Digital meets Culture

Beirut (Lebanon), 11-12 April 2019

ABLE Summit on digital accessibility in higher education

ABLE (Accessibility for a Bolder Learning Experience), is an initiative by the Office of Information Technology (IT) in collaboration with the Student Affairs Accessible Education Office (A.E.O) at the American University of Beirut (A.U.B), to open the doors of higher education for all through digital accessibility.

More than 200 experts, frontline workers, innovators, vendors and end users from around the world are expected to attend the April summit to share innovations, best practices, implementation strategies, and research and education in assistive technology (AT) and accessibility.

“Excellence in education is when we do everything that we can to make sure they become everything that they can.” Carol Ann Tomlinson.

ABLE aims at increasing the retention and success rates of students with disabilities and to support their readiness for life after university by developing and deploying accessibility to campus-wide IT resources.

ABLE scope covers assistive technologies (A.T), learning content, services, resources, policies, inclusive IT support, collaboration platforms, IT facilities and learning spaces.

The ABLE initiative includes, but not limited to:

The ABLE Summit annual event
A national joint project to implement digital accessibility in higher education with a consortium of universities, governmental and nongovernmental entities.

The ABLE summit will feature renowned speakers from global leading organizations in industry and academia, to boost awareness, charge collective momentum and to trigger related initiatives.

Website: https://sites.aub.edu.lb/able/

take a tour of ancient Rome in A.D. 320 and discover the architecture of the eternal city as Emperor Constantine saw it.

Rome Reborn original project and new apps

Rome Reborn Project was an international initiative launched in 1996 with the goal of creating 3D digital models to illustrate the urban development of ancient Rome. According to the advice of the project’s advisory committee, the work of modeling begun recreating the city in year 320, under the emperor Constantine. This was a transition moment for the ancient city from the point of view of its architecture, which saw an increasing of Christian basilicas and churches built near to older structures such as the Pantheon and the Roman Senate House, thus enticing a great change in the urban landscape in that moment. The model shows a very neat panorama, which doesn’t account the recreation of the actual conditions of traffic, dirt and confusion of antique Rome’s crowded streets; but permits to explore over 7,000 buildings and monuments as they are known through literature, maps, and catalogues.

Rome Reborn–Flight over Ancient Rome from Bernard Frischer on Vimeo.

What was a digital humanities project at the University of California at Los Angeles, where architectural historians and 3D modelers were involved into its early development and then launch, grew along time well beyond the project itself and various versions of Rome Reborn have been developed by artists, classicists, archaeologists, and 3D modelers at numerous institution, whom have not always been cited and credited for their work. Although some criticism arised along time, due to the fact that a project originally funded by public money was eventually the base for highly commercial products copyrighted by an ad-hoc created, for-profit company, the new app Rome Reborn® VR nowadays utilizes version 3.0 of the 3D digital model as originally created and makes the model publicly available using Virtual Reality headsets and personal computers (Windows and Mac), for new experiences of education and entertainment: users can immerse in the ancient city, walking down its streets and entering some of its most famous buildings while listening to the commentary of highly qualified experts.

Whether such cultural heritage content should be more available to the public in an open-access repository is still an open question; in any case the project is indeed one of the best examples in the field of digital cultural heritage and 3D interactions with the past.

Rome Reborn: https://www.romereborn.org/

Sidney (Australia), 20-21 September 2019

HIP 2019 – Historical Document Imaging and Processing

The 5th International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (HIP 2019) will be held in conjunction with ICDAR2019 International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, on September 21, 2019 in Sydney, Australia.

The manifold topics addressed in this workshop encompass the entire processing chain from image acquisition to information extraction. We include the growing importance of machine learning in this processing chain, such as convolutional and recurrent neural networks, and we also encourage the presentation of entire projects in the context of historical documents.

The workshop brings together researchers working with historical documents and is intended to be complementary and synergistic to the work in analysis and recognition featured in the main sessions of ICDAR, the premier international forum for researchers and practitioners in the document analysis community.

HIP 2019 Workshop: https://www.primaresearch.org/hip2019/

ICDAR 2019: http://icdar2019.org/

Important Dates for HIP 2019 Call for Papers

Paper submission deadline: 01 June 2019
Acceptance notification: 15 July 2019
Camera ready: 01 August 2019
Workshop: 20-21 September 2019

HIP 2019 Workshop Call for Papers

Workshop topics include (but are not limited too):

Imaging and Image Acquisition

Imaging for fragile materials
Multispectral imaging
Camera-based/non-invasive acquisition
Case studies/applications

Digital Archiving Considerations

Compression issues
Measuring essential resolution (color, spatial) and metadata
Modeling of document image degradation
Historical Collections
Military records, personal journals, church records, medieval manuscripts, etc.
Scientific, technical and educational documents
Government archives, documents from the world cultural heritage, multi-language

Document Restoration/Improving readability

Removing or minimizing damages, defects, ink-bleed
Completing and filling in missing pieces based on context, prior knowledge, supporting documents, i.e. inpainting, etc.
Machine-learning algorithms for enhancement based on example images
Interactive tools from a user viewpoint
Learning from user-directed image enhancement

Content Extraction (within the context of historical documents)

Content-based retrieval
Automated or semi-automated transcription / processing
Crowdsourcing, user interfaces
Machine-learning algorithms for content extraction, convolutional and recurrent neural networks, auto-encoders, unsupervised feature learning
Content recognition based on surrounding and supporting context
Ontologies for modeling historical document content

Family History Documents and Genealogies

Personal, Family, National and Historical Collections of Family Genealogy and Histories
Extracting and linking names, dates, places, etc.
Extracting, linking and piecing together personal and family histories and narratives
Discovering historical social networks

Automated Classification, Grouping and Hyperlinking of Historical Documents

Style identification (typography of printed text, handwriting style recognition for manuscript authentication, dating or author identification…)
On-line & web-based navigation within/among document images
Searching/querying, retrieval, summarizing/condensing of document images, large-scale databases
Document clustering, collecting, linking, analysis and search technologies
Parallel tagging of images, transcripts, and other document layers

15th February 2019, Prague

Small Towns Heritage Pilot- Regional meeting with associate partners

On 15 February Charles University, leader of the REACH Project Pilot on Small Towns Heritage, held a half-day regional meeting with the associated partners representing regional governance and the heritage institute in the Vysočina region.

This small informal meeting took place in Prague and was arranged in the format of an “open space” meeting to discuss the development of the pilot project.

The Prague team presented the progress of the pilot, in particular the article on the Podlasie region, highlighted what was done for the participative model, the contributions of the team to other pilots and how it affects the Vysočina region.

The next meeting is scheduled for May.

Read more about Small Towns Heritage Pilot

San Francisco (US),14-15 November 2019

Future Technologies Conference (FTC) series, edition 2019

The Future Technologies Conference (FTC) 2019 is to be held from 14-15 November 2019 in San Francisco. FTC is the world’s pre-eminent forum for reporting technological breakthroughs in the areas of Computing, Electronics, AI, Robotics, Security & Communications.

FTC attracts researchers, scientists and technologists from some of the top companies, universities, research firms and government agencies from around the world. A call for papers is open until 01 March 2019. Each paper will be reviewed by at least three regular PC members or two senior PC members. The acceptance decisions will take into account paper novelty, technical depth, elegance, practical or theoretic impact, and presentation.

The conference programme will include paper presentations, poster sessions and project demonstrations, along with prominent keynote speakers and industrial workshops.

Researchers, academics and technologists from leading universities, research firms, government agencies and companies from 50+ countries present the latest research at the forefront of technology and computing. The 2018 conference successfully brought together technology geniuses in one venue to not only present breakthrough research in future technologies but to also promote practicality and applications and an intra- and inter-field exchange of ideas.

Important Dates:
Paper Submission Due : 01 March 2019
Acceptance Notification : 01 April 2019
Author Registration : 01 May 2019
Camera Ready Submission : 01 June 2019
Conference Dates : 14-15 November 2019

Complete details are available on the conference website : http://saiconference.com/FTC

FTC 2019 papers will be will be published in Springer series “Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing” and submitted for indexing to ISI Proceedings, EI-Compendex, DBLP, SCOPUS, Google Scholar and Springerlink.

Outcomes of the meeting held the 12th February 2019 in Budapest

REACH project local encounter: Mini-conference “The Roma Heritage of the 8th district”

The conference was co-organized by ELTE, Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Humanities, together with the students of the Cultural Heritage MA programme of the Atelier department.
The students completed a research during the first semester in three groups: they had been researching the community, the musical and the fine arts heritage of the Roma community in the 8th district.
During the research, they were cooperating with the local REACH partners and other stakeholders (like Glove Factory/Kesztyűgyár, the local Roma minority Self-Government, the Budapest Roma Cultural and Educational Centre (FROKK) and several Roma artists (musicians, painters who are also involved in community building practices).

The conference included two key-note lectures. Péter Szuhay, former director of the Roma collection in the Museum of Ethnography presented a digital repository entitled the Virtual House of Roma Culture. Tibor Sándor, head of Budapest Collection, Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library, Budapest talked about the Topotéka project of 8th district (http://jozsefvaros.topothek.at/).

The key-note lectures were followed by the three presentations held by the MA students:
1. Adrienn Tóth, Tamás Tüske, Zsófia Vajda and Bianka Vilonya: The role of the individual in Roma community-building
2. Anett Jánosi, Melinda Lovag, Zsófia Szalai, Julianna Szántó and Edina Szathmári: Roma fine-arts through the lens of contemporary artists
Anna Klára Andor, Dóra Nagy, Sára Kónya and Gergely Szabó: From the “Mátyás University” to the Mátyás Pince

The third section of the conference comprised a round table discussion about the possibilities of institutionalizing Roma heritage, the participants were Eszter György, István Gábor Molnár, president of Roma Minority Self-Government, Újpest; founder and director of Roma Local History Collection, Újpest and Kálmán Káli-Horváth, actor, painter and committee member of the future Cziffra Centre (Roma Cultural Centre, to be opened in the 8th district in 2020)

The conference was accompanied by a photo-exhibition. Gyula Nyári’s photo document the Roma cultural events that took place in the 8th district over the past two-three decades. Some of the places, institutions depicted on the photos do not exist anymore so the pictures are extremely important in maintaining the collective Roma memory of the district.

The event was very successful, over 50 people attended the conference and besides the university students, a lot of different stakeholders and representatives of other, Roma or non-Roma cultural and educational institutions came (Tom Lantos Institute, CEU, University of Debrecen, etc).

Poster of the event

For more information, articles in Hungarian are available here and here

[Show as slideshow]

International Conference, 2-5 April 2019, Madrid (Spain)

«The Museum for all people: Art, Accessibility and Social Inclusion»: call for papers

The International Conference “The Museum for all people: Art, Accessibility and Social Inclusion” will be held in Madrid between 2nd-5th April 2019 organized by the MUSACCES Consortium (UCM-UNED-AUM).

The conference aims to provide a forum for exchange and debate among museum managers, professors, researchers, artists, students and other professionals from the world of culture regarding improving access in art museums to all people. It invites a reflection on factors such as the experiential dimension of art and cultural heritage, focused on its audiences or the history of museums as spaces for universal knowledge. Similarly, the conference will delve into the needs of museum audiences that lie within education and cultural action, including the needs of particular groups to promote inclusion.

The conference will have breakup sessions, specific seminars, concurrent activities and will feature internationally renowned speakers.

In the frame of the activities in a more inclusive museology, the MUSACCES Consortium (UCM-UNED-UAM) invites the scientific community to submit contributions, such as oral communications or posters, in relation to the following areas:
1. Pluralism in art. Aesthetic and sensory perceptions.
2. Cultural heritage at everyone’s reach.
3. Museums as spaces for knowledge .
4. Museums and 21st century audiences .
5. Museums and universities .
6. Museums as spaces for inclusive innovation and technology
7. Accesibility beyond the museum
8. Outstanding projects and practices in museology accessibility or social inclusion (poster)

The deadline for submitting papers is 15h February 2019.
General participation rules and the communication submitting form may be found at the link: http://museumforall.musacces.es/en/papers/
Further information at http://museumforall.musacces.es/en/home/
All queries about the congress will be processed through email: museumforall@musacces.es

Lumen organises an annual juried competition, exhibitions and opportunities for artists around the world

Lumen Prize for Art and Technology 2019: call for entries

Calling all artists engaging with technology
The Lumen Prize for Art and Technology celebrates and promotes artists working with
technology globally through its annual juried competition and exhibitions.

Now in its 8th year, The Lumen Prize has already awarded over $70,000 in prize money.
Through Lumen Art Projects, over 45 exhibitions in 15 cities worldwide have been staged, including London, New York, Shanghai, St Petersburg, Beijing, Cardiff and Athens.

Prize Fund in 2019 is $11,000. The 2019 Prizes are:
● Gold Award ($4000)
● Moving Image ($1000)
● Still Image ($1000)
● XR ($1000)
● 3D/Interactive Award ($1000)
● The BCS Artificial Intelligence Award ($1000)
● The Rapoport Award for Women in Art and Technology ($1000)
● Photomonitor Student Prize ($500)
● People’s Choice Award ($500)

There is an administration fee of US$48 to enter which covers two entries. Any additional
artwork is US$24. As a not-for-profit based in the UK, all entry fees go directly towards the prizes and events programme.

All longlisted artists, finalists and award winners are eligible for Lumen exhibitions,
commissions and events.

Closing Date: May 3rd 2019
Questions about the prize? Visit the FAQ page or email info@lumenprize.com

www.lumenprize.com

the app allows to explore creative works, and to interact directly with creators who are appropriately credited.

daisie is a playground for creative collaboration, exchange and networking

daisie is a new app designed by a hugely passionate team who cares about the future of creatives in a rapidly changing world: daisie supports creatives work together and discover one another, by sharing original content, and facilitating exchange and networking.

The app is dedicated to filmmakers, writers, readers, listeners & speakers, poets, dancers, singers, chefs, entrepreneurs, developers & architects, for establishing a community that thrives on collaboration, and where creators are credited properly for their work and the roles they had and the impact they made on the overall project.

daisie allows to explore creative work in film, fashion, music, photography, art and literature, and to interact directly with the inspirational people who work in these fields.

daisie is available worldwide on the App Store.

https://www.daisie.com/

Venice International Art Fair 2019 analyzes the relationship between body and space, and the hybridization between identities and cultural/physical/social/urban settings in contemporary time

VENICE ART FAIR 2019 – call for artists is open

Venice International Art Fair will be held in Venice, at THE ROOM Contemporary Art Space and in Palazzo Ca’ Zanardi, from April 11th to May 3rd, 2019.

Venice International Art Fair is a contemporary art fair that presents collective and solo projects by leading and emerging international artists. Founded in 2001 by ITSLIQUID Groupthe 11th edition will represent a forum for direct exchange of ideas and contacts between collectors, artists, photographers, designers and art professionals. It provides artists and exhibitors with the unique opportunity to present their works to an international audience of professionals as curators, gallerists, collectors, editors and publishers who seek to acquire, publish and encourage the best contemporary art talents.

Venice International Art Fair 2019 analyzes the relationship between body and space, and the hybridization between identities and cultural/physical/social/urban settings in contemporary time, through two main sections: LIQUID ROOMS and FUTURE LANDSCAPES.