Digital meets Culture

online event, 22-24 September 2020

European Research and Innovation Days is the European Commission’s annual flagship event, bringing together policymakers, researchers, entrepreneurs and citizens to debate and shape the future of research and innovation in Europe and beyond.

This year’s online format will provide an opportunity to connect, take stock of research and innovation achievements in the global response to the pandemic and build on the EU’s response: worldwide coordination of excellent science for global health, social and economic recovery. The interactive sessions will let participants provide input on how research and innovation policy and funding can help propel Europe’s recovery and pave the way to a green, digital and resilient future. Building on the success of last year, the 2020 edition will feature three days of intensive policy co-designing, thought-provoking panels and matchmaking opportunities.

The interactive sessions will let participants provide input on how research and innovation policy and funding can help propel Europe’s recovery and pave the way to a green, digital and resilient future. Building on the success of last year, the 2020 edition will feature three days of intensive policy co-designing, thought-provoking panels and matchmaking opportunities.

In a crucial year, following an unprecedented global crisis, just ahead of the launch of Horizon Europe – the next research and innovation programme starting in 2021 – and an enhanced European Research Area, this event is a unique chance to discuss how research and innovation will benefit the future of Europe.

Registrations will open early September.

More info: https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/events/upcoming-events/european-research-and-innovation-days_en

This ambitious, five-year project is increasing awareness and enjoyment of sound today

Unlocking Our Sound Heritage, a UK project led by the British Library

The British Library is home to the UK’s sound archive, an extraordinary collection of over 6.5 million recordings of speech, music, wildlife and the environment. These recordings, from the UK and around the world, date from the birth of recorded sound in the 1880s to the present day. The sound archive forms a vital part of the nation’s collective memory and tells a rich story of the diverse history of the UK.

However, sound items are under threat, both from physical degradation, and as the means of playing them disappear from production. Professional consensus internationally is that we have approximately 15 years in which to save many of our sound collections through digitisation, before they become unreadable and are effectively lost.

The Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project – part of the Save our Sounds programme – aims to preserve and provide access to half a million of the nation’s rare and unique sound recordings: not just those in the British Library collections but also key items from other collections preserved across the UK.

The project is swiftly progressing:

A network of audio preservation centres has been established across the UK, with expert staff in place to catalogue, digitise and preserve sounds
100,000 rare and at-risk sound recordings have been digitally preserved
Through new and improved cataloguing records, discoverability and access to sounds is being improved
A programme of learning and outreach activities is being delivered nationwide, including workshops, learning events for families, public tours and exhibitions; by the end of the project, even more people will have engaged with sound recordings.

In the “Sound and Vision” blog, the British Library curators showcase interesting and curios examples from the archives, such as this selection of waves recording. There are almost 400 specific recordings of waves in the archives, demonstrating the sheer variety of sounds that the sea can produce.

Or you can enjoy the highly complex chant of the skylark, available also in slow mode so to appreciate every nuance of this romance repeal that male skylarks use to attract partners.

If you prefer to move from natural sounds to humans, you can for example listen to an interesting recording of visual artist Barbara Kruger in conversation with the art historian Griselda Pollock at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1991.

Unlocking Our Sound Heritage: https://www.bl.uk/projects/unlocking-our-sound-heritage
Sound and Vision blog from the British Library: https://blogs.bl.uk/sound-and-vision/index.html

All images from The British Library website.

The younger generations are called to draw their own heritage

The new international project “Reconnecting With Your Culture”

The edA (Esempi di Architettura Internationale Research Center) together with UNESCO University and Heritage activated a new international project titled “Reconnecting With Your Culture” in order to bring the younger generations closer to the theme of cultural heritage.

The concept from which this new project starts, is the centrality of the role of Culture to develop future perspectives capable of developing shared and participatory policies and foster the sustainable development of humanity.

To promote this centrality of Culture it is necessary start from the younger generations and the project is exactly addressed to children between 5 and 17 years old and to all schools in the world.
The youth, with the support of their teachers, are invited to explore the cultural heritage of their country and describe, also with drawings, their experience of knowledge in contact with the historical, artistic, and cultural heritage.

The project has launched a call to became “ an Ambassador of Culture” and all participants will have the opportunity to display their proposals in a digital exhibition and ten will be selected for each category (5-10 years) and (11-17 years) to be published in a digital book OPEN ACCESS which will have international diffusion, then the book will be published in the EdAKids collection.

The project will start on the 1st August and a first presentation will be held in Lima (Peru) on July 31st.

Other presentations will follow in Latin America and then move on to Asia and Europe.
Everything is done through Webinars.

The call is here
Further information are here

Submission deadline for highly innovative proposals: 7 August

HCOMP Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing – Blue Sky Ideas

The Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP 2020) invites submissions to a special “Blue Sky Ideas” track.

HCOMP is the home of the human computation and crowdsourcing community. It’s the premier venue for presenting latest findings from research and practice into frameworks, methods and systems that bring together people and machine intelligence to achieve better results.

While artificial intelligence (AI) and human-computer interaction (HCI) represent traditional mainstays of the conference, HCOMP believes strongly in fostering and promoting broad, interdisciplinary research. Our field is particularly unique in the diversity of disciplines it draws upon and contributes to, including human-centered qualitative studies and HCI design, social computing, artificial intelligence, economics, computational social science, digital humanities, policy, and ethics. We promote the exchange of advances in human computation and crowdsourcing not only among researchers, but also engineers and practitioners, to encourage dialogue across disciplines and communities of practice.

This year, HCOMP2020 will be a virtual event organized by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.

Website: https://www.humancomputation.com/

BLUE SKY IDEAS

The emphasis of this track will be on visionary ideas, long term challenges, and opportunities in research that are outside of the current mainstream topics of the field.

Submissions will be judged on the extent to which they expand the possibilities and horizons of the field or challenge existing assumptions prevalent in the field.

Submission deadline: 7 August

To encourage researchers to present truly visionary concepts, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is offering prizes for up to three top papers in this special track: first prize $1000, second prize $750, and third prize $500, to be awarded.

Submissions to this track are limited to at most four pages in length. Note that paper submissions in this track will not receive full-fledged reviews as in the other tracks at HCOMP 2020. All submissions however will be screened to ensure that they meet the required criteria of being visionary in nature. A committee of experts will adjudicate the top-3 submissions to this track and nominate them for awards sponsored by CCC.

Questions? Please contact Ujwal Gadiraju, at u.k.gadiraju@tudelft.nl

deadline 31 August - apply online wiht an original 3D object sprinkled with creativity and a touch of boldness

Sacrebleu Digital Art 3D contest, open for submission

Sacrebleu consulting Art agency based in New York city is calling to artists for a 3D art contest with prize of 400 $.

We are on the final stage to launch a new mobile app with Augmented-Reality, based on geolocation and promoting artists (any kind!) and creative brands. We are currently consolidating our in-app library, and wish for opening it to more artists! Therefore we are currently looking for creative 3D objects (preferably animated). These digital artworks will be used both in the AR chat and in the geolocation features – users will be able to admire to art in Augmented Reality when close to the given pin point.

All interested professional or amateur artists, graphic designers, illustrators, architects or anyone able to build a digital object on 3D, are eligible to submit work and could be selected.

Read the entire call and apply at https://sacrebleu-galerie.com/en/digital-art-contest/

Initially a French non-profit organization based in Orleans (1 hour from Paris, France), founded in 2015 by Yannick Pazzé and Jean Michel Ouvry, Sacrebleu has grown and has also become a New-York based commercial agency, promoting modern art. While Sacrebleu France intents to promote contemporary art through creation and the organization of pop-up//ephemeral museums, Sacrebleu New-York offers multiple services, including the creation of cultural and promotional events and/or exhibitions, and an activity of Artists’ agent.

The common guidelines between all our French and American activities lies in our exigent artistic vision turned toward the urban & street art and illustrations, and a certain taste for unusual staging.

The new NEMO report on digitisation and copyright

The challenges that EU museums face to digitise their collections

Digital tools offer numerous opportunities and can significantly support the work of museums and strengthen the public exchange.

Throughout this digitalization process, museums often have had to overcome many obstacles connected with insufficient resources and insufficient staff.

On these topics the Network of European Museum Organisation, NEMO, conducted a survey to identify challenge that museums encounter when digitising their collections and establishing online access to them.

The study was conducted analising three different target groups:

national museum organisations,
national ministries in charge of museums
individual museums

It also debated the national implementation processes of the EU Digital Single Market Directive and arised questions about Intellectual Property Rights.

The results of this survey, in which participated 60 museums in 15 EU countries, were collected in a new report on digitisation and copyright that is just published.

In this, NEMO and its Working Group Digitalisation and IPR, provided recommendations to EU policy makers as well as to national museum organisations, to help museums on their way to digitalised collections.

Furthermore information here.

Click here for the full report.

online event, 30 November - 4th December 2020

MTSR 2020, 14th Metadata and Semantics Research Conference

The 14th International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR 2020), as well as the SPECIAL TRACK on METADATA & SEMANTICS for CULTURAL COLLECTIONS & APPLICATIONS, due to the COVID-19 pandemic will take place virtually on 30th November – 4th December 2020.

MTSR is an annual international inter-disciplinary conference, which brings together academics, researchers and practitioners in the specialized fields of metadata, ontologies and semantics research. The conference provides an opportunity for participants to share knowledge and novel approaches in the implementation of semantic technologies across diverse types of information environments and applications.

*** Submission deadline: August 2nd, 2020 ***

Proceedings will be published in Springer CCIS series. CCIS is abstracted/indexed in Scopus, SCImago, EI-Compendex, Mathematical Reviews, DBLP, Google Scholar. CCIS volumes are also submitted for the inclusion in ISI Proceedings.

Website:

AIM AND SCOPE
Cultural Heritage collections are essential knowledge infrastructures that provide a solid representation of the historical background of human communities. These knowledge infrastructures are constructed from and integrate cultural information derived from diverse memory institutions, mainly libraries, archives and museums. Each individual community has spent a lot of effort in order to develop, support and promote its own systems, tools and metadata for the management of cultural information, mainly related to its particular resources and use.

In this framework, the management of the cultural information has to deal with challenges related to (i) metadata modeling, specification, standardization, extraction, (semantic) enrichment, mapping, integration, effective use, and evaluation, (ii) knowledge representation as conceptualization to provide the context for unambiguously interpreting metadata, and (iii) information integration from different contexts for the provision of integrated access, reuse and advanced services to users.

At the same time, there are also inter-domain efforts targeted to semantically align data (research data, educational data, public sector information etc.) to cultural information. New challenges are also emerged from the need to incorporate cultural information into the new publication paradigms, where a variety of resources (data, metadata, processes, results, etc) are linked and integrated, providing better shareability and reusability. Currently, Linked (Open) Data, as part of the Semantic Web Technology, is having a major role in modernizing cultural heritage collections.
Providing to users the possibility to re-use and integrate data into their own systems is currently more than a need, given that transparency and access to information is a prerequisite. A critical factor to the effectiveness of many aspects of all the above efforts is the quality of metadata, as interpreted by its context and use and evaluated by the proper measures and methods. Many institutions and aggregate infrastructures are dealing with the poor quality of metadata that inevitably results in poor integration, search and reuse, while their enrichment, in terms of contextualization, co-referencing, alignment, etc, is really challenging.

The aim of this Special Track is to maintain a dialogue where researchers and practitioners working on all the aspects of the cultural information will come together and exchange ideas about open issues at all stages of the cultural heritage information life cycle. The track also welcomes works related to semantics and applications for new approaches to cultural information publication and sharing, as well as to interlinking to other datasets published in the Semantic Web universe.

TOPICS
The papers in this special track should be original and of high quality, addressing issues in areas such as:
* Cultural Heritage metadata models, standards, ontologies, knowledge organization and representation systems
* Cultural Heritage information integration, interoperability and mappings
* Automated extraction of metadata, entities, and patterns from Cultural Heritage resources
* Metadata manual or automated (Semantic) enrichment and search
* Metadata quality metrics, tools and services
* Linked Open Data approaches in the Cultural Heritage domain
* Publication, linking and citation of Cultural Heritage information and resources
* Large volume content management
* 3D models-indexing, storage and retrieval approaches
* Infrastructures for sharing content
* Digital Curation workflows and models
* Provenance and preservation metadata for Cultural Heritage digital resources

IMPORTANT DATES
August 2nd, 2020: Submission deadline
September 6th, 2020: Notification of decision (Acceptance/Rejection)
September 20th, 2020: Camera-ready papers due
November 30th – December 4th 2020: the Virtual MTSR 2020 Conference will take place

SPECIAL TRACK CHAIRS
* Michalis Sfakakis, Dept. Archives, Library Science and Museology, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece (sfakakis@ionio.gr)
* Lina Bountouri, Dept. Archives, Library Science and Museology, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece and
EU Publications Office – European Commission, Luxembourg (boudouri@ionio.gr, linabountouri@gmail.com)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
– Trond Aalberg, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway
– Enrico Francesconi, EU Publications Office, Luxembourg, and Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Firenze, Italy
– Manolis Gergatsoulis, Ionian University, Greece
– Antoine Isaac, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
– Sarantos Kapidakis, University of West Attica, Greece
– Christos Papatheodorou, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and Digital Curation Unit, IMIS, Athena RC, Greece
– Chrisa Tsinaraki, Joint Research Centre, European Commission, Italy
– Andreas Vlachidis, Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Science, University of South Wales, UK
– Maja Žumer, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

July 23 2020

Webinar “Museums after the pandemic” organized by UNESCO and ICCROM

Tomorrow July 23, the webinar “Museums after the pandemic” will be held, organized by UNESCO and ICCROM ( International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property).

This events aims to comprehensively address the critical issues about the future of museums, providing useful insights on ways forward to realize the full potential of museums as agents of transformation.

The need of a serius debate on these themes was emerged especially after the COVID-19 pandemia, which had a strong impact on the international museum community and brought to light how important it is for museums to adapt and proactively demonstrate their value to society in order to successfully overcome current and future challenges in the post-COVID-19 world.

More information on the speakers of the webinar is available here.

The link to register is this.

27-30 October 2020, on-line conference

ROCK Open Knowledge Week: Cultural Heritage Leading Urban Futures

The ten ROCK cities – Athens, Bologna, Cluj-Napoca, Eindhoven, Lisbon, Liverpool, Lyon, Skopje, Turin, and Vilnius – developed innovative solutions and demonstrated how heritage and cultural activities have essential importance for keeping the cities alive.

Culture and heritage can be the driving forces behind urban sustainability as well as the cultural interactions are surely at the core of the wellbeing of our societies.

The ROCK Open Knowledge Week was the occasion to share the results, lessons learned, and best practices collected during the project.

The meeting brought together local governments, policy makers, businesses and researchers looking for new ways in which cultural heritage can contribute to the regeneration, sustainable development, and economic growth of entire cities.

The Open Knowledge Week hold on-line on 27-30 October, and replaced the ROCK conference, originally scheduled on 14-15 May in Bologna, but cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Recordings of the event are available online. To find the session of your interest look in the programme and click on the “play” button.

a new issue of the 44DEGREES online art magazine offers a review of artists and artworks

Digital art to talk about social distancing

NEW issue from 44DEGREES online art magazine. The subject of this issue is SOCIAL DISTANCING, which we all have been asked to respect and follow due to the COVID-19 crisis.

The issue presents contemporary Israeli and international artists, from various fields such as painting, sculpture, mixed media, digital media (photography, computer painting, who have chosen to discuss about social distance “through the languague of creation, which allows expression of the feelings of chaos, loneliness, anxiety, inspiration and pain”.

The issue is published as interactive item on issuu, and can be viewed with the mouse and arrows. It is highly recommended to view via computer and enlarge to full screen: https://issuu.com/44degrees/docs/social_distancing-44degrees-2020

44DEGREES is an online art magazine, founded to promote contemporary Israeli and international artists. The magazine provides a platform for many artists such as digital media artists, painters, sculptors, mix media and curators, with each issue dedicated to a different theme that unities the works.

Magazine’s website: https://www.44degrees.net/