Digital meets Culture

Leicester (UK), 12 September 2019

Keywords – finding the right words to find the right records

Collections Trust’s 2019 conference revisits an important topic: Keywords – finding the right words to find the right records.

If your users struggle to find things in your collections database, this event is for you. This one-day conference will be held in the beautiful Victorian art gallery of Leicester’s New Walk Museum. Aimed at anyone who works with collections, the theme is terminology control and why it matters.

Date: Thursday 12 September 2019
Venue: New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester

Tickets: https://collectionstrust.org.uk/product/2019-ct-conference/

The Collections Trust conference always aims to give both the bigger picture and case studies from a range of museums. This year is no exception, and we are delighted to confirm the following speakers, with more to follow.

Revealing hidden histories Helen Johnson, Museum Development Officer , West Midlands Museum Development
Flat file to thesaurus: improving terminologies at the National Gallery Rupert Shepherd, Collection Information Manager, The National Gallery
Virtually shoes Jane Seddon, Collections Manager, Northampton Museums and Art Gallery
Developing specialist archaeological vocabularies Dan Miles, Research Resources Adviser, Historic England
Keywords for documenting collections management processes Marta Mroczek, Inventory Manager, British Museum

If you’re in Leicester the day before, there is an optional pre-conference visit to the award-winning King Richard III Visitor Centre, and also a suitably-themed pub quiz. Follow the links for further details.

The website is actually a digital memorial to the millions of enslaved Africans forcibly pulled into the slave trade

Voyages, a digital resource about slave history

ph. Fabrizio Sbrana

Text by Caterina Sbrana.

There are various projects that look into the story of slavery and offer digital resources to historians, students and researchers. One that we already explored is the Zamani project to create a Slave Trade Database, collecting and presenting 3D digital models of monuments and sites related to the slave trade together with other spatial and contextual information.

We continue to follow the research on slavery, looking for digital documents related to slave history because this subject seems to us to be more and more relevant. Another interesting project is Voyages: an online database explores 36,000 slave voyages that occurred between 1514 and 1866. This huge project is directed By Philip Misevich (Assistant Professor of History, St. John’s University), Daniel Domingues (Assistant Professor of History, University of Missouri-Columbia), David Eltis (Professor Emeritus of History, Emory University), Nafees M. Khan (Lecturer in Social Studies Education, Clemson University) and Nicholas Radburn (postdoctoral Fellow, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences).

Voyages website

When we talk about the slave trade that has affected 12.5 million Africans, we are actually talking about the largest forced oceanic migration in human history. “From which port did the voyage begin? To which places in Africa did it go? How many enslaved people perished during the Middle Passage? And where did those enslaved Africans end the oceanic portion of their enslavement and begin their lives as slaves in the Americas?” These are the questions that researchers have tried to answer and this is how the team explained the idea behind the research and also what are the problems encountered. “Given the size and complexity of the slave trade, combining the sources that document slave ships’ activities into a single database has presented numerous challenges. Records are written in numerous languages and maintained in archives, libraries and private collections located in dozens of countries. Many of these are developing nations that lack the financial resources to invest in sustained systems of document preservation. Even when they are relatively easy to access, documents on slave voyages provide uneven information. Ship logs comprehensively describe places of travel and list the numbers of enslaved people purchased and the captain and crew. By contrast, port-entry records in newspapers might merely produce the name of the vessel and the number of captives who survived the Middle Passage. These varied sources can be hard to reconcile. The numbers of slaves loaded or removed from a particular vessel might vary widely. Or perhaps a vessel carried registration papers that aimed to mask its actual origins, especially after the legal abolition of the trade in 1808. Compiling these data in a way that does justice to their complexity, while still keeping the site user-friendly, has remained an ongoing concern.”

Through a function of the Voyages site, visitors can interact with sources and materials, they can submit new material on transatlantic slave voyages and also they can help researchers identify possible errors in the database. In the website we can also find lessons created by teachers for middle school, high school and college students. Clicking on lesson plan, web site visitors have various possibilities to access Resources with a gallery of images including: Manuscripts, Places, Slaves, Vessels.

https://slavevoyages.org/resources/images/category/Slaves/3

“This is one image of a group of illustrations published in The Illustrated London News on June 20th, 1857. The illustrations were created by the newspaper based on images sent with a letter from Kingston, Jamaica, dated May 11th, 1857, describing the capture of slaver “Zeldina” and the conditions of the slaves disembarked. The schooner “”Zeldina”” embarked slaves at Cabinda, but she was blown off her route to Cuba, captured by the British naval force in April, 1857, and stationed at Port Royal, Jamaica.”

Meanwhile the research team is also working at an African Origins database. By combining the names of 100,000 Africans liberated from slave vessels with information from Voyages on liberated Africans’ ports of origin, the “Origins website aims to better understand the homelands from which enslaved people came”. Reasearchers said: “Through these endeavors, Voyages has become a digital memorial to the millions of enslaved Africans forcibly pulled into the slave trade and, until recently, nearly erased from the history of not only the trade itself, but also the history of the Atlantic world.”

Website: https://www.slavevoyages.org/

The work of digitization allows to admire the extraordinary drawings of one of the most important wildlife artist.

www.audubon.org: A Vibrant Digital Library

Text by Caterina Sbrana.

John James Audubon (1785-1851) was not the first person who painted and described all the birds of America, but he was one of the youngest “country’s dominant wildlife artist(s)”. We are talking about his seminal Birds of America, a collection of 435 life-size watercolors of North American birds printed between 1827 and 1838, all reproduced from hand-engraved plates. This is a portal into the natural world.

A collection born from the failure of Audubon: in facts he was briefly jailed for bankruptcy; with a family to support and no other prospect Audubon goes away from Henderson, while Lucy, his wife, earns money as a tutor for rich families. With a gun, pencils, some notebooks and a young assistant, the artist collects a lot of material about American avifauna. In 1826, with his collection partially finished, he sailed to England. His life-size bird paintings, along with descriptions of wildlife, hit just the right spot at the height of the continent’s romantic era. “The American Woodsman was literally an overnight success”.

As we read in the web site dedicated to him “He encapsulates the spirit of young America, when the wilderness was limitless and beguiling. He was a person of legendary strength and endurance, as well as a keen observer of birds and nature.”

Nearly two centuries later, Audubon prints are coming to life once again in a vibrant digital library : https://www.audubon.org/birds-of-america.

https://www.audubon.org/birds-of-america/american-avocet (Plate 318)

In the digital archive it is possible to make a search by inserting the common name (not scientific) of the bird or to scroll through the paintings of birds, inserted in alphabetical order. You can also see the plates in chronological order. The birds are drawn in their habitat, while they look for food or feed the newborn, in pairs in groups or singles, while they fly or while they are placed on a branch. Plate 1, for example, represents an extraordinary Wild turkey one of the most interesting of the birds indigenous to the United States of America.

For each bird there is a long description of the areas where it lives, its habits, the mating and especially the description of what these animals do during the year. It is specified also the scientific name of both the bird and the plant represented.

https://www.audubon.org/birds-of-america/wild-turkey

“The Turkey is irregularly migratory, as well as irregularly gregarious. The males, or, as they are more commonly called, the gobblers, associate in parties of from ten to a hundred, and search for food apart from the females; About the middle of April, when the season is dry, the hens begin to look out for a place in which to deposit their eggs”.

To better understand the accuracy in the description we do a search by entering “flamingo” : we immediately find out that it is plate 431 – American Flamingo.
And immediately the description: “On the 7th of May, 1832, while sailing from Indian Key, one of the numerous islets that skirt the south-eastern coast of the Peninsula of Florida, I for the first time saw a flock of Flamingoes. It was on the afternoon of one of those sultry days which, in that portion of the country, exhibit towards evening the most glorious effulgence that can be conceived”.

https://www.audubon.org/birds-of-america/american-flamingo

You can admire the composition in its entirety, you can zoom some parts, download it in high resolution, or share the image via Twitter fb, e-mail and other social network. The extraordinary thing is that we have the comparison between the painting and a modern photograph of the species observed in the section “bird guide”: Audubon had an extraordinary ability to observe every detail of the painted subject from the color of the plumage to the shape of the beak and movements. I suggest at least the navigation among the Audubon Birds not only to bird watching enthusiasts or ornithologists, but to all those who like to observe beautiful things.

Website: www.audubon.org

13 June 2019, Manhattan, New York

Panel discussion: “The Artist Isn’t (Physically) Present: Women in Digital Art”

Thursday 13th June at Showfields, Manhattan, New York, the interesting panel discussion “The Artist Isn’t (Physically) Present: Women in Digital Art” took place to discuss why digital art, like other artistic format, continues to be dominated by male exponent although there are excellent female digital artists who work and sell in the virtual realms.

The debate was carried on by the artists Molly Soda, Claudia Hart, and Faith Holland, prominent female artists and it was led by Poppy Simpson, head of content and curation at Meural.

The artists explained the complexities of working and selling their work and the ways in which they are building their digital art practice.
They talked about “their predictions for what a digitally driven and more inclusive art market might look like in the future,” according to the organizers.

During the event, the works of the panelists were displayed on the Meural Canvas, a digital screen that collectors and consumers can hang in their homes to show a variety of visual art.

smart discussion in preparation of upcoming project achievements

Kaleidoscope project meeting in Helsinki

The progress meeting of 50s in Europe Kaleidoscope project took place on the 5th June in Helsinki, attached to the annual event of Photoconsortium hosted by Museovirasto.

Partners met particularly to discuss the next steps in two main areas of the project: the development of the services for visual recognition and for crowdsourcing that the project is implementing to support metadata creation and enrichment for photographic content relating to the fifities, and the content selection for the project’s exhibition to be lauched in a double format: as a travelling physical exhibition of printed photographs to premiere in Pisa on 6th September, and on Europeana as a virtual exhibition to be published online in Autumn 2019.

Other topics tackled in the meeting touched upon the progress of the MOOC, to be available for user testing in Autumn and the brand new access point for educational content online, the upcoming Educational Portal which will be available soon also including cooperation with Europeana community on education.

Paris (France), 13-14 June 2019

STARTS residencies at FUTUR.E.S festival in Paris

We are very happy to present two STARTS Residencies projects during Futur.e.s festival on 13th and 14th June, at the Galerie des Gobelins in Paris. Created by Cap Digital, Futur.e.s festival offers for two days interactive summits that mix inspirational lectures, workshops and masterclasses, and 80 innovative demos rigorously selected for their emerging, sustainable nature and technological excellence.

STARTS website: https://www.starts.eu/

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PRINT YOUR CITY by The New Raw
June 13 & 14 from 9.00am to 8.00 pm – Free entry

What if citizens could build their cities from waste?
Print Your City explores the concept of applying 3D printing to plastic waste, as a way to re-design urban space.

In the project Print Your City, urban dwellers transform their plastic waste into raw material for public space, creating a circular stream within the city. This is achieved by recycling household plastic waste with robotic-3d-printing and producing components that upgrade the built environment through citizen involvement and the principles of circular economy.

A project developed by the design studio the New Raw in collaboration with PlasticTwist platform.

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MASTERCLASS “How art pushes startups beyond intended uses?”
June 14 from 2.30 to 3.00 pm – Free entry

Speakers:
Laurent Bazin, stage director
Line Brucena, co-founder of Gengiskhan Production
in the framework of “My fears murmured to you” STARTS Residency

MORE INFO :https://futures.paris/

30-31 May & 1 June, Rome

Fifth Biennial of Public Space: promote projects and initiatives to give quality and vitality to public spaces

The Biennal Public Space is an event for the exchange and dissemination of research activities and actions carried out on the issues of urban public spaces.

The Fifth edition took place in Rome in the past few days, organized by the Association Public Space Biennale – APS.
The key theme of the event was “meeting”, declined in three thematic areas: public parks, sustainable mobility, public art.

The contemporary city suffers the large and rapid changes of urban and social nature, spreads individualism and it is increasingly difficult to trace what is recognized as “common”; this increases the degradation and the abandonment of real public space, but public space represents a privileged place to meet, socialize, share interests, promote activities of construction and development of forms of participatory democracy; it embodies the identity of a city and the shared values of the community that resides there.

The Biennial promotes meeting and comparison between citymakers, individuals or associates, who show interest in a physical re-appropriation of the city with representatives of Municipalities and Regions, professional Associations, universities and companies; the aim is to outline effective shared solutions and the enhancement of public spaces.

The final event included three workshops focused on the three thematic areas:

public parks that are the major component of public space and have an ecological rule.
sustainable mobility to regenerate cities and their suburbs
public art to promote the social re-appropriation and qualification of urban spaces

During the event, national and international territorial workshops took place to inform and discuss ideas, projects and experiences related to the three thematic areas, as well as a trip to the municipalities of good practices.

As a result of the call for papers promoted by the Biennial, the papers will be published in the digital volume “DIVERSE City” edited by the Italian National Council of Architects Landscape Planners and Conservators.
In this book, the research experience nurtured during the Rock project (Regeneration and Optimisation of Cultural Heritage in creative and Knowledge cities), Reach linked project, was presented by Andrea BOERI, Danila LONGO, Valentina GIANFRATE, Rossella ROVERSI (UNIBO-DA) with the title “Cultural heritage-led initiatives for urban regeneration. Pilot implementation actions in Bologna public spaces”.

The contribute focuses on the use of Cultural Heritage as a catalyst for urban regeneration and on reactivation actions of public spaces in Bologna, aiming at fostering collaborative practices, social cohesion and innovation.

Further information about the event on the http://www.biennalespaziopubblico.it/

The Polish contribution to the Small Towns Heritage Pilot of REACH Project

“The Strategic Use of Heritage Representations: The Small Towns of Podlasie Province”

Last May the open-access peer-reviewed international academic journal “Urbanities” published the result of the Polish case study carried on in the framework of the Small Towns Heritage Pilot of REACH Project. The article was written by Luďa Klusáková(Charles University, Czech Republic) Halina Parafianowicz and Marlena Brzozowska (Białystok University, Poland).

The article stems from a project researching good practices in the use and re-use by small towns of their cultural heritage. Heritage representations and related participative activities may contribute to urban renaissance, or completely fail if there are no favourable conditions. The selected case of Podlasie Voivodship, a Polish province on the border with Lithuania and Belorussia, represents a peripheral border region. Its settlement is to quite a large extent represented by small towns on the edge of the countryside. To test our hypothesis that towns in border regions across Europe use heritage in their development strategies and that these are comparable through the perspective of the use and reuse of the heritage, the representations of selected settlements were analysed: Tykocin, Supraśl, Hajnówka with Białowieża and Wysokie Mazowieckie. The authors are historians, and combine contextualization with observation of selected cases inspired by visual ethnography. In addition, the general public’s understanding of heritage has been explored through the analysis of 248 questionnaires answered by a focus group of secondary school students from Wysokie Mazowieckie. The findings presented in the article contribute to the debate on the role of Creatives in towns from the historian’s perspective
Link to the entire article:http://www.anthrojournal-urbanities.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/6-Luda-Klus%C3%A1kov%C3%A1-et-al.pdf
Link to Urbanities Journal:http://www.anthrojournal-urbanities.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/May-2019.pdf

Experiences and deductions from MEMOLAB and REACH projects

“The legal framework of cultural landscapes in Andalusia (Spain): limits and possibilities of public participation from an archaeological perspective”

The independent European journal of post classical archaeologies PCA recently published an article facing the theme of the participation on cultural landscape.
The contribution was given by Dott. L. Delgado Anés and Prof. J.M. Martín Civantos from the University of Granada, both engaged for years in projects promoting forms of participation for the protection and recovery of the heritage of landscapes. Indeed, as explained by the authors in the introduction of the article, “the choice of this subject stems from the accumulation of experiences
gathered during the development of two research projects: MEMOLA (www.memolaproject.eu) and more recently REACH (www.reach-culture.eu).
Intention of the article is to ascertain how the management and participation in cultural landscapes are conducted and to identify in which conceptual and normative contexts archaeologists should act in their approach to putting into practice a participatory model. The paper advances that this cannot be initiated uniquely from archaeological, or even heritage or cultural, practices. Environmental factors and natural values are essential and have often prevailed over more integrated conceptions of coevolutionary processes between humans and the environment.
Read the entire article:
PCA 9_Delgado-Civantos

21 May 2019, Gandhi Secondary School Pécs, (Hungary)

REACH Local Encounter: “Intangible Roma cultural heritage in Hungary – Communities and participation”

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The 21th May a local encounter organized by Elte University, task leader of Minority Heritage Pilot, was held at the Gandhi Secondary School, located in Pécs; this is the first secondary school in Europe, devoted to preparing young Roma for higher education and teaches Roma history and culture as well as Beash and Romani languages.

The aim is to produce future Roma intellectuals committed to the cause of the Roma and the continuation of Roma language and culture.
In 2017, the pedagogic method for the preservation of the Gipsy/Romani intangible cultural heritage was selected as element of the national register of best safeguarding practices in Hungary.

The three hungarian organisations, the Hungarian and Gipsy Dance Traditions of Nagyecsed (part of the national inventory of ICH, since 2017), the Gandhi Secondary School and the Talentum Art School (both selected on the national register of best safeguarding practices in Hungary with their educational programs) attended the event to present their history and their definition of Roma cultural heritage.
The discussion highlighted the importance of heritage communities and the active participation and involvement of the local communities; it raised the question of authenticity of the Roma culture and the danger of exoticising certain cultural traditions as well as danger of xenophobic attitude of the majority society.
The debate concerned a lot of pertinent issues, such as the position of the communities, their activity and their involvement in the case of Hungarian Roma, where poverty and disadvantageous social status may very much balk the participation in cultural activities.

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Also the lunch time was an opportunity to deepen the Roma culture: the Kóstolda Roma House Restaurant is a great local example of Roma entrepreneurship where the visitors may discover authentic Roma cuisine, while the restaurant also attempts to break down the discrimination and prejudice against their ethnic group through fostering communication

During the event there was a small exhibition presenting photos and objects collected from the past.

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