Through the Lens of Demarco - Hack 3 for Culture Hack Scotland 2012

Through the Lens of Demarco is one of the three hacks that I was part of for Culture Hack Scotland 2012. Richard Demarco is one of the long-standing figures involved in the Edinburgh Festival, and over the years used his camera to document the event and the people involved. He had unique access to a wide variety of interesting people, and managed to build a body of work of tens of thousands of photographs. In 2008, fifteen thousand of those images were meticulously scanned, added to a database with associated metadata and then put online. Trouble is, when I went to the Demarco Archive website I was disappointed because all I found was a Flash site with some text. No images! So the content was there, it was just locked away behind a Flash site. It was late in the hack, we had a few hours left, and I'd been saying that if there was enough time I'd like to take all of the images, import them into a database and then write a script that would load them into a Facebook page as a timeline.