HCMID Hackathon 2020

Written by Stacey Kaliabakos '23 and Ryan Wynn '23

• What is Hackathon?
  • Hackathon is an annual event where several high schools and middle school send groups of students to the College to work on transcribing Latin manuscripts into digital references.
    • The first Hackathon took place in 2018 and was organized by Hannah Nguyen '19. This year's Hackathon was organized by Thomas Posillico '20.
    • Additionally, Hackathon plays a unique role in bringing HCMID alumni and current students together.
  • In 2020 and 2019, we worked on Germanicus' "Aratea" and hope to publish our work on it soon.
  • The "Aratea" is a collection of poems describing various constellations and contains artwork that corresponds with the poems as well.
• Structure and Set-up of Hackathon
  • Students are split up into different teams (by school) and are each assigned a section of the manuscript.
  • Along with each team, there are two HCMID Holy Cross students or alumni to assist with any challenges or issues the high schoolers may face.
  • It is mostly the work of the younger students to work on the manuscript; however, the supervisors are there and willing to guide them through the language of the manuscript and to help download all the necessary software for the process.
• Process of Hackathon
  • Professor Neel Smith gave a brief introduction to students explaining how to read the manuscript and to record various terminology (names of people, corrections, abbreviations, etc.)
  • Students were shown what software to download (Docker, Atom.io, GitBash) and how to go about doing. HCMID students guided them on how to download and use the various systems.
  • DSE was the process of taking digital images of the manuscript and corresponding it with the canonical line numbers of text. This was used to display the Latin manuscript text alongside the digitally edited text in the Validation process.
  • Students were then guided in reading and transcribing the manuscript into the ATOM software, taking turns doing so to gain familiarity with the terminal along with the language and style of the manuscript.
• Validation
  • The validation process helps us to know that there are no errors in the transcribed manuscript by comparing it with the digital image collected from the DSE.
  • Pushing the work of the students through the GitBash terminal to the GitHub project website ensures that it is saved. This constitutes a collection of all the students' work.
• Struggles and Problem-Solving
  • Some groups ran into issues, including getting used to the author's hand in such a short amount of time, familiarizing themselves with the software, and learning the exceptions and rare phenomena in terms of terminology.
    • For example, in many Latin manuscripts, authors tend to abbreviate the diphthong "ae" by writing a small hooked ligature under the "e" in order to minimize the amount of space used on each line. Students who were not familiar with reading Latin manuscripts could not have possibly been aware of this; therefore, it was the responsibility of the HCMID students and alumni to inform them of this abbreviation so that they could be aware of it in the future.
  • We faced an unexpected obstacle when the WiFi cut out and forced the HCMID supervising students to take out their own laptops to try to solve the problem. We learned how to adapt our initial plan to accommodate this problem, allowing the visiting students to use computers with software already downloaded until the WiFi was fixed. Despite this setback, we were ultimately successful in spite of it, transcribing a significant portion of the manuscript while also having fun.
• Feeling Accomplished
  • Hackathon is a unique experience. It is rare for such young students to have the opportunity to read and understand an authentic ancient manuscript-- an opportunity most students will not get until coming to college. Additionally, they were able to utilize the same skills that professionals use consistently in their own fields. The students left feeling accomplished in their work and their progress, excited to have worked on this project and to eventually see their work published.