Digital meets Culture

Kyoto (Japan), 1-7 September 2019

ICOM Kyoto 2019 – Museums as Cultural Hubs: The Future of Tradition

A wide programme of ICOM members meetings, keynote speeches and excursions constitutes the 25th edition of ICOM conference, in Kyoto, under the main theme “MUSEUM AS CULTURAL HUBS: The Future of Tradition”.

On 1-7 September 2019, Kyoto will be the city to receive some 3,000 participants to the ICOM General Conference. A flood of discussions and exchange of ideas on museum-related issues will sweep the city during the week. The event will offer opportunities to engage with museum professionals and enthusiasts from all over the world and to broaden user experience and understanding of the museum world.

The theme, “Hubs” aims to highlight 2 key concepts:

Museums as “Networks” –supporting collaborative partnerships with one another,
Museums as “Cores” –invigorating communities at the local level.

The sub-theme “The Future of Tradition” aims to link museums to the future whilst respecting traditions. Looking forward to discussing these timely topics with participants from all over the world.

Website: http://icom-kyoto-2019.org/index.html

Madrid, 2-5 April 2019

REACH Project at “Museums for all people!”

Museums for all people! This was the title of the international conference held from 2 to 5 April 2019 at Complutense University in Madrid. Keynote lectures, short talks and posters discussed the diverse and multi-layered dimensions of art and cultural heritage and in particular of the museum as an institution. The focus was in particular on the great diversity of the public and barrier-free access to culture. Further topics were: the relations between museums and universities, the use of new technologies as well as participative, integrative and cooperative projects. The majority of the presentations and discussions again highlighted the social importance and responsibility of museums. The congress offered valuable opportunities for an intensive exchange across countries and sectors, which will enable the further development of ideas on future museum work in theory, practice and politics.
Museums for all people! This was the title of the international conference held from 2 to 5 April 2019 at Complutense University in Madrid. Keynote lectures, short talks and posters discussed the diverse and multi-layered dimensions of art and cultural heritage and in particular of the museum as an institution. The focus was in particular on the great diversity of the public and barrier-free access to culture. Further topics were: the relations between museums and universities, the use of new technologies as well as participative, integrative and cooperative projects.
In this context the REACH project was presented by Dr. Berlekamp. In her presentation she emphasized on museums as a very special place, as they enable manifold forms of participation. Further she reflected on the role of participation and its impact for the participants, the institution and the environment.
The majority of the presentations and discussions again highlighted the social importance and responsibility of museums. The congress offered valuable opportunities for an intensive exchange across countries and sectors, which will enable the further development of ideas on future museum work in theory, practice and politics.

http://museumforall.musacces.es/en/home/

Sofia (Bulgaria), 26-28 September 2019

Digital Presentation and Preservation of Cultural and Scientific Heritage – DiPP2019

The Ninth International Conference on Digital Presentation and Preservation of Cultural and Scientific Heritage–DiPP2019 will be organized under the patronage of UNESCO and Burgas District Administration. It aims at presenting innovative results, research projects and applications in the field of digitisation, documentation, archiving, representation and preservation of global and national tangible and intangible cultural and scientific heritage.

DiPP2019 web site: http://dipp2019.math.bas.bg/

Call for papers: PDF, 311 Kb
The deadline for title and authors’ names submission: 20 May 2019.
The deadline for paper submission: 5 June 2019.

The focus of conference Digital Presentation and Preservation of Cultural and Scientific Heritage – DiPP2019 is to provide open access to digitised cultural heritage and to set up sustainable policies for its continuous digital preservation and conservation. The priority area is the digital presentation and preservation of cultural and historical objects under conditions of risk. The forum will demonstrate innovative technologies and prototypes, including digital repositories, digital archives, virtual museums and digital libraries, which result from established practices and achievements in the field. Representatives of a number of public and specialised libraries, museums, galleries, archives, centres, both national and foreign research institutions and universities will be invited to participate and exchange experiences, ideas, knowledge and best practices of the field.
There will be also Workshop on Open Access to Scientific Publications, Data and Data Science, which will primarily focus on the following activities: Open Access indicators; disseminate partners’ best practices; discuss research problems in the field; discuss the possibilities of establishing a network of open access repositories; contribute to the problems of the harmonization of national legislation and practices; and discuss the possibilities of developing training courses for creators and managers of scientific digital repositories to ensure interoperability.

Principal organiser:
Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1113, Sofia, 8, Acad. G. Bonchev Str., website: http://www.math.bas.bg, phone: +359 2 870 1072, fax: +359 2 971 3649, e-mail: director @ math.bas.bg

Co-organisers:
Regional Academic Center – Burgas, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Regional Historical Museum – Burgas, Burgas Free University, Index Ltd.
Under the patronage of: UNESCO and Burgas District Administration

DiPP2019 conference: September 26-28, 2019
Deadline for papers submission: June 05, 2019

17, 30 March; 13, 14 April; 4, 5 May 2019, Spain.

Good practices from the Rural Heritage Pilot: MEMOLab campaign “recovery of historic irrigation channels”

MEMOLab laboratory of the University of Granada, in the framework of REACH project, continues the planning and implementation of events dedicated to the recovery and use of historical irrigation systems.

Also this year the “recovery of historic irrigation channels” campaign was organized; the cleaning of the historic irrigation channels with the irrigation communities was started already in March, earlier than usual, because the irrigation communities of the province of Granada, due to the lack of rain, need water to start irrigating their fields.

The activity was organized over several days of work:

17th of March Romayla Irrigation Channel in Granada
the activity took place with the community of local irrigators and the collaboration of the Council of Alhambra and Generalifee, 25 volunteers participated. The activity carried out by MemoLab is also aimed at dynamize the community and putting their irrigators in contact, since the community of irrigators has disappeared.

30th of March “Barjas” Irrigation Channel in Cáñar: activity with Cáñar Irrigator Community (20 members) and the participation of 50 volunteers.

On the occasion of World Water Day, the 5th Annual Cleanning of the medieval irrigation Barjas- Water Party was carried out.
In this area, the work of MemoLAb plans to support irrigators on their objectives, such as the promotion of agricultural activity, for the next 4 years.

13-14 of April “Nueva” Irrigation Channel in Barranco del Poqueira with the local irrigators community (18 members), the participation of 45 volunteers and with the collaboration of the Natural and National Park of Sierra Nevada, Capileria town hall, Bubion town Hall and pampaneira town Hall.
The work carried out is to help the irrigators to establish a directive and start to working as a community.

The last local encounter is scheduled on 4-5 of May at Jerez del Marquesado.

This campaign promotes the direct participation of civil society and public administration in the preservation and promotion of local landscape and cultural heritage and represents a model of good practice for the rural heritage pilot of REACH Project.

The “recovery of historic irrigation channels” initiative .

a new platform to explore musical itineraries, recitals from processions, organs and other sounding experiences in Granada and Sevilla

Historical Soundscapes: listen to Andalusian cities’s voices

This project was originally conceived by Juan Ruiz Jimenez, PhD from Granada University, with the aim of exploring historical urban soundscapes in Andalusian cities, aided by the outreach potential made possible through new technologies. Throughout the digital platform Historical soundscapes (c.1200 – c.1800) users are offered alternative possibilities of understanding the city (currently Granada and Sevilla) as the centre of production of sounding experiences.

This innovative approach allows users to recreate music of the past in historical locations through the use of online interactive maps with digital resources (documents, videos, sounds, etc.). The contents aim to be inclusive and help achieve a better understanding of urban culture, establishing an aesthetic and intellectual dialogue with their sensorial aural history through an interdisciplinary approach that brings together urban musicology with areas including cultural history and art history, among others. This platform is intended to be a useful and innovative tool for the educational institutions (from primary to tertiary education), museums, tourist boards, etc. of different cities.

Explore Historical Soundscapes: http://www.historicalsoundscapes.com/

One of the greatest resources and communities for presenting LOD and for support tools

EuropeanaTech and Pelagios, together for Linked Open Data

The current issue of EuropeanaTech Insight newsletter is solely dedicated to the Pelagios community and was done in close collaboration with the Pelagios team. Pelagios is a community and infrastructure for Linked Open Geodata in the Humanities, which means that it aims at connecting online resources by linking historical materials through their common reference to particular places (hence geodata).

Pelagio’s well known resources are Recogito, a tool that makes it easy to identify, record and export as Linked Open Data the places referred to in historical texts, maps and tables; Peripleo, a search service that allows you to find community-curated content related to specific places; and Pelagios Map Tiles, a set of resources that allow you to project data onto dynamic maps dedicated to different historical period, and the three of them are widely used by digital humanities researchers and heritage institutes.

EuropeanaTech has been engaged with Pelagios for many years, and the issue 12 of the EuropeanaTech newsletter provides 7 different implementations and insights into making use of Pelagios and being involved in the community. It’s a rich resource for any researcher or institute curious about exploring LOD or those already familiar with it curious about implementing it in new settings.

Read the Newsletter: https://pro.europeana.eu/page/issue-12-pelagios#letter-from-the-editor

img. Portolano by Grazioso Benincasa, Public Domain via Wikimedia commons. This file has been identified as being free of known restrictions under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights.

New Coventry University funded project

Get involved in the Dancing Bodies in Coventry!

Dancing Bodies in Coventry is a Coventry University 2021 funded project that is being led by researchers from Coventry University’s Centre for Dance Research (CDaRE).
Dancing Bodies in Coventry is a multimedia project that will document the legacy of dance in the city of Coventry.

The project aims to make three films, two podcasts, and five visual banners, to be shared at a public projection at a location in the city of Coventry, as well as in an online archive.
Through the making of the three films (each of which will respectively cover the past, present and future of dance in Coventry), the creation of an archive for the city that is focussed on dance will start.

The project aims to bring forward a range of dance artists, festival organizers, dance schools and local groups, and allow them to share their dance stories with the wider Coventry community. The films will sit online and will be publicly available for people to view. All images and videos will be created with the intention to celebrate the dance legacy of the city.

For further information:
Rosa Cisneros, Research Fellow, C-DaRE ab4928@coventry.ac.uk
Marie-Louise Crawley, Research Assistant, C-DaRE ad1803@coventry.ac.uk
Follow us on Twitter: @RosaSenCis @CrawleyMLC @CDaRE

14-16 March 2019, Castelo de Vide (Portugal)

REACH at the International Conference “Small Cities and Environment (from the Middle Ages to Contemporary Times)”

From 14 to 16 March at Castelo de Vide (Portugal) was held an international conference on Small Towns and Environment in History – Pequenas Ciudades e Ambiente – organized by the international network Small Cities in Time (In-SCIT).

The main subject of this conference sets out from the principal that the “environment” (in the twin sense of “nature” and “area surrounding a locality”) provides small cities with amenities, possible benefits and probably also restrictions (above all for societies in ancient times) and on the other hand, small cities have an impact on environment. The knowledge, the exploring the amenities and becoming aware of the restrictions and impacts and elaborating solutions to rectify them, concern both the political sphere (and therefore cultural, including religious aspects) and the economic sphere.

This three days conference brought together number of historians interested in small towns, like Peter Borsay from Aberyswyth who spoke about English spa towns, Peter Clark from Helsinki who offered a reflexion on small towns in global perspective, Marjaana Niemi from Tampere with a talk on small towns in Finland and a number of British expertes from Leicester CUH, Norwegian experts from Nord University in Bodo and Spanish and Portuguese colleagues.

REACH project contributed to the event by the participation of the Charles University (CUNI), task leader of the Small Towns Heritage Pilot: Prof. Luda Klusakova provided a key note lecture on small towns and environment presenting the Pilot Study for the REACH project, while Dr. Jaroslav Ira spoke about a case of Kdyně – small town in western Bohemia, which knew its short period of glamour in interwar period.

Thanks to the interventions of the REACH representatives, which have met with considerable success and aroused the interest of the organizers, the event was an important opportunity to forge partnerships in particular on the Portuguese case for the Small Towns Heritage Pilot study and to expand the network of REACH.

The conference was particularly exciting for the atmosphere of empathy for small towns and energy devoted to the organization of the conference, not forgetting about the generous hospitality of the municipality of Castelo de Vide.

Further information:

2019 – Small Cities and Environment website

summer School of the UNESCO chair in ICT to develop and promote sustainable tourism in World Heritage Sites

LeVERAGE ICTs for Tourism

Image by: Rufino Emmenegger, Copyright: Foundation Pro Monastery of St. John.

LeVERAGE ICTs for Tourism – Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism for preserving LiVing hERitAGE

August 24-31, 2019 – Lugano & Müstair, Switzerland

The 2019 Summer School of the UNESCO chair will take place in Switzerland: the activities of the first two days (August 24th and 25th) will be run within the 2019 edition of the MEM Summer Summit in Lugano, then the group will move to Val Müstair, home to the Benedictine Convent of St John at Müstair, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.The focus this time is on living heritage, which is living practices and expressions passed down from generation to generation and constantly recreated by communities in response to their environment, their relationship with nature and their history. The importance of living heritage is not the cultural manifestation itself but rather the wealth of knowledge and skills that is transmitted.

The Summer School is conceived with the following characteristics:

– it is addressed both to an academic and a professional audience, in particular: Master and PhD students, researchers and academic fellows, professionals, in the field of digital technologies, heritage and tourism;

– it will take place from August 24^th to August 31^st;

– the first two days will be organized in Lugano, while then the group will be moved to Müstair, where there are a World Heritage Site and a biosphere reserve;

– the topic this year is the role of ICT in Tourism for preserving living heritage;

– applications are open until April 30^th.

(Download: brochure)

More info can be found here: http://www.unescochair.usi.ch/activities-2/summer-schools/summer-school-2019

A way to increase knowledge worldwide: a large quantity of ancient and recent documents are within reach of everyone due to Digital Collections

NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY: 180,000 digital items in the public domain

Text and photos by Caterina Sbrana.

Dear readers,
this is the second report I realized on my trip to New York following the one on 9/11 Museum& Memorial, and it regards the system created by the New York Public Library that counts more than 50 million items. I personally was very responsive to the organization of the libraries that permit worldwide to find a huge quantity of materials for study and researches.

The New York Public Library (NYPL) system actually includes 92 libraries situated in different districts like Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island. Humanities and social sciences, performing arts, black history and culture, business and industry are the topics of the four research centers that take part in NYPL System.
The collections of the New York Public Library compose of more than 50 million items, thanks to the work of generations of curators over the past 160 years. The collections have been organized into more than 100 major topics.

Screenshot https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/

Searching the website of the NYPL we can find out, by clicking on “Research”, a huge digitisation project carried out by different research teams, out of which 180,000 documents are available since 2016 in digital version and in public domain. These documents include: maps, posters, manuscripts drawings, photographs like those of Racioppo Larry, Barvin Bill, Morris Rosenfeld, Walter Silver, Martha Swope etc., letters, ancient texts, charts, totally open access for everybody, from children to adults.
We can read on the website that “everyone has the freedom to enjoy and reuse these materials in almost limitless ways. The Library now makes it possible to download such items in the highest resolution available directly from the Digital Collections website. […] The release of more than 180,000 digitized items represents both a simplification and an enhancement of digital access to a trove of unique and rare materials: a removal of administration fees and processes from public domain content, and also improvements to interfaces — popular and technical — to the digital assets themselves“.

[Show as slideshow]

The New York Library in 476 5th Ave is located in an extraordinary building, the Stephen A. Schwarzman’s Building: study rooms, research rooms, exhibitions… in a space that takes your breath away. On my trip to New York for Digital Meets Culture, I went to this building where is one of the locations of the public libraries in New York. On the first floor, at the information point, I presented myself explaining that I was writing an article for our magazine and that I wanted to consult some documents. I filled out an application form using one of the many computers available. I specified my residence time in New York and in a few minutes I got my own free library card.With it you can borrow books and materials that can be returned in any of the libraries that are part of the NYPL system. Also, the card allows you to receive notices, download digital media, search hundreds of electronic databases, reserve a computer, and more.
Searching the Public Domain Digital Collections we can find a lot of documents, as the Street view of New York City’s Fifth Avenue how it was in 1911 compared with 2015’s Google Street View; manuscripts of American literary masters like Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne; Medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts from Western Europe; Book Art and illustration; over 20,000 maps and atlases documenting New York City, North America, and the World etc.

Street view NY Fifth Avenue: 1911/2015 comparison

In the section “ALL COLLECTIONS” it is possible to do a research by keywords related to a country, a topic, an author etc… Let’s search the H. Thoreau manuscripts on the web page: on the left we find information about the Collection, the author, date of manuscript creation, library locations, topics, notes; in the middle of the web page there are the digital documents. A symbol on the left of the images shows if the document is composed by more than one page and if it is possible to print it.

Screenshot: H. Thoreau manuscripts

The mission of The New York Public Library is “inspire lifelong learning, advance knowledge, and strengthen communities“. Nowadays technological means allow us to preserve and spread culture by sharing documents, old as well as modern, in digital platforms that allow everyone to enjoy cultural goods, by deleting physical distances. There is a double advantage: the preservation and the dissemination of documents belonging to the cultural heritage of each individual community.

NYPL website: https://www.nypl.org/

Access to Public Domain items: https://www.nypl.org/research/collections/digital-collections/public-domain