From WorldCat Developers' Network

WorldCat Hackathon T-Shirt, 2008 NYC

This t-shirt design is chock-full of meaning, read on to find out about it.

The WorldCat Hackathon image comes to us from Sanchez Circuit, the science and technology-inspired clothing and design company. Based in Boston, they specialize in clothing for “curious, intelligent individuals.” That would be us. And you, we would guess.

As a curious, intelligent individual, you are surely wondering the meaning of the shirt design. We’d love to hear your own ideas and reflections about what it means. In the meantime, here’s some guidance on the thought process from Sanchez Circuit:

We started first by thinking about hacker stereotypes. The common sentiment is that hackers are an army of one. Maybe they’re viewed by society as subversive, or maybe someone’s hacker side is their alter ego that they do in secret. Hackers and coders are a people who possess arcane knowledge of multiple complex programming languages, and most developers maintain a viewpoint about the appropriate technical applications for each. The rest of the world might see that as a superiority complex for knowledge. We think it’s normal.

Then we started thinking about libraries in the ancient world as temples of wisdom and knowledge--a sort of gathering place for secrets and secret societies. And we wondered if hieroglyphs might actually be the original coded data for only a chosen few to understand. If this was so, then the pyramids in Egypt would act like data centers for this secret code. Thinking about Egypt, we also thought about the Library of Alexandria and realized that today’s modern-day equivalent would be WorldCat, as the world’s largest collection of online library materials.

So the guardian of these data center pyramids is the Sphinx, who asks a riddle. And this riddle is easy to people who know the code (those with the superior knowledge) but not for people who don’t. You’ll see indicators of a few programming language riddles in the artwork of the Sphinx itself on the left hand side.

The right hand side is a nod to this event’s location—New York City with Lady Liberty. There’s a secret riddle/hidden message, written in code, within Lady Liberty, too, that can be revealed at the event itself.

The title of the design — Encrypto Illustrado — comes from two sources. Encrypto meaning old + new, with encryption and coding. Illustrado is a Spanish and Filipino term for “the enlightened one.” Philippine Ilustrados were the Filipino elite and social reformers during the Spanish colonial period in the 19th C.