Digital meets Culture

Technical Coordinator Antonella Fresa delivered 3 inspiring minutes to AGM audience about creative reuse of digital cultural heritage

E-Space Ignite Talk at Europeana AGM 2016 melts snow in Riga

The Europeana Network Association Annual General Meeting (AGM) is an annual key event for Europeana and its network. It provides the opportunity for Europeana and its partners for all to share, discuss and develop specific areas of mutual interest.

This year, at AGM2016 in Riga, E-Space was one of the protagonists with an Ignite Talk, that is a quick, inspiring and exciting short presentation of 3 minutes, focused on the project core action for creative reuse of digital cultural heritage.

Technical Coordinator Antonella delivered the talk as a combination of few slides (PDF available for download, 270 Kb) and a trailer video of the 6 E-Space pilots:

Many partners of the project also were in Riga, and the meeting was a great occasion of networking and dissemination, also in sight of the third international conference of the project taking place in Berlin on 21-22 November.

[Show as slideshow]

Objective of the action, which includes an open challenge, is to eventually have digital versions of the handwritten testimonies from WW1’s home and battle fronts in 22 languages

Europeana launches crowd source campaign to decipher unique First World War testimonies

Europeana launches Transcribe Europeana 1914-1918 — an online crowdsourcing campaign to unlock important testimonies of the First World War for future generations by transcribing handwritten texts that are otherwise difficult to read and cannot be searched or translated automatically online.

Transcribe Europeana 1914-1918 will run as an ongoing online challenge — a ‘Transcribathon’ — to encourage members of the public to transcribe digital versions of the unique letters and diaries of those who experienced the First World War and that can be found at Europeana 1914-1918. The challenge will run until 2018, the centenary of the end of WW1.

Nine teams from across Europe met in Riga AGM to launch the competition with a special 48-hour challenge event judged by an international jury. Prizes were awarded at the Latvian National Library to winning teams from France and the University of Latvia.

Members of the public are invited to take up the challenge at www.transcribathon.eu with digital versions of the handwritten testimonies from WW1’s home and battle fronts in 22 languages. Participants add their own transcriptions, geo-tags and other annotations to texts, enabling greater understanding and access to these original historical scripts. The website is free to use and open to all.

A simple e-tutorial teaches participants how to decipher old and difficult handwriting in various languages with an easy-to-use online transcription tool. It is hoped the challenge and the tool will help build an international community of contributors of all ages and nationalities who can share their knowledge and experience.

The Transcribathon is ‘run’ by accumulating virtual ‘miles’ with every word transcribed. Each participant works on the transcription of selected documents, for example a diary or a letter, in a specific language. A ‘Transcribometer’ charts their progress as they compete against others to move up the transcribers league.

People can take part individually from home or as teams at special Transcribathon events where a jury awards points for quality, quantity and presentation of transcriptions. All future event details will be announced on www.transcribathon.eu and www.europeana1914-1918. The first planned events are for Romania and Italy in the first half of 2017.

the 7 teams are invited to the global event REMIX SUmmit

E-Space Incubated projects go to London

We’re delighted to announce that the 7 winning teams from E-Space Incubation process will be attending the supercool REMIX Summit in London (January 2017), which will give them a great opportunity to network with creative leaders, institutions, brands, potential collaborators and investors.

REMIX explores the intersection of culture, technology and entrepreneurship bringing together thought-leaders from across industries to tackle the big ideas shaping the future of culture, creative cities and creative entrepreneurship. A video of the 2015 edition:

REMIX Summits London 2015 from REMIX Summit on Vimeo.

Discover the 7 Incubated projects from E-Space: We Make Known, NOUS, Vivl.io, Picasso’s cat, NORA, PostArt, Storypix.
http://www.europeana-space.eu/e-space-incubated-projects/

More info and registration REMIX Summit: http://www.remixsummits.com/ldn

London (UK), 18-19 January 2017

REMIX London summit on Culture, Technology and Entrepreneurship

REMIX EXPLORES THE INTERSECTION BETWEEN CULTURE, TECHNOLOGY AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP.

REMIX Global Summits bring together pioneers from different industries to explore the future of culture, creative cities and the creative economy. They are a forum where creative leaders from different sectors can exchange insights, ideas and work together towards common goals, and they are attended by leading global cultural institutions, creative businesses, startups, policy makers and media.

The 2017 London edition is scheduled for 18-19 January 2017 and hosted at Google HQ and Ace Hotel London Shoreditch.
The first group of speakers for 2017 is announced including:

– Alex Beard MBE – CEO, Royal Opera House
– Kevin Lim – Assistant Director, Corporate & Strategic Development, National Gallery Singapore
– Wayne Garvie – Chief Creative Officer, Sony Pictures Television
– Beatie Wolfe
– Alice Black – Deputy Director, Design Museum
– Gavin Poole – CEO, Here East
– Toby Coffey – Head of Digital Development, National Theatre
– Dave Patten – Head of New Media, Science Museum
– Rohan Silva – Co-Founder, Second Home
– Claire Cockerton – CEO, Entiq
– Lisa Westcott Wilkins – Founder, DigVentures
– Sam Bompass – Founder, Bompass & Parr
– John Cassy – Founder & MD, Canon Street

With many more still to be announced.
REMIX London is part of a series of international summits in leading creative capitals including NYC, Dubai & Sydney supported by global partners including Google, Bloomberg, Mindshare and Bridgeman Images.

More info and registration (early bird registration until 16 December): http://www.remixsummits.com/ldn

Opportunities for networking and partnerships at Hola Cloud great event in Madrid

SME Event: Face2face Meetings and Clinics at CF2016

Cloud Forward 2016 conference on the future of cloud computing offered to SMEs, projects, researchers and institutions the opportunity to talk to other companies or institutions about new opportunities for collaboration and innovative R&D ideas. These meetings were be organised both as open face2face meetings and as pre-scheduled clinic sessions. The Conference took place in Madrid in October 2016.

A technology scouting report was prepared to describe the main scientific and technological trends in the areas of Software, Services and Cloud Computing together with the most active experts / projects / organisations in each of the selected areas. This helped interested participants to identify whom to meet at CF2016 accoridng to the topics they are interested in, either for bilateral collaboration or with the purpose to explore the possibility to participate in future H2020 proposals together.

The booklet is available for Download here.

Open spaces were be available for SMEs and researchers in projects, institutions, industry to be able to meet and chat freely.

Also, few clinic sessions, pre-scheduled, were dedicated to different themes and coordinated by an expert.

Clinic 1. FitSM: Lightweight IT Service Management
Coordinated by Michel Drescher, Cloud Consult Ltd.

IT Service Management has a long and honourable history. Over the last decade, however, Cloud Computing has taken the IT landscape by storm, disrupting many business models that were thought being axiomatic beyond doubt. Awash with a deluge of new ideas and services, models of service delivery, and challenged by the “new kids on the block”, established IT Service Management is often seen as proliferated, leaving the cause choked to death through perfection. FitSM addresses this situation by pruning back IT Service Management to a concise yet complete set of procedures, roles and artefacts by creating a cohesive combination of existing ITSM best practices and standards.

Clinic 2. Customer Experience: Business sustainability with ethics
Coordinated by Michel Drescher, Cloud Consult Ltd.

Customer Experience (CX) is a relatively new movement in the private sector, originating mainly from the anglo-saxon domain. In its broadest and most neutral definition, CX covers the relationship between a provider of services or products, and any (potential) customer or client: CX is in essence a business strategy for sustainability, with customer value engineering as the underpinning implementable framework.

Clinic 3. Technology Scouting, Competitive Intelligence and Strategic Foresight
Coordinated by Manuel Noya, Linknovate

Linknovate is a network that connects you with emerging technologies and key players. It aims to bridge the gap between people searching for innovation and people who want to expose their knowledge and technologies. Based on Linknovate.com, HOLA PORTAL is the new discovery engine which provides business intelligence and collaborative research insights over the metadata extracted for >0.5M documents for the area of Cloud Computing alone.

Clinic 4. Innovation Procurement in Horizon 2020
Coordinted by Antonella Fresa, Promoter Srl

Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) and Public Procurement for Innovative Solutions (PPI) are two competition-like methods designed to steer the development of innovative solutions towards concrete public and private sector needs. These solutions are developed by external suppliers that are awarded a contract through a phased open procurement process. In the last years, the PCP and PPI instruments are becoming more and more popular and the European Union increased support for groups of procurers working together on joint PCPs and PPIs under Horizon 2020.

Citizens engagement aims to bridge the gap between science and society

The Roadmap for Citizen Science @ Festival della Scienza – Genoa, 3 November 2016

As part of the “Festival della Scienza”, a very important and wide event taking place from October 27 to November 6 at Genoa (Italy), CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES project has been selected to discuss about the Citizens engagement and the results of its studies into a session devoted to the Open Science.

Antonella Fresa, Promoter‘s Director and CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES Technical Coordinator, represented the European Consortium who worked around the EC’s project.

The venue of the meeting was in the premises of the Regione Liguria – Sala Trasparenza.

The event, in italian language, interested a wide number of experts from different areas of interest. Starting from different experiences and expertise but interested to dibate on how citizens may be involved in the reserch processes.

Antonella Fresa, presenting the results of the CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES’s EU project, reflected about the necessity to engage the Citizens in the research on cultural heritage and humanities (also considering new creative approaches).

Abstract

The term Open Science describes how digital technologies, media and networks are changing the way in which research is conducted, shared and disseminated. The scientific community benefits from greater collaboration among researchers supported by new technologies – as well as open to the contributions of the citizens – and it is at the center of scientific debate concepts such as transparency and reproducibility of research results. In particular, the strong demand for open data, as freely and open available for all, highlights the need for adequate supports for the storage and sharing of the data, as well as platforms to make them more accessible. Thus, citizens are invited to make its entry into the “data space”, and to support projects and research playing an active role through citizen science initiatives. Moreover, the citizens, are the recipients of a number of science communication activities, aimed to bridge the gap between science and society. Are you interested to these themes? Would you like to know more about the Open Data and about your possible role as a scientific citizen? Join us and participate to the Open Science Café!

The Workshop has been organised by Elsevier.

A full report of the event (including all the presentations) is available here: http://www.civic-epistemologies.eu/the-roadmap-for-citizen-science-will-be-presented-at-the-festival-della-scienza-genoa-3-november-2016/

See details (in italian) here: http://www.festivalscienza.it/site/home/programma/eventi-per-tipo/conferenze/open-science-cafe.html

the important conference on Cloud Computing from the project Hola Cloud took place in Madrid in October. Proceedings now available!

CLOUD FORWARD 2016: the proceedings

Hosted at the centrally-located Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid from 18 to 20 October 2016, Cloud Forward 2016 Conference brought together researchers and specialists from academia and industry, European R&I projects, SMEs, startups and post-graduate students to present and discuss innovative technologies in the area of distributed computing as well as new technologies beyond CLOUDs, ranging from architectures over methodologies to new applications and services. The conference focused both on research and development efforts in the domain of CLOUDs, and in future scenarios and technologies that exploit CLOUD computing as a utility, such as Internet of Things. Integral to the conference, the work of the clusters of experts and EC projects working on ‘beyond current CLOUD’ topics has been presented.

In addition to the scientific programme, CF2016 hosted an event dedicated to SMEs to investigate innovative technologies, promote business ideas and foster current game-changers arising on the market. The event, organised by Hola Cloud, AppHub, CloudWATCH2 and SLA-Ready, featured innovation and marketing oriented workshops, dedicated informative and training sessions carried out by experts from the research and the industry sectors, interactive live demonstrations of new services, technologies and R&D results, and face to face meetings amongst projects and SMEs, aimed at the development of new collaborations and R&D ideas.

Conference proceedings have been published by Elsevier Science in the open-access Procedia Computer Science and they are now available on the event webpage http://cf2016.holacloud.eu/

London, 30 November - 1 December 2016

Acting on change: new approaches and future practices in digital preservation

Overall topic

Preserving digital objects and ensuring their access, use and reuse over the long-term within a rapidly changing digital environment have become increasing priority for many organisations and sectors in recent decades. The impact of change, be it technological, semantic or cultural, has demanded research to develop solutions that are fit for a range of different preservation environments and practices.

This conference will consider the importance of understanding digital objects in relation to their associated dependencies and context for preservation. During the conference we will look at how modelling might help us to understand the digital object and associated dependencies within its environment, and how this could support decision-making to lessen or countermand the impacts of change. Risk analysis and the use of models will also be explored, as tools that can support practitioners in anticipating the consequences of decisions and policies on digital preservation.

The conference

PERICLES, a FP7 EU funded research project has been developing an approach that addresses both the active life of digital objects and the impact of change on our ability to preserve digital objects and data. The project consortium invites you to join us for this conference and accompanying workshops to discuss the approaches and solutions proposed by PERICLES and like-minded projects and initiatives. The conference aims to acknowledge different perspectives, contexts and practices.

The conference is aimed at those working to develop digital preservation policy, strategy and procedures; establish digital preservation infrastructures and workflows; systems developers, providers and procurers; and those interested in seeing the systems and tools developed that reflect their needs and environment.

The conference will take place on two consecutive days, 30 November and 1 December 2016, with a range of panel discussions and workshops addressing the main topics and themes of the conference.

EVENT WEBSITE: http://pericles-project.eu/page/conference

The event is carried out in association with the DPC Awards 2016, which will take place on the evening of 30 November.

to Go Digital means more than just digitizing cultural objects, it requires to Think Digital.

Out of the Box – Museums Tales

By Ram Shimony, our referent from Israel, and candidate to Europeana Members Council 2016

Launched at 2014, The Israeli Museum Portal was a remarkable milestone in the segment of Digital Culture and Digital Heritage in Israel. Since then similar projects in this field has referred to the portal as a basic standard of visualization and engagement.

The development team of the portal – my team, invested time and efforts to “pour content” into our mission that simply was: “Go Digital”.

We quickly concluded that “Go Digital” is not only Digitizing quantities of objects, improving their visual representation and packing them in a portal or a website.

There is no doubt that “Quantity” and “Quality” are mandatory for decent websites in general and for a comprehensive cultural and educational portal in particular.

But “Go Digital” means more –it requires to “Think Digital”.

“Think digital” means maintaining inter-relations between quantity, quality and a third element: ENGAGEMENT.

In order to become “a work environment” and not only a “nice to have” portal, we have to think not only about WHAT users will be exposed to, but also HOW they are going to use the content.

The challenge is to meet the users’ needs with helpful online features and tools, such as annotation tools, presentation tools, inter-user connectivity, personalization options and built-in online research tools.

These features should perform and be presented in an engaging way, to make the user experience as positive and as pleasant as possible.

As a result, we added functionality to the portal.

One of the most useful features we have added is the “Museums Tales” section – a gallery of short video clips about selected items, artists or topics. We produce these clips in collaboration with the contributing museums, according to three goals in mind:

Enriching the way information was presented to users
Widening the scope of information beyond what is presented in the item page
Offering ready-to-use informative topic summaries for pedagogy.

In order to produce the video clips we formed an internal working group comprising a new-media expert, a graphic and video editor and a content manager. This group worked tightly with relevant curators, producing marvelous clips based on research, content and imagery.

I invite you to enjoy one of our latest clips, featuring the exquisite Roman blue glass vase of Ennion, part of the Glass Collection at The Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv.

Curator and researcher: Henrietta Eliezer-Brunner

DPFManager 3.0 released

We are publishing a new version of the DPF Manager, version 3.0, which is available to download in the PREFORMA Open Source Portal and includes the following set of improvements and changes.

TI/A draft conformance checker available.
Redesigned and enriched the report
Show metadata incoherencies.
Option to edit implementation checkers.
Added filesize policy.
External conformance checkers configuration.
METS report accessible via GUI
Drag and drop to open files and configurations
New metadata fixes to solve metadata inconsistencies and make baseline 6 compliant files

You can view the full list of changes of this new release in the GitHub repository.

Download NOW!

Available for Mac OS X, Linux & Windows.
Don’t forget to send us your feedback to help improving the software!

Join us at the PREFORMA Experience Workshop which is planned in Berlin on 23 November 2016. registration is open at http://experienceworkshop.preforma-project.eu/registration/.