CRASH, the Cultural Heritage Advanced Search Hackathon

Many decisions of a research tool come together in its search: what counts as similar, why a result is shown, who can use the tool, and what a query costs. At CRASH, teams build search prototypes on real material and test them. The motto is "Vibes and Checks": the room chooses the winner of hearts, the jury the winner of numbers. For the jury, each team picks at least one focus area (efficiency, trust, control, access or discovery) and shows at the end how it checked its tool in that area.

The hackathon is open to students and staff of all faculties, and to people from GLAM institutions and industry. Coding skills help a lot, but not everybody needs them: bring a skill, a dataset or a problem you know well, for example from your thesis, your project or your collection. You can register without a team. We especially encourage people of genders underrepresented in tech to register.

We provide the DHinfra clusters (see dhinfra.at) with very large open-weights models and GPUs, prepared datasets, two impulse talks and food on both days. Places are limited, and registration is open until 1 November 2026.

All details, a manifesto on the motto, and the registration on the Website.