Digital meets Culture

Virtual Multimodal Museum (ViMM project) seeks for experts to join its Advisory Board

Join the Group of Experts for the creation of the EU H2020 Manifesto on Digital Heritage and Virtual Museums

Virtual Multimodal Museum (ViMM – www.vi-mm.eu) is a high-visibility and participative Coordination and Support Action (CSA), funded under the EU Horizon 2020 programme (CULT-COOP-8-2016). ViMM brings together Europe and the world’s leading public and private sector organisations working on Virtual Museums and in the wide sector of Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) to support high quality policy development, decision making and the use of technical advances. The partner consortium (see below) will be supported by an expert Advisory Group in building the ViMM Framework, involving decision-makers and practitioners in defining and resolving issues spread across 7 interlinked Thematic Areas (‘the 7 Ds’): Definitions, Directions, Documentation, Dimensions, Demand, Discovery and Decisions.

Major results will include:

/ A highly interactive and wide-reaching ViMM communication platform which will:

enable focused contributions and discussion by everyone interested
represent excellence in Virtual Museums and DCH
provide a decision-support tool for stakeholders

/ Key events at policy and practitioner/ stakeholder levels and extensive use of the media

/ A clearer, evidence-based view of the impact of Virtual Museums and Digital Cultural Heritage on society and the economy

The final result of the project will be the EU H2020 Manifesto and Roadmap for Action, which will be validated at the final ViMM international conference in 2019.

Please activate the Login option and register on the platform!

Join, follow and like us on: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/virtualmultimodalmuseum
Join us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/vimmuseum

List of consortium partners:

CYPRUS UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY Cyprus / Digital Heritage Research Lab – Coordinator
FOUNDATION FOR RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY HELLAS Greece
7REASONS MEDIEN GMBH Austria
UNIVERSITE DE GENEVE Switzerland
STIFTUNG PREUSSISCHER KULTURBESITZ Germany
UNIVERSIDAD POMPEU FABRA Spain

a project of IATP International Association of Photography and Theory invites artists to collaborate - deadline 21st May 2017

OPEN CALL Ar(t)chaeology: Intersections of photography and archaeology

This Call invites artists who particularly work with photography to respond to the theme of the International Association of Photography and Theory’s first collaborative project entitled Ar(t)chaeology: Intersections of photography and archaeology. The project will run from May to December 2017 and will include regular meetings and a creative process that will result in an exhibition, a parallel one-day seminar, and a visual publication, which will negotiate themes that are considered central to this project.

The project seeks to investigate the relationship between archaeology and contemporary art photography. Cyprus, an island, the identity of which was born out of contested histories and conflicting narratives, can serve as a case study for the examination of the connection between these two seemingly diverse fields of practice. On the one hand, archaeology in Cyprus is usually seen as the meticulous, objectivity-driven, study of objects, artifacts, and material culture, which often uses photography as a tool for purposes of documentation, archiving, and representation. On the other hand, contemporary art photography can be seen as an entirely different practice to archaeological processes of presentation and preservation. Yet, both archaeology and contemporary art photography are connected by a common engagement with ideas beyond the tactile, and with an equally significant – often indirect – fascination with affect.

More specifically, the project wishes to include works that:
•   Explore the role of the artist as archaeologist
•   View the photographic archive as a space of archaeological excavation
•   Address the politics of archaeology (and photography)
•   Involve processes of archaeology and photography
•   Investigate the relationship between museums, archaeology and photography
• Address issues of authenticity, originality, the counterfeit and fictitious in archaeology and photography
•   Approach critically archaeological knowledge and narratives
•   Re-invent archaeological sites of knowledge through photographic practices
•   Offer alternative forms of preserving the past through photography
•   Explore notions of “extend” (space) and “duration” (time) in both archaeology and photography
•   Reflect critically on the intersections of photography, archaeology and ethnography
•   Engage with landscapes and other fabrics of heritage in photographs
•   Explore – and ‘exploit’ – ruins, absences and erasures through photography

Important Deadlines:
Phase I, DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS | Sunday, May 21^st, 2017: Submission of proposals for existing ongoing works or new productions. Proposals need to be a maximum of 300 words and to clearly describe the proposed work, its concept and rationale, and its expected contribution to the general themes of the exhibition. They must also be accompanied by short biographies of participating artist(s) (up to 200 words) and, depending on the project, by visual material and technical specifications. All proposals must be submitted electronically to [IAPT] at: info@photographyandtheory.com. The submitted proposals will be reviewed, and up to 15 proposals will be selected, by an invited Selection Committee based on artistic and conceptual merit. Artists will be notified on the selection by Sunday, June 9^th, 2017. A small budget will be made available to the participants for the realization of their work.

Phase II, COLLABORATION / WORK PREPARATION |From June, 2017 to December, 2017:
Selected artists/photographers will then have six months to finalize their projects and prepare for the exhibition. The process of preparing for the exhibition will be based on a collaborative and dialogic exchange between artists and between artists and members of the selection committee and the exhibition coordinator. For this reason, at least four meetings will be scheduled which selected artists will have to attend. During these meetings, artists will be given the opportunity to exchange ideas, discuss their process and progress and offer their constructive feedback for the completion of all projects.
Download the call (PDF, 78 Kb)

Website: http://photographyandtheory.com/

Rome (Italy), 26-27 June 2017

Education and Museum: Cultural Heritage and Learning

EdMuse project – Education and Museum: Cultural Heritage for science learning is a two-year Strategic Partnership (2015-2017) funded by the EU Programme Erasmus+, Key Action 2 Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices.

The project works for the promotion of initiatives, starting from primary school, for using ICT, open educational and digital resources of cultural heritage for the improvement of science learning. The EdMuseaim is to promote new ways of learning and teaching through innovative methods, using technologies and open digital resources that can be non-formal content for designing the curricula. It also proposes a new approach for the cooperation between schools and museums.

The Sapienza University, coordinator in the Erasmus+ Edmuse project, in cooperation with the Michael Culture Association, organizes an International Conference to disseminate the results of the initiative and to provide a place of discussion on the importance of cultural heritage in learning environment.

DATE AND TIME
Mon, Jun 26, 2017, 8:00 AM – Tue, Jun 27, 2017, 8:00 AM CEST

LOCATION
Sapienza University of Rome
5 Piazzale Aldo Moro 00185 Roma

REGISTRATION

CONFERENCE PROGRAM Available soon!

For any enquiries, please contact edmuse2015 @ gmail.com.

We look forward to seeing you at the conference “Education and Museum: Cultural Heritage and Learning”.

Website: http://www.edmuse.eu

Girona, 27 March 2017

PREFORMA presented at OPATL in Girona

Sònia Oliveras i Artau from Girona City Council, one of the memory institutions participating as procurers in PREFORMA, presented the PREFORMA project to the Permanent Observatory of Archives and Local Televisions (OPATL) in Girona.

Permanent Observatory of Archives and Local Televisions (OPATL) is a collaboration project started in 2008 with its main aim to preserve the local television heritage at the regions of Catalonia and Andorra.

The annual plenary meeting of OPATL took place in Girona the 27th March. In this plenary meeting there were 35 professionals attendees of 18 institutions who manage local audiovisual heritage.

The professionals focused their questions on the presentation of the conformance checker results and on the file format selected.

Artist Chris Cheung Hon Him presents this installation collaborated with NikeLab’s The Vision-Airs project.

VaporScape – interactive soundscape installation that reacts with body data

VaporScape is an interactive soundscape installation collaborated with NikeLab’s The Vision-Airs project, globally launched for celebrating the new VaporMax technology.
The idea behind is about detecting the humidity of the room, temperature on audience’s skin and translate the vaporization rate into the sound modulation. It emphasis the biomechanics process of human body and embodied the generative soundscape self-containing in a vaporized atmosphere.

[Show as slideshow]

Vaporization is about the changing of state, thus turning liquid to vapor where it occurs in our body. We breath; we sweat; heartbeats hit and blood flows. That’s how the internal circulation work and regular the body temperature. The heat evaporates through sweating hence for the result. Our body work like an orchestra, the micro sounds are amazing.

VaporScape is an interactive ambience sound installation that contains 4 layers of sound. The sensors react with the humidity of the room, temperature on audience’s skin and translate the vaporization rate into the sound modulation. It emphasis the biomechanics process of human body and embodied the generative soundscape self-containing in a vaporized atmosphere.

Project link: h0nh1m.com/vaporscape/

the technology and its application will be demonstrated in the important event MW17

MuPop, the Pop-Up Museum exhibition tool created within E-Space goes to Ohio!

The conference MW17: Museums and the Web (this year taking place in Cleveland, Ohio, April 19-22) will feature advanced research and exemplary applications of digital practice for cultural, natural and scientific heritage.

During the conference, a 1-hour demonstration by Brigitte Jansen from the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, will showcase the exhibition tool developed by E-Space project: the Pop-Up Museum (MuPop).

MuPop is a tool that brings digitized cultural objects back into the physical museum space. It lets curators easily build an (interactive) storyline for a local installation in a museum setting, or at other locations.

The idea is that people walk into a room and use their own mobile phone to interact with an exhibition that is displayed on big screens inside the room. The interaction includes (1) content selection (what do you want to see), (2) navigation with a chosen theme/subject, (3) interaction with a specific art-work (4) answering more education / triggering questions in relation to the art-work.

The goal is to engage user participation with cultural collections, by transferring a casual passerby into a museum visitor with our pop-up museum which is interjected into an existing space.

More about MW17: http://mw17.mwconf.org/

More about MuPop: http://www.europeana-space.eu/pop-up-museum/

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

DPF Manager v3.2 released and available to download

DPF Manager has been updated to version 3.2.

This new version includes several new features, improvements and some bug fixes.

New Features and improvements

Built installers for 32 and 64 bit architectures in both Windows and Linux
Save running task total time in report
New policy check: long edge check
Improved reports section, showing PDF reports stats, and browse report folder
Copiable text in report tooltips
More complete PDF reports
Clarified policies texts

Fixes

Filenames with non-standard characters
TIFF file structure IFD index bug
Wrong character encoding in metadata containers
Report not generated in some TIFF cases

Many of these new features and bug fixes have been reported in the Github issue tracker. Don’t hesitate to use it for any comment and suggestions!

The Hague (Netherlands), 1 May 2017

Seminar Linked Data in Research and Cultural Heritage

DANS seminar on May 1, 12.00-17.30h. Meet people at the forefront of new developments in creating, keeping, and using Linked Data.

Hear more about nanopublications, self-publishing of scholarly papers, image interoperability and FAIR principles. See how Linked Data can be kept decentrally, and be subjected to distributed search.

This seminar is intended for people who are already familiar with the core concepts of linked data and associated technologies. If you are involved in current or upcoming projects that produce or consume linked data, this is a good opportunity to zoom in.

Preliminary program

12:00-12:10 Welcome – Peter Doorn

12:10-14:00 Session 1

Ruben Verborgh, Universiteit Gent: Decentralizing queries at Web scale
Tobias Kuhn, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: Nanopublications and Decentralized Publishing
Sarven Capadisli, University Bonn: Linked Research
Michel Dumontier, Universiteit Maastricht: FAIR principles and metrics for evaluation

14:00-14:25 Discussion, moderated by Martijn Kleppe

14:25-14:45 Break

14:45-16:30 Session 2

Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory & DANS: A Linked Data Archive approach
Valentine Charles and Nuno Freire, Europeana: New approaches for data acquisition at Europeana: IIIF, Sitemaps and Schema.org
Enno Meijers, KB: A distributed network of digital heritage information
Albert Meroño Peñuela, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: Repeatable Semantic Queries for the Linked Data Agnostic

16:30-17:00 Discussion, moderated by Martijn Kleppe

17:00-17:30 Drinks

More information and registration: https://dans.knaw.nl/nl/actueel/agenda/seminar-linked-data-in-research-and-cultural-heritage

At the final review in Brussels the project was awarded with the highest evaluation! We are so proud!

E-Space is “Excellent”!

Dear followers of E-Space project,

I am very pleased to tell you that the final project review went very well and we have been awarded an ‘excellent’ for the project. Moreover, the reviewers described the project as ‘exceeding expectations’. This is a wonderful outcome and reflects the very hard work that all of you have contributed to the project. So this is by way of saying a warm ‘thank you’ to you all who followed and participated to the success of this project.

Although the funding period is over and the project is now at an end, there are expectations that we will continue to fly the flag for E-Space with additional work on the E-Space Portal, MuPoP and other activities, including the MOOC, that can continue to demonstrate the success and future impact of E-Space, so this is not really an end and I am certain that we will be connecting again.

Sarah Whatley, Coventry University, project coordinator

FOLLOW E-SPACE AND JOIN OUR BPN:

The E-Space Portal: http://espaceportal.eu/

The project website, giving access to all the knowledge produced by E-Space and to the tools developed by the Pilots: http://www.europeana-space.eu/

The E-Space for Education miniportal: http://www.europeana-space.eu/education/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/EuropeanaSpace

PREFORMA Hands-on Sessions

Now that the PREFORMA prototypes are complete and functionally stable, the PREFORMA project is organising a series of hands-on session and training seminars to explain to the participants what does conformance checking mean, why is file format validation so important in long-term digital preservation, how to create their own policy profiles and how to download, install, configure and use the conformance checker to analyse their files.

These workshops/seminars invite archivists/conservators/librarians to bring their files and analyse them with the PREFORMA tools. At the end of the workshop, they should be able to understand which are the main issues related to digital preservation and file formats validation at many memory institutions, check whether their files conform to the specifications of the standards, and learn how to create a policy profile that allows them to check if their files are compliant with the acceptance criteria for their digital repository.

The first of such events has been organised on 10 March 2017 in Padua (Italy) in combination with the Innovation Workshop. The event was very successful and brought together more that 20 librarians with technical knowledge and IT staff dealing with long-term preservation from the universities of Padua, Venice Ca’ Foscari and IUAV.

Other sessions are being organised between April and October 2017 in several European countries:

Barcelona (Spain), 10 May 2017 (for librarians) and June 2017 (for archivists), focusing on TIFF
Stockholm (Sweden), 29 May 2017, focusing on PDF/A
Quedlinburg (Germany), 29 May 2017, focusing on TIFF
Amsterdam (The Netherlands), 30 May 2017 in the framework of The Reel Thing XL, focusing on AV
Brussels (Belgium), September 2017, focusing on PDF/A and TIFF
Ghent (Belgium), September 2017, focusing on AV
Tallinn (Estonia), 11-12 October 2017 in the framework of the PREFORMA Final Conference, focusing on all media types