Digital meets Culture

Tallinn, 11-12 October 2017

Following the successful workshops organised in Stockholm, Berlin and Padua, the PREFORMA project invites all the members of the digital preservation community to attend the PREFORMA International Conference – Shaping our future memory standards, which will be held in Tallinn on 11-12 October 2017.

Aim of the event is to highlight the importance of standardisation and file format validation for the long term preservation of digital cultural content, present the open source conformance checkers developed in PREFORMA and look at future challenges and opportunities.

Hosted by the National Library of Estonia, the conference will include: keynote speeches by international experts in digital preservation; live demonstrations of the software; examples and good practices of memory institutions that are integrating the PREFORMA tools in their environments; and panel discussions to reflect on how to sustain and further develop the results of the project.

The event is intended for anyone dealing with digital preservation of images, documents and audiovisual files. This conference is a great opportunity to ask and exchange with international experts, fellow archivists and even Open Source developers about file format questions, issues and challenges we are facing today.

The PREFORMA International Conference will be co-located with the fifth edition of the Networking Session for EC projects in the cultural heritage field, a successful initiative launched in the framework of the RICHES project and continued under the auspices of Europeana Space and PREFORMA.

REGISTER HERE BEFORE 30 SEPTEMBER 2017

Participation in the event is free of charge.

EVENT WEBSITE

http://finalconference.preforma-project.eu/

FURTHER INFORMATION

The event will be held in English.

If you have any questions or need additional information, please contact Claudio Prandoni at prandoni@aedeka.com.

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About PREFORMA

PREFORMA, PREservation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives, is a Pre-Commercial Procurement project started on January 1st, 2014, and co-funded by the European Commission under its FP7-ICT Programme to work on one of the main challenges memory institutions are facing nowadays: the long-term preservation of digital data. The main objective of the project is to give memory institutions full control of the process of the conformity tests of files to be created, migrated and ingested into archives, through the development of a set of tools which enable this process to happen within an iteration that is under full control of the institutions.

veraPDF, Easy Innova and MediaArea are currently working on the development of three open source software licensed conformance checkers aimed for any memory institution (or other organisation with a preservation task) wishing to check conformance with a specific standard. The standards under consideration are PDF/A for electronic documents, uncompressed TIFF for images and FFV1 (lossless video), LPCM (uncompressed audio) in a Matroska (.mkv) container for AV files. In addition, interoperability mechanisms allow the integration of the developed tools into the legacy systems of the memory institutions as well as their extension to new formats. The prototypes of these tools are available to download in the PREFORMA Open Source Portal.

The project seeks to establish a sustainable community that ensures long-term availability of the software, generates useful feedback for those who control it and advances improvement of the standard specifications.

Leiden (The Netherlands), 13-14th June

Archaeology and Architecture in Europeana, workshop by CARARE & Europeana

This two-day workshop is jointly hosted by CARARE and Europeana at the University of Leiden, Faculty of Archaeology. The theme of the workshop is Archaeology and Architecture in Europeana.

The physical remains of Europe’s rich heritage are all around us. The historic houses we live and work in, the places we go to worship, places we visit to explore tombs, earthworks, architectural ruins or monuments to industries past, the museums we visit, the shape of our landscape and the ground beneath our feet.

Digital technologies are widely used to capture the heritage for conservation and research, for analysis, to support learning and tourism, and for enjoyment. This workshop will explore how digital content for the archaeological and architectural heritage can be made available to users of Europeana, experiences and best practices, and potential re-uses of the content for education, tourism, and researchers.

The workshop is free to attend, registration is through Eventbrite HERE.

Preliminary programme

10:30: Registration

Welcome

Session 1: Archaeology and Architecture in Europeana

This session will begin with an overview of archaeology and architecture in Europeana and an introduction to CARARE, followed by case studies of experiences in providing content to Europeana

Session 2: Heritage data

This session will focus on the development of approaches to increase the interoperability of heritage data such as the uses of linked data, historic place names and GI, and its accessibility for research and community geo-portals.

Session 3: Technologies: data management and data quality

This session will focus on technologies for metadata aggregation, tools and services, and applying the FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable).

Session 4: Heritage and users

This session will focus on the uses of archaeology and architecture datasets for education, cultural tourism etc.

The programme will include discussion and practical sessions on making archaeological and architectural datasets available to Europeana’s users.

For more information about the workshop please see:

http://www.carare.eu/events/archaeology-and-architecture-europeana/

International artists have the opportunity to gain an insightful look into and experience the world behind the scenes of the world-renowned art university

Workshops for digital artists at Berlin Summer University of the Arts

The Berlin Summer University of the Arts is home to a multitude of workshops and courses incorporating all disciplines of the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK Berlin): Performing Arts, Fine Arts, Design and Music. The broad spectrum of courses ranges from classical master-classes to experimental workshops and new formats. International artists have the opportunity to gain an insightful look into and experience the world behind the scenes of the world-renowned art university as well as meeting and networking with other artists and expanding individual creative horizons.

Currently there are two upcoming workshops.

Digital Materiality (June 2017)

In this workshop we will analyse digital technologies from their material properties to help grasp what they are, how they are changing us and how we can change them as well. We will explore the ever diversifying, discipline-melting realms of creative digital practices, which may be art, design, propaganda, engineering or all at once.

Digital technologies and processes are increasingly integrated in all aspects of our lives: from ubiquitous all-at-once social media, high frequency trading and smart cities to the instruments we use to make art and express ourselves. They open up new realms of experience and open up questions about who and what we are. In this seminar we will analyze digital technologies from their material properties to help grasp how they work, what they are, how they are changing us and maybe how we can change them. Our crash course will reference thinkers from the ancient physicists through the scientific revolution to today’s quantum physics, from Plato to Marx to contemporary political economy and out into speculative new Materialism and post-history. We will explore the ever diversifying, discipline-melting realms of creative digital practices, which may be art, design, propaganda, engineering, and all at once. We will discuss, research and prepare small presentations for each other, as we attempt to synthesize our understanding in texts, performances and objects.

More info: http://summer-university.udk-berlin.de/?id=227

Stereoscopic Etudes (September 2017)

This course will investigate exemplary strategies of stereo 3D image making as artistic expression. We will realise this by exploring practical excercises of making and spectating.

On the practical part of the artistic use of stereo3D image making:

Stereoscopic image making, especially filmmaking has seen many ups and downs. The recent hype, started in 2009 and now going down again, is slightly different. The digitization of the production eased many challenges and enabled a democratized access to this method. This leads to a growing use of stereo3D in the context of filmmaking, photography and visual art.

Hence stereo3D still counts as infantile and reduced to its „effect“. I think stereo3D offers so many potentials that it will lead to an improved visual vocabulary. But what we know about images doesn’t help very much. Image makers have to start from scratch again.

This course will investigate exemplary strategies of stereo3D image making. We will have a look at contemporary and older stereoscopic works. We will wander around the topic 3D by reading comics and talk about ancient paintings. Finally we will try it on our own in praxis. And we will ask ourselves „What else could be done?“.

More info: http://summer-university.udk-berlin.de/?id=223

Berlin Summer University of the Arts: www.udk-berlin.de/summer-courses

Saint Petersburg (Russia), 22-23 June 2017

EVA 2017 SAINT PETERSBURG: Electronic Imaging & the Visual Arts

Announcement on the International conference EVA 2017 SAINT PETERSBURG: Electronic Imaging & the Visual Arts, which will be held on 22-23 June 2017 at the ITMO University, Lomonosov str., bld. 9. The working language of the conference is English.

The key aim of this Event is to provide a forum for the user, supplier and scientific research communities to meet and exchange experiences, ideas and plans in the wide area of Culture & Technology. Participants receive up to date news on new international arts & information communication technologies (ICT) initiatives as well as on Projects in the visual arts field, in archaeology and history. Working Groups and new Projects are promoted. Scientific and technical demonstrations are presented.

More information: http://evaspb.ifmo.ru/en/theme

The Organizing Committee extended the submission of the abstracts (1 page) or articles (maximum 8 pages) until May 11, 2017. Abstracts or articles should be sent to the official e-mail address of the Conference (evaspbconf@gmail.com).

Instructions and paper template are located at: http://evaspb.ifmo.ru/en/paper-template

The full texts of papers included into the Conference program must be submitted before 31 may 2017. The full texts of papers will be published in the conference proceedings.

For the participation in the Conference please register on the Conference website (http://evaspb.ifmo.ru/en/registration).

To participate in the conference you are required to pay the Participation fee (http://evaspb.ifmo.ru/en/participation):

– 15000 rubles up to 31 May 2017 (course meets 250,00 Euro)

– 18000 rubles since 1 June 2017 (course meets 300,00 Euro) To pay the fee please click the link http://isaudit.ru/confer.html select the conference EVA 2017 SAINT PETERSBURG, and then follow the instructions to make payment.

Participation fee includes:

– Conference Proceedings (will be published in English by the conference opening) and the thumb drive with the materials of the conference in electronic form;

– Coffee-breaks;

– Participation in the gala buffet at the end of the Week of Information Society Technologies;

– Cultural program.

Visa Support Information (http://evaspb.ifmo.ru/en/visa-support-information):

Please note that the preparation of Invitation letter from the ITMO University takes an average from 2 weeks up to one month and that a visa at the Russian Consulate may take about 1 month. To prepare your invitation letter for Russian visa, we need to have pdf or jpg copy of your passport.

Contacts for organizational issues: evaspbconf@gmail.com

Part of the 11th International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR 2017), November 28th – December 1st 2017, Tallinn, Estonia

1st Call for Papers, SPECIAL TRACK on METADATA & SEMANTICS for CULTURAL COLLECTIONS & APPLICATIONS

Submission deadline: July 10th, 2017

Proceedings will be published in Springer CCIS series

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 metadata as tools for the description and dissemination of cultural information, mainly related to its particular resources and use.

The management of the cultural information has to deal with challenges related to (i) metadata modeling, specification, standardization, extraction, evaluation, mapping, integration and effective use, (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 and advanced services to the 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. It is also important to note that in the Semantic Web environment there are many opportunities but many challenges as well, while its’ complete and accurate establishment in Cultural Heritage institutions needs still a long way to go.

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 and standards
Ontologies and knowledge representation for the Cultural Heritage domain
Automated metadata extraction
Cultural Heritage integration
Extraction of semantics, entities, and patterns from Cultural Heritage collections
Collection and item level models and metadata
Linked open data approaches for the Cultural Heritage domain
Composite content-discovery and management of components and interrelationships
Publication, linking and citation of Cultural Heritage information and resources
Large volume content management
3D models-indexing, storage and retrieval approaches
Federation of repositories/data infrastructures
Integration of intra or inter disciplinary heterogeneous resources
Infrastructures for sharing content
Digital Curation workflows and models
Provenance and preservation metadata for Cultural Heritage digital objects
Metadata quality metrics
Case studies

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Authors can submit either full papers (12 pages) or short papers (6 pages). Submitted papers have to follow the LNCS proceedings formatting style and guidelines.

The submitted papers will undergo the same peer review as the submissions for MTSR 2017 and accepted contributions will be published in the MTSR 2017 proceedings (Springer CCIS series). Authors of accepted papers will be asked to register to the Conference and present their work.

Authors of the best papers will be invited to submit extended and revised versions of their papers for possible publication in selected international journals, including the International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies (Inderscience), and Program (Emerald). More information on submission can be found at the MTSR 2017 call for papers web page.

IMPORTANT DATES

June 15th, 2017: Submission deadline

July 25th, 2017: Notification of Acceptance/rejection

August 20th, 2017: Camera-ready papers due

November 28th – December 1st, 2017: Conference at University in Tallinn, Estonia

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, Luxembourg (boudouri@ionio.gr)

More info on the conference: http://www.mtsr-conf.org/

The new release is available to download from the PREFORMA Open Source Portal

DPF Manager v3.2.1 released and available to download

The new version of DPF Manager is now ready to download from the PREFORMA Open Source Portal!

This update solves some bugs and includes some enhancements. This is the list of changes.

Rewriten table in reports section. Now it is much faster and there are no more display errors.
Bugfix related to the internal database when few memory is available for the virtual machine
Show all running tasks from GUI (not only the tasks that started after the start, but also the ones that started before and are still running)
Possibility to run the CLI with the java jar (which allows the user to specify custom virtual machine parameters)
Option -t of the command line interface is now working properly
New –silence and –show-report options for CLI, in order not to display info messages and open the report at the end

We would like to thank you for all the received feedback in the Github issue tracker. Your help is much appreciated!

In this release we have also been working hard on the testing and validation of the platform, and will continue doing so in the next months. A new repository has been created for this purpose, and all the possible TIFF errors have been defined and classified. This repository has been named ground truth and will be used as a tool to validate and assure the correctness of DPF Manager.

now, citizens from around the world can vote online for the Public Choice Award and win a trip to Turku for the Awards Ceremony.

Rode Altarpiece project, co-funded by E-Space project, wins Europa Nostra award!

On the 5th of April, the European Commission and Europa Nostra revealed the winners of the 2017 European Union Prize for Cultural Heritage / Europa Nostra Awards, Europe’s top honour in the heritage field. The 29 laureates from 18 countries are being recognised for their notable achievements in conservation, research, dedicated service, and education, training and awareness-raising. Independent expert juries examined a total of 202 applications, submitted by organisations and individuals from 39 countries across Europe, and chose the winners.

Among the outstanding initiatives awarded this year, the Rode Altarpiece digitization and education project, also co-funded in E-Space, was selected for the category “Research”.

“I congratulate all the winners. Their achievements demonstrate once again how engaged many Europeans are in protecting and safeguarding their cultural heritage. Their projects highlight the significant role of cultural heritage in our lives and our society. Especially today, with Europe facing many big societal challenges, culture is vital in helping us to raise awareness of our common history and values and to foster tolerance, mutual understanding and social inclusion.”said Tibor Navracsics, European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport.

Citizens from around the world can now vote online for the Public Choice Award and rally support for the winning project(s) from their own or another European country. Voters have the chance to win a trip for two to Finland and be a special guest at the Awards Ceremony that will be held in the historic city of Turku on 15 May.

The Rode Altarpiece demonstrator can be accessed from E-Space portal for education.

Enjoy and vote for Rode Altarpiece!

Riga, 15 May 2017

File formats for preservation

The IS&T (Society for Imaging Science and Technology) arranges its conference, Archiving 2017, in Riga (Latvia) 15-18 May. Riksarkivet (the Swedish National Archive) has been invited to the conference to hold a course about file formats for preservation on the 15th of May.

The course will take the form of a workshop with the purpose to concretise the work done in Riksarkivet’s research and development program ArkivE 2.0 — fundamental principles for selection of format — by using the tools developed in the PREFORMA project.

The questions the workshop aims to answer are:

What is meant with “format”?
What makes a format suitable for long time preservation?
What makes a format suitable for long time preservation appropriate in a specific case?
What is the importance of a Conformance Checker?

The workshop is followed up with two additional specialized courses; first on PDF/A (Challenges and Validation Tools), and after that, on TIFF (Archival Recommendations). These two courses are lead by the developers behind veraPDF and DPFManager respectively.

About IS&T

https://www.imaging.org/site/ist

About Archiving 2017

https://www.imaging.org/site/IST/Conferences/Archiving/IST/Conferences/Archiving/Archiving_Home.aspx

Course description

https://www.imaging.org/Site/IST/Conferences/Archiving/Archiving_Home.aspx?WebsiteKey=6d978a6f-475d-46cc-bcf2-7a9e3d5f8f82&hkey=dbb5e9ad-4e55-40aa-bc02-6148ddb16979&Archiving_2017_Content=3#ArchSC04

This residency will provide the opportunity to develop the production of an orginal artwork, a fresh approach to innovation challenges.

Artist or creative? Apply for the VERTIGO STARTS Artistic Residencies Program

VERTIGO is a program which organizes 45 artistic residencies over a 3-year period in order to create new synergies between artistic communities, cultural institutions and innovation stakeholders.

Artists accompagned by their producer choose the R&D ICT-Project they want to collaborate on from a list of available projects.

This residency will provide the opportunity to develop the production of an original artwork, a fresh approach to innovation challenges.

Artists, the European program lets you:

> COLLABORATE on an ICT R&D project
> DESIGN original prototypes
> OBTAIN support for commissioned works
> BENEFIT from the exposure of a unique cultural network

DEADLINE FOR APPLICATION: 22nd May 2017 h.10.00 am

MORE INFO AND APPLICATION: http://vertigo.starts.eu/residencies-program/

The VERTIGO STARTS Artistic Residencies Program organises collaborations between artists and research and development projects in the field of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). VERTIGO is funded under the H2020 European STARTS initiative, innovation at the nexus of Science Technology, and the ARTS. STARTS promotes the arts as catalysts for efficient conversion of science and technology knowledge into products, services, and processes. To achieve this objective, VERTIGO is organizing and funding artist residencies within ICT R&D projects.

The program is organised in 3 yearly open calls for proposals which will be selected by an international jury. The selected artists will contribute to the innovative aspects of ICT R&D projects’ research by bringing original perspectives through artistic practices. Those practices should naturally lead to an original artwork based on the project technology featuring novel use-cases with a high potential for innovation. VERTIGO will also act as a platform to showcase produced works to the public and actors of innovation.

Montreal, Canada, 7th August 2017 / deadline for submission: 31st May 2017

Workshop on Computer Vision in Digital Humanities @DH2017- Call for Abstracts

*Call for Abstracts* / Computer Vision in Digital Humanities

3rd Workshop on AVinDH, to be held at the Digital Humanities Conference DH2017, Montreal, Canada

Date: 7 August 2017

Deadline for Abstracts: 31 May 2017

url: https://avindhsig.wordpress.com/workshop-2017-montreal/call-for-abstract/

*Workshop Overview*

This full-day workshop will start with a keynote address by Lindsay King & Peter Leonard (Yale University) on “Processing Pixels: Towards Visual Culture Computation”.

This keynote will be followed by:

Paper presentations based around three themes: 1) Results or ongoing work and research in which computer vision was applied and what opportunities and challenges were faced. 2) How can cooperation between Humanities researchers and computer vision experts be improved so both can benefit of each other’s expertise? 3) What kind of large publicly available annotated datasets are of use for Digital Humanities researchers?

A hands-on session in which participants will be able to experiment with open source Computer Vision tools. This session will be led by Benoit Seguin of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, (EPFL).

Lightning Talks allowing participants to share their ideas, projects or ongoing work in a short presentation of two minutes. Registration for this session will take place during the workshop so no submission is needed for part of the workshop.

*Submission Details*

The workshop organisers invite abstracts for paper presentation (max 500 words) that deal with one or more of the aforementioned themes. To submit an abstract, please send a docx or pdf file to martijn.kleppe@kb.nl before May 31 2017. Accepted abstracts will be published on the website of the AVinDH Special Interest Group (https://avindhsig.wordpress.com/ )

*Important Dates*

Deadline: 31 May 23:59 2017

Date for notification: 15 June 2017

Workshop: Monday 7 August 2017