Culture Hack Day: CultureGrid hacks - A mobile app, JSONP API and a large image scraper

For the recent Culture Hack Day, I did a handful of small hacks around CultureGrid. It's an aggregated search on 80+ UK cultural institutions' archives of cultural artefacts, so you can use it to search across museums for 1.2m things - paintings, drawings, photographs, objects, locations, and so on. They have an XML API and I wanted to do something using JQuery mobile aimed at providing a mobile interface to the database. So I wrote an XML parser and made it available as a JSONP proxy. Then I could start using that JSON in a mobile app. So, representing each of the results as a Backbone Model, adding a Backbone Controller to handle listing and showing the results, I quickly had a way to search the database on a mobile device. I came up with this solution - a generic scraper that learns over time.