Digital meets Culture

Amsterdam, 7 June 2016

The SILVER consortium hosts its Final Conference and Workshop, which will be held ahead of the European eHealth Week, on the 7th of June 2016 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

The Conference aims to share the SILVER experience with Pre-Commercial Procurement as an innovative tool for bringing new care technologies to the market. Participants will have an opportunity to hear from both procurers and contractors involved in the project’s Pre-Commercial Procurement exercise. Furthermore, the successful robotic solution – the Lean Elderly Assistant (LEA) – will be presented by its designers, Robot Care Systems.

For participants interested in the practicalities of procuring innovation in the fields of robotics and elderly care, the SILVER partners will host an interactive workshop session following the Final Conference. The afternoon session will focus on the lessons learnt while delivering SILVER and give recommendations for future Pre-Commercial Procurement projects.

Both events will be held at the Tobacco Theater (address: Nes 75–87, 1012 KD Amsterdam) and are free of charge. Registrations by the 3rd of June 2016.

For more information about the conference, please visit www.silverpcp.eu/events/silver-end-of-project-conference/.

For more information on the SILVER project, please visit www.silverpcp.eu.

available open access at Springer, the book makes a creative addition to the debates surrounding the cultural heritage domain.

Cultural Heritage in a Changing World – the RICHES book

Developed within the RICHES FP7 research project about the context of change of our society and cultural heritage, the book “Cultural Heritage in a Changing World” addresses several core topics, through essays of important experts, adding to the debates surrounding the cultural heritage domain.

The Book is divided into four interrelated sections: Context of Change; Mediated and Unmediated Heritage; Co-creation and Living Heritage for Social Cohesion; and Identity and Belonging.

The Introduction and the whole editorial process have been curated by RICHES partners Karol Jan Borowiecki (University of Southern Denmark), Neil Forbes (Coventry University) and Antonella Fresa (Promoter SRL).

List of chapters:
Context of Change

Cultures and Technology: An Analysis of Some of the Changes in Progress—Digital, Global and Local Culture, by Mariella Combi
Interdisciplinary Collaborations in the Creation of Digital Dance and Performance: A Critical Examination, by Sarah Whatley and Amalia G. Sabiescu
Sound Archives Accessibility, by Silvia Calamai, Veronique Ginouvès and Pier Marco Bertinetto
Technology and Public Access to Cultural Heritage: The Italian Experience on ICT for Public Historical Archives, by Calogero Guccio, Marco Ferdinando Martorana, Isidoro Mazza and Ilde Rizzo
Copyright, Cultural Heritage and Photography: A Gordian Knot?, by Frederik Truyen and Charlotte Waelde

Mediated and Unmediated Heritage

A Case Study of an Inclusive Museum: The National Archaeological Museum of Cagliari Becomes “Liquid”, by Anna Maria Marras, Maria Gerolama Messina, Donatella Mureddu and Elena Romoli
The Museum as Information Space: Metadata and Documentation, by Trilce Navarrete and John Mackenzie Owen
The Museum of Gamers: Unmediated Cultural Heritage Through Gaming, by Serdar Aydin and Marc Aurel Schnabel

Co-creation and Living Heritage for Social Cohesion

Change of Museums by Change of Perspective: Reflecting Experiences of Museum Development in the Context of “EuroVision—Museums Exhibiting Europe” (EU Culture Programme), by Susanne Schilling
Technologies Lead to Adaptability and Lifelong Engagement with Culture Throughout the Cloud, by Silvia de los Rios Perez, Maria Fernanda Cabrera-Umpierrez and Maria Teresa Arredondo
The Place of Urban Cultural Heritage Festivals: The Case of London’s Notting Hill Carnival, by Ernest Taylor and Moya Kneafsey
Tools You Can Trust? Co-design in Community Heritage Work, by Simon Popple and Daniel H. Mutibwa
Crowdsourcing Culture: Challenges to Change, by Dora Constantinidis

Identity

The Spanish Republican Exile: Identity, Belonging and Memory in the Digital World, by Lidia Bocanegra Barbecho and Maurizio Toscano
Growing Up in the ‘Digital’ Age: Chinese Traditional Culture Is Coming Back in Digital Era, by Situ Xiaochun

Further, a chapter abour Riches and the Riches Taxonomy conclude the book.

The Book is available at SPRINGER LINK

On the occasion of a meeting, prof. Karol Jan Borowiecki had the opportunity and the honour of handing the book to the President of the Republic of Poland Andrzej Duda.

Open from May 13th to August 10th 2016 in Gorizia (Italy), the installation Insight brings us closer to the experience of conflict through the symbolic power of art

INSIGHT: multi-sensory art installation by Joshua Cesa dedicated to the experiential perception of the great war

B#SIDE WAR is an artistic and cultural festival of spread art, diffuse in 12 territories of Italy and Slovenia, thanks to artistic exhibitions and installations, performing, talks and conferences, researches and publications, and special events in Toronto (Canada), Kansas City (USA), Canberra (Australia) and London (UK). Designed with the main scope of investigating the heritage that has connected the First World War to our everyday life, B#SIDE WAR project has then been devoted to the analysis of the relationship between the Human Being and the conflicts of the XX Century, as well as to the examination of the kinship between our war past and the vision of the world we nowadays have, through experimental artistic interventions concerning memory and history.

The festival is about to present the main event of its second edition: the installation Insight in Gorizia, a city which is particularly important in the European scene for its past related to the Great War. Today Gorizia is the perfect place to talk about multiculturalism, historical and geographic fractures, and especially about the human experience of those who experienced the ‘war fractures’ of the ‘900.

Gorizia is the place chosen for the site-specific installation made by Josha Cesa: a great artwork of multi-sensory contemporary art, which will be placed directly inside a pedestrian tunnel of 350 meters linking the center of the Italian city with the Slovenian Carso upland.

Insight is a public art, site-specific installation, that winds through a path marked by seven “sensory stations”, that the visitors are invited to experience from side to side of the gallery.

The artwork wants to engage the users through the senses, suggesting an intimate, polyphonic and subjective reflection on what the people directly involved in World War I felt and emphasizing the conflict as a factor that impacts with violence on the experience of life, booming in our past, present, and dragging its rumble into the future. In particular, the installation examines and revises through the media of contemporary light art and sound art, some phenomena reported in the literature and in books and diaries which have followed the outbreak of the conflict: such as the view as illusory instrument and the hearing as an atavistic tool for salvation.

The Bombi gallery is the perfect place to host the installation, due to its particular shape, capable of amplifying with its perspective, atmospheric temperature, light and eco, the aesthetic perceptions desired by the author Joshua Cesa, who built it through the languages of forms, materials and sounds.

The alteration of the usual perspective of the gallery turns into a path of ‘auditory impressions’: the walk through the entire length of the gallery, and stop at every “sensory station”, becomes a memory ritual of great beauty and symbolic power.

The installation will be freely available 24 hours/24 at the pedestrian tunnel Bombi of Gorizia from 13 May to 10 August 2016. The installation by Joshua Cesa has been freely adapted from ‘The Human Body Memories’, the literary research project by Tancredi Artico. Sounds by Alessio Sorato and Lorena Cantarut.

Info and contacts: www.iodeposito.org | www.facebook/iodeposito | +39 348 7768935

Coventry (UK), 20th May 2016

Body^Space^Object^Memory^Identity – Symposium

Image- Liporello: The Speakers and the Listeners by Jane Ball. Taken by Rob Meredith. BSO Symposium 2015

Organised by Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) and researchers in the School of Art and Design

Following on from last year’s Memory ^ sentiment ^ body ^ space ^ object, this year’s event builds on the collaboration between the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) and researchers in the School of Art and Design, and invites contributions from scholars and practitioners from across the arts and humanities. This one-day symposium addressed how performers, artists and designers suggest the relationship of individuals to their surroundings.

Rituals of the everyday, of memory, of making things special, and of moving through space and leaving traces are all important factors in being human and developing a sense of self. Many artists, designers and performers have considered these aspects, and it is how these have been addressed that the symposium will explore.
Keynote Speakers

We are pleased to be joined by Gill Perry and Jonathan Burrows an Artist Researcher at C-DaRE as our two keynote speakers for the day.

Schedule

To view the full schedule for the day Click here (may be subject to change)
Click here for Information about the presenters and their presentations.

Poznań, 6-7 October 2016

DATeCH 2016 Conference @ Digitisation Days

The Digitisation Days aim to present an up-to-date vision of the most recent advances in technology for the digitisation of text, to showcase successful experiences in their application and to explore the challenges for the near future of digitisation.

The event comprises:

The DATeCH conference (Digital Access to Textual Cultural Heritage) where the latest and future technologies for the digitisation of historical text will be presented and discussed.
A demonstration day where the most advanced technology for digitisation will be showcased.
Panel discussions on digitisation policies, intellectual property rights and other hot topics in the digitisation domain.

The digitisation days will take place in Poznań, on October 6-7, 2016 and it is organised by the Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center, in collaboration with the Impact Centre of Competence.

The DATeCH international conference brings together researchers and practitioners looking for innovative approaches for the creation, transformation and exploitation of historical documents in digital form.

The conference aims to foster interdisciplinary work and linking together participants engaged in the following areas:

Text digitization and OCR
Digital humanities
Image and document analysis
Digital libraries and library science
Applied computational linguistics
Crowdsourcing
Interfaces and human-computer interaction

Authors are invited to submit papers related to the Topics of Interest for the DATeCH 2016 Conference.

Information how to submit a paper can be found here.

Deadline for submission: 30 May 2016.

Brussels, 13 May 2016

Show & Tell & Touch: Digital Culture and Education

Contemporary education, formal classrooms, museum educational programmes, lifelong learning are all increasingly embracing ‘the digital’. As more and more arts and culture artefacts become available in this digital space, it was only a matter of time before the two worlds, heritage and education, would find each other. But have they really?

final roundtable at the workshop

Show & Tell & Touch: Digital Culture and Education is the second workshop organized by E-Space on education, and aims to reflect on how digital cultural content may be creatively re-used in an educational setting. This interactive and involved re-use not only improve the quality of education but engages younger audiences in a way more insync with their daily lives. Premiere speakers from around Europe discussed first class examples of digital culture education in practice, looked at current trends in the field as well as (European) politics and set the scene for facilitating reuse.

[Show as slideshow]

Speakers included: Barbara Dierickx / PACKED vzw; Elina Jokisalo / European Schoolnet; Antonella Fresa / Promoter SRL; Hildegarde Van Genechten / FARO; Alain Thillay / French Ministry of Education; Stefano Caneva / Wikimedia IT-BE; Fred Truyen / KU Leuven; Milena Popova / Europeana; Lisette Kalshoven / Kennisland; and the Europeana Space Pilot and Demonstrators coordinators

This event was held at the Future Classroom Lab, an inspirational learning environment in Brussels, challenging visitors to rethink the role of pedagogy, technology and design in their classrooms. The educational demonstrators that have been created in the EuropeanaSpace project were nicely showcased live in this experimental setting.

More information on the programme HERE

Videos recording of the event are also available.

The Europeana Space project looks at how digital cultural heritage coming from Europeana amongst other sources, may be reused in different contexts. With the creation of a MOOC, five educational demonstrators and six pilot actions with an educational dimension, there is a lot to show. Find more information on this particular field of interest on the dedicated Europeana Space education mini website: www.europeana-space.eu/education.

Girona (Spain), 16 - 18 November 2016;

IMAGE AND RESEARCH 14th International Conference

The Centre for Image Research and Diffusion (CRDI) of the Girona City Council and the Association of Archivists of Catalonia, with the support of the Department of Culture of the Generalitat of Catalonia – Sub-Directorate General of Archives, and the Spanish Ministry of Culture – Sub Directorate-General of State Archives, the promotion of the International Council on Archives (CIA/ICA) and the collaboration of Digital Meets Culture, Michael Culture Association, Photographic Studies Institute of Catalonia (IEFC), Sindicat de la Imatge UPIFC and ANABAD, are calling the 14th Image and Research International Conference, which will be held in the Palau de Congressos de Girona from 17th to 18th of November.

Girona is one of the cities with the most personality in Catalonia. Wandering Girona’s ancient streets is a continuous journey of discovery around its hidden corners, both large and small.

Previously, on 16th, four workshops related to the areas of interest of the Conference will be organized.

A very rich programme of Workshops, keynote conferences, presentations and roundtables completes this event, one of the most popular and appreciated on the international stage.

Download the full programme (PDF, 2,5 Mb)

Event website and registration (deadline: 26 October 2016) at: http://www.girona.cat/sgdap/cat/jornades_properes-ENG.php

Digital Meets Culture is Media Partner of the International Conference and will follow the event with a full coverage.

During the event, the PREFORMA project will organise a Workshop (on 16th November) called “PREFORMA – A tool to guarantee the preservation of digital cultural heritage” to present its results and the challenges that are still to be addressed. Magnus Geber (Principal Administrative Officer at the Information and Preservation Department at the National Archives of Sweden) and Antonella Fresa (General Manager and Administrator of company Promoter srl) as representatives of the project will chair the Workshop.

The International Consortium for Photographic Heritage (Photoconsortium), formally established on 2014 after the end of the Europeana Photography project, will explain the importance to be part of this association in order to be included in a network of top-class partners that are leading the Historical photography sector in Europe, with access to specialized services related to the re-use and enhancement of photographic heritage. Fred Truyen and David Iglésias, respectively President and Officer of the Association, will take a presentation of the International Association on 17th November.

Soon available also on the PREFORMA Open Source Portal

veraPDF 0.14 released with launch of demo website

We are pleased to announce the latest release of veraPDF. Version 0.14 features Transparency and Unicode character map validation in PDF/A-2 levels B and U. Other highlights include:

Conformance checker:

added all transparency-related validation rules in PDF/A-2 and PDF/A-3
added full Level U support in PDF/A-2 and PDF/A-3
code refactoring to synchronize GUI, API and CLI interfaces
PDF/A-1B fix: check both Tiling patterns used as different fill and stroke colour spaces in the same painting operations
added initial versions of PDF/A-2U, PDF/A-2A, PDF/A-3U, PDF/A-3A validation profiles. We now have initial validation for all PDF/A flavours.

Test corpus:

added a further 65 atomic test files for PDF/A-2 specific requirements

Infrastructure:

a demo of the REST interface is available at http://demo.verapdf.org

Download veraPDF 0.14:

http://downloads.verapdf.org/rel/verapdf-installer.zip

Release notes:

https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/releases/tag/v0.14.2

This is the first release of the final design phase which began on 19 April following the PREFORMA Project EC review at the Open Source Workshop.

veraPDF is building the definitive, open source PDF/A validator. The project benefits from a high level of development resource and PDF/A expertise. Please support our efforts by downloading and testing the software. If you encounter problems, or wish to suggest improvements, please add them to the project’s GitHub issue tracker. You can expect a speedy response. Your feedback is very important, it helps to improve the software.

Keep up to date with the latest developments of veraPDF by subscribing to the veraPDF consortium’s newsletter.

About veraPDF

Led by the Open Preservation Foundation and the PDF Association, the veraPDF consortium is developing the definitive open source, file-format validator for all parts and conformance levels of ISO 19005 (PDF/A). The software is designed to meet the needs of memory institutions responsible for preserving digital content for the long term.

The veraPDF consortium is funded by the PREFORMA project. PREFORMA (PREservation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives) is a Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) project co-funded by the European Commission under its FP7-ICT Programme.

Management Centre, Bangor University, Wales, 9-10 June 2016

Procurement Week 2016: Bootcamp

Procurement Week is a bi-annual, international conference, that aims to explore the many facets of Public Procurement such as Public Tendering, Business Development, Procurement Law and International Trade.

During this conference, presentations will be given by leading procurement practitioners, lawyers, economists, innovators, strategists and thinkers.

Procurement Week continues to grow in popularity, with in excess of 850 attendees last year from over 40 countries.

‘Procurement Week 2016: Bootcamp‘, is an event that explores the Modernisation, Flexibility, and Simplification of the EU Procurement Directives and will be held at Bangor University on the 9th and 10th June. Topics to be discussed at Procurement Week 2016, by leading local, national and international experts, will include:

Day 1, 9th June 2016

Modernisation, Flexibility & Simplification of the EU Procurement Directives
Safe Joint Procurement
Contract Modifications
Alternatives to Litigation
Contractual Ineffectiveness
Procurement & the Courts
Reserving Contracts for NGOs
Collaboration: In house or Horizontal?
Panel Discussion: The view from other Member States

Day 2, 10th June 2016

Slavery & Procurement
Social Procurement
Modernisation, Flexibility & Simplification of the EU Procurement Directives
Health Procurement
BREXIT – Possible Implications for Procurement
E-Procurement – A Good Idea Gone Bad?
University Procurement
Concessions
Sustainable Procurement
Social Services Procurement

Download here the brochure of the Procurement Week 2016 Bootcamp.

For more information on the Procurement Week 2016 Bootcamp visit http://www.procurementweek.org.uk/PW2016.html.

To register to the Procurement Week 2016 Bootcamp visit http://www.procurementweek.org.uk/bootcampregistration.html.

Brussels, 31 May 2016

Scenario workshop on Open eGovernment Services

How Can the Public Sector Become an Agent of Innovation?

The workshop aims to generate collective insight into public sector innovation for Open eGovernment Services (OGS). It is clear that OGS require a deep change in the machinery of government, but also they act as an incentive for change through for example increased transparency and collaboration. The study has analysed several cases in order to understand the key costs and benefits of OGS. The workshop now aims to analyse in depth the rationale and drivers behind these cases, in order to draw lessons and develop future scenarios.

The event is strategically positioned at the beginning of the third and final phase of the study.

The first phase aimed at defining WHAT are Open eGovernment Services, providing a definition and taxonomy
The second phase aimed at analysing WHY OGS are important, in terms of benefits achieved
The third phase aims to understand HOW this innovation happens and how we can accelerate it with appropriate policy measures

Do you want to share your knowledge and network with stakeholders from across Europe?

Download here a first version of the Agenda.

For more info on the event: http://bit.ly/1RVtgjU