Digital meets Culture

Citizens engagement aims to bridge the gap between science and society

The Roadmap for Citizen Science @ Festival della Scienza – Genoa, 3 November 2016

As part of the “Festival della Scienza”, a very important and wide event taking place from October 27 to November 6 at Genoa (Italy), CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES project has been selected to discuss about the Citizens engagement and the results of its studies into a session devoted to the Open Science.

Antonella Fresa, Promoter‘s Director and CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES Technical Coordinator, represented the European Consortium who worked around the EC’s project.

The venue of the meeting was in the premises of the Regione Liguria – Sala Trasparenza.

The event, in italian language, interested a wide number of experts from different areas of interest. Starting from different experiences and expertise but interested to dibate on how citizens may be involved in the reserch processes.

Antonella Fresa, presenting the results of the CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES’s EU project, reflected about the necessity to engage the Citizens in the research on cultural heritage and humanities (also considering new creative approaches).

Abstract

The term Open Science describes how digital technologies, media and networks are changing the way in which research is conducted, shared and disseminated. The scientific community benefits from greater collaboration among researchers supported by new technologies – as well as open to the contributions of the citizens – and it is at the center of scientific debate concepts such as transparency and reproducibility of research results. In particular, the strong demand for open data, as freely and open available for all, highlights the need for adequate supports for the storage and sharing of the data, as well as platforms to make them more accessible. Thus, citizens are invited to make its entry into the “data space”, and to support projects and research playing an active role through citizen science initiatives. Moreover, the citizens, are the recipients of a number of science communication activities, aimed to bridge the gap between science and society. Are you interested to these themes? Would you like to know more about the Open Data and about your possible role as a scientific citizen? Join us and participate to the Open Science Café!

The Workshop has been organised by Elsevier.

A full report of the event (including all the presentations) is available here: http://www.civic-epistemologies.eu/the-roadmap-for-citizen-science-will-be-presented-at-the-festival-della-scienza-genoa-3-november-2016/

See details (in italian) here: http://www.festivalscienza.it/site/home/programma/eventi-per-tipo/conferenze/open-science-cafe.html

the important conference on Cloud Computing from the project Hola Cloud took place in Madrid in October. Proceedings now available!

CLOUD FORWARD 2016: the proceedings

Hosted at the centrally-located Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid from 18 to 20 October 2016, Cloud Forward 2016 Conference brought together researchers and specialists from academia and industry, European R&I projects, SMEs, startups and post-graduate students to present and discuss innovative technologies in the area of distributed computing as well as new technologies beyond CLOUDs, ranging from architectures over methodologies to new applications and services. The conference focused both on research and development efforts in the domain of CLOUDs, and in future scenarios and technologies that exploit CLOUD computing as a utility, such as Internet of Things. Integral to the conference, the work of the clusters of experts and EC projects working on ‘beyond current CLOUD’ topics has been presented.

In addition to the scientific programme, CF2016 hosted an event dedicated to SMEs to investigate innovative technologies, promote business ideas and foster current game-changers arising on the market. The event, organised by Hola Cloud, AppHub, CloudWATCH2 and SLA-Ready, featured innovation and marketing oriented workshops, dedicated informative and training sessions carried out by experts from the research and the industry sectors, interactive live demonstrations of new services, technologies and R&D results, and face to face meetings amongst projects and SMEs, aimed at the development of new collaborations and R&D ideas.

Conference proceedings have been published by Elsevier Science in the open-access Procedia Computer Science and they are now available on the event webpage http://cf2016.holacloud.eu/

London, 30 November - 1 December 2016

Acting on change: new approaches and future practices in digital preservation

Overall topic

Preserving digital objects and ensuring their access, use and reuse over the long-term within a rapidly changing digital environment have become increasing priority for many organisations and sectors in recent decades. The impact of change, be it technological, semantic or cultural, has demanded research to develop solutions that are fit for a range of different preservation environments and practices.

This conference will consider the importance of understanding digital objects in relation to their associated dependencies and context for preservation. During the conference we will look at how modelling might help us to understand the digital object and associated dependencies within its environment, and how this could support decision-making to lessen or countermand the impacts of change. Risk analysis and the use of models will also be explored, as tools that can support practitioners in anticipating the consequences of decisions and policies on digital preservation.

The conference

PERICLES, a FP7 EU funded research project has been developing an approach that addresses both the active life of digital objects and the impact of change on our ability to preserve digital objects and data. The project consortium invites you to join us for this conference and accompanying workshops to discuss the approaches and solutions proposed by PERICLES and like-minded projects and initiatives. The conference aims to acknowledge different perspectives, contexts and practices.

The conference is aimed at those working to develop digital preservation policy, strategy and procedures; establish digital preservation infrastructures and workflows; systems developers, providers and procurers; and those interested in seeing the systems and tools developed that reflect their needs and environment.

The conference will take place on two consecutive days, 30 November and 1 December 2016, with a range of panel discussions and workshops addressing the main topics and themes of the conference.

EVENT WEBSITE: http://pericles-project.eu/page/conference

The event is carried out in association with the DPC Awards 2016, which will take place on the evening of 30 November.

to Go Digital means more than just digitizing cultural objects, it requires to Think Digital.

Out of the Box – Museums Tales

By Ram Shimony, our referent from Israel, and candidate to Europeana Members Council 2016

Launched at 2014, The Israeli Museum Portal was a remarkable milestone in the segment of Digital Culture and Digital Heritage in Israel. Since then similar projects in this field has referred to the portal as a basic standard of visualization and engagement.

The development team of the portal – my team, invested time and efforts to “pour content” into our mission that simply was: “Go Digital”.

We quickly concluded that “Go Digital” is not only Digitizing quantities of objects, improving their visual representation and packing them in a portal or a website.

There is no doubt that “Quantity” and “Quality” are mandatory for decent websites in general and for a comprehensive cultural and educational portal in particular.

But “Go Digital” means more –it requires to “Think Digital”.

“Think digital” means maintaining inter-relations between quantity, quality and a third element: ENGAGEMENT.

In order to become “a work environment” and not only a “nice to have” portal, we have to think not only about WHAT users will be exposed to, but also HOW they are going to use the content.

The challenge is to meet the users’ needs with helpful online features and tools, such as annotation tools, presentation tools, inter-user connectivity, personalization options and built-in online research tools.

These features should perform and be presented in an engaging way, to make the user experience as positive and as pleasant as possible.

As a result, we added functionality to the portal.

One of the most useful features we have added is the “Museums Tales” section – a gallery of short video clips about selected items, artists or topics. We produce these clips in collaboration with the contributing museums, according to three goals in mind:

Enriching the way information was presented to users
Widening the scope of information beyond what is presented in the item page
Offering ready-to-use informative topic summaries for pedagogy.

In order to produce the video clips we formed an internal working group comprising a new-media expert, a graphic and video editor and a content manager. This group worked tightly with relevant curators, producing marvelous clips based on research, content and imagery.

I invite you to enjoy one of our latest clips, featuring the exquisite Roman blue glass vase of Ennion, part of the Glass Collection at The Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv.

Curator and researcher: Henrietta Eliezer-Brunner

DPFManager 3.0 released

We are publishing a new version of the DPF Manager, version 3.0, which is available to download in the PREFORMA Open Source Portal and includes the following set of improvements and changes.

TI/A draft conformance checker available.
Redesigned and enriched the report
Show metadata incoherencies.
Option to edit implementation checkers.
Added filesize policy.
External conformance checkers configuration.
METS report accessible via GUI
Drag and drop to open files and configurations
New metadata fixes to solve metadata inconsistencies and make baseline 6 compliant files

You can view the full list of changes of this new release in the GitHub repository.

Download NOW!

Available for Mac OS X, Linux & Windows.
Don’t forget to send us your feedback to help improving the software!

Join us at the PREFORMA Experience Workshop which is planned in Berlin on 23 November 2016. registration is open at http://experienceworkshop.preforma-project.eu/registration/.

Webinar given Oct. 18th 2016 with MediaArea, describing the MediaConch project and its integration into Archivematica

Archivematica Mediaconch integration webinar

MediaConch is a policy and implementation checker for use with Matroska, FFV1 and PCM files. Through funding provided by the PREFORMA project, MediaArea has been collaborating on integrating this tool into Archivematica. So far, they have been working on:

making MediaConch an option for validating original file formats in Transfer
making a new micro-service to allow MediaConch to validate the results of normalization in Ingest
making new micro-services to allow users to upload a policy created with MediaConch to Archivematica, which Archivematica will check both original files and the results of normalization against.

They’ve also used this opportunity to think about how Archivematica models audio-visual material in the METS file and are exploring modeling bitstreams in the METS.

During the webinar, Dave Rice and Natalie Cadranel from MediaArea gave a demonstration of MediaConch, followed by a demo by Sarah Romkey from Artefactual of the implementation in Archivematica so far.

Open Access is a valuable resource in scholarship and research, and an example of creative reuse of open content is the Open&Hybrid Publishing Pilot from E-Space project

Photomediations for the Open Access Week, video interview

The Open Access Week, running from 24-30 October 2016, is a global annual event that promotes Open Access as the new default in scholarship and research. Joanna Zylinska, coordinator of the Open & Hybrid Publishing Pilot in Europeana Space project, the main outcome of which is the beautiful Photomediations: An Open Book, was interviewed for the occasion.

The video contains a few general remarks about open access but mainly concentrates on the outcome of the Open and Hybrid Publishing Pilot, and nice screenshots of the Photomediations book are in the video.

Learn more and visit Photomediations: An Open Book on E-Space website

2 and 9 November 2016

E-ARK project webinars

During November 2016, Open Preservation Foundation is running two webinars with the E-ARK (European Archival Records and Knowledge Preservation) project to introduce their key outcomes. The topics will cover the interoperability specifications developed by the project and the tools which implement these specifications.

E-ARK is a multinational big data research project that aims to improve the methods and technologies of digital archiving, in order to achieve consistency on a Europe-wide scale. Tackling a range of problems associated with independent record-keeping technologies, systems and practices, E-ARK aims to impact the development of internationally accessible archives through: the provision of technical specifications and tools, the development of an integrated archiving infrastructure, the demonstration of improved availability, access and use, and the rigorous analysis of aggregated sets of archival data. Running from 1st February 2014 to 31st January 2017 it is co-funded by the European Commission under its ICT Policy Support Programme (PSP) within its Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP).

For more information about E-ARK visit: http://www.eark-project.com/

Webinar 1. Introducing E-ARK specifications and the E-ARK Web platform

2 November 2016 11:00 GMT / 12:00 CET

The first webinar provides an introduction to the E-ARK Common Specification and the E-ARK Web environment for scalable digital archiving. Read more.

Session leads:

Andrew Wilson (University of Brighton)
Jan Rörden (Austrian Institute of Technology)

Registration:

https://openpreservation.clickmeeting.com/eark-specifications-and-web-platform/register

Webinar 2. Database preservation solutions in E-ARK

9 November 2016 13:00 GMT / 14:00 CET

The second webinar provides a detailed overview of the SIARD 2.0 format for preserving relational databases (developed in collaboration between E-ARK and the Swiss Federal Archives) and a demo of the Database Preservation Toolkit. Read more.

Session leads:

Anders Bo Nielsen (National Archives of Denmark)
Luis Faria (KEEP Solutions)

Registration:

https://openpreservation.clickmeeting.com/database-preservation-solutions-in-e-ark/register

The webinars will last approximately one hour.

Berlin (Germany), 17-18 November 2016

Shaping Access! – More Responsibility for Cultural Heritage

Shaping Access! – More Responsibility for Cultural Heritage
6th International Conference 17 & 18 November 2016
at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin

The digitization of Cultural Heritage has made great progress in recent years. However the rapid technological development of electronic media, the project orientation of cultural promotion and the volatility of digital communication, demand for sustainable strategies.

Cultural Heritage profits and relies on innovation. The digitalization has opened great opportunities for a worldwide access to cultural heritage, yet cultural heritage is at threat if the political and regulatory framework lag behind.

How can we ensure the cultural heritage to stay visible and maintain its ground also in the digital world? Who archives the internet? Who takes responsibility for the preservation of our cultural heritage and how? Which political and legal framework is necessary? How can participation and control be balanced? How can norms and standards be promoted? How can we move from project oriented funding to sustainable long-term financing?

These and other related aspects will be discussed on the 6th international conference on the 17th and 18th of November 2016 in Berlin.

Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart
Invalidenstr. 50-51
10557 Berlin

Conference website: http://www.zugang-gestalten.de/shaping-access-more-responsibility-for-cultural-heritage/

Text by Zugang Gestalten

If you have an idea to create a mini game that can be played for 3 to 5 minutes as part of an OJOO, have Unity skills, this competition is for you.

OJOO minigames hackathon

OJOO consists of an app to play games, and a Design Studio to create games, even without any technical skills or knowledge! If you know how to type text and upload a picture, you’re all set. And once you have created your game, you can publish it in OJOO store to share, sell and play it with people around the world. With OJOO everyone can create mobile games without coding. Link media, challenges and rewards to locations & augment the reality!

OJOO is now launching a real competition, a mini games hackathon from 18th to 20th November 2016.

If you have an idea to create a mini game that can be played for 3 to 5 minutes as part of an OJOO, have Unity skills, this competition is for you. We have 15 mini games people can use to make their OJOO more fun. Ranging from puzzles or quizzes to more immersive catch game (think Pokemon Go). All these mini games can be customized by our users.

Now, we’ve created a Unity framework allowing developers to create customizable mini games that can be integrated in the OJOO App & Studio. Think about the game element in Flappy Bird, Pop the Lock, Geometry, AA, Alto, Snake,… with a custom skin on top and you have a mini game.

18 november: Release of our Unity framework & documentation

19 november: Game hackathon in OJOO Ghent office

20 november: Mini game Unity projects need to be in our mailbox before 12pm.

21 december: Announcement of the winners

International projects are also welcome. You don’t need to attend the hackathon in person, you can join remotely. As long as your project is according to the framework standards, you’re good to go.

Info: http://www.ojoo.com/mini-games-hackathon/