Digital meets Culture

Research into the use of digital technologies in cultural institutions in England

NESTA report on how digital technology change arts and cultural institutions

This 2015 report provides analysis on the period 2013-2015, giving a detailed sense of how the picture is changing for arts and cultural organisations. It is based on a survey taken by over 900 research participants in UK.

This year’s report shows that while the positive impact of technology on organisations remains high, there is a gap between the ambition of arts and cultural organisations in relation to digital technology and their ability to execute on those ambitions.

The report also outlines that experimental organisations and those that ascribe the highest levels of importance to digital technology are more likely to experience high levels of impact from these areas of work.

As outcomes of the research, a series of thematic factsheets is available together with the online portal providing access to all the data of the period under examination in the report.

Download the report HERE

Thursday 11 February 16:00 CET

Software benchmarking in digital preservation

As the digital preservation community is increasingly deploying tools into productive environments, the need to systematically evaluate and share evidence about the quality of these tools has become a pressing need. At the Benchmarking Forum at IPRES 2015, researchers, community organizations and practitioners discussed opportunities and challenges in adopting software benchmarking as a systematic tool for evaluating digital preservation tools. Outcomes include an initial set of benchmark specifications for targeted scenarios elaborated jointly during the workshop, and a set of concrete collaborative actions to take place in 2016.

This webinar will widen the conversation to include those who were unable to attend IPRES, provide a summary of key concepts, but most importantly, provide an opportunity to join efforts with BenchmarkDP, OPF and the PREFORMA Project to establish an initial set of high-interest scenarios for benchmarking and identify opportunities for the community for future collaboration.

After establishing a common ground in software benchmarking several participants will present specific benchmark scenarios and report on the achievements since the IPRES workshop. Presentations include the following:

Christoph Becker, Kresimir Duretec, Artur Kulmukhametov, Andreas Rauber will provide concise summaries of key concepts of benchmarking and example scenarios resulting from recent work in the BenchmarkDP project;
Bengt Neiss will provide a use case of the Preforma project to illustrate how benchmarking is applied in a format validation scenario; and
Carl Wilson, Technical Lead of the OPF, will talk about the OPF’s testing platform.

The webinar will conclude with an interactive session to continue and broaden the discussion initiated at the Benchmarking Forum at IPRES 2015.

The following recent publications provide a background to this webinar

Duretec K, Kulmukhametov A, Rauber A, Becker C. Benchmarks for Digital Preservation tools. In: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation (IPRES), Chapel Hill, NC, USA, 2015. available from: http://ifs.tuwien.ac.at/~duretec/publications/benchmarks_for_digital_preservation.pdf
Becker C, Duretec K, Kulmukhametov A, Rauber A. The Benchmarking Forum at IPRES 2015. DLib Magazine Volume 22, Issue ½, 2016. Available from: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january16/becker/01becker.html

Registration

We will use Google Hangouts for this webinar. After registering, we will send the Hangout link to participants. It will also be recorded.

Girona and Brussels, January 2016

PREFORMA visits the three suppliers

Between 20 and 30 January 2016, a team of representatives of the PREFORMA project, coordinated by Peter Pharow of Fraunhofer IDMT, visited the three consortia that are currently working in the prototyping phase: veraPDF, Easy Innova and MediaArea.net.

Aim of the visits is to better know each other, get in a closer touch with the suppliers, see the people working in their own environment, analyse the current status of the three open source projects and start future possible collaborations.

Peter Pharow, Börje Justrell, Antonella Fresa, Benjamin Yousefi and Sònia Oliveras i Artau composed the PREFORMA delegation who participated in the first visit, which was planned at Easy Innova premises in Girona on 20-21 January 2016. The team discussed with members of Easy Innova and of the University of Basel several topics, among which the status of DPF Manager, the evolving functionalities, the process of community building, and the status of standardization activities.

In addition, a representative from the National Technical University of Athens (Marios Phiniketos) joined the meeting to plan the integration of DPF Manager into the Technical Space, a web based application for the development of applications and services based on digital cultural content developed in the framework of the Europeana Space project.

The other two visits (to veraPDF and MediaArea.net) took place on 28 and 29 January in Brussels, in the occasion of the FOSDEM Conference.

The team discussed with members of veraPDF Consortium and of MediaArea.net several topics, among which: status of the conformance checkers; capabilities for software; evolving functionalities including interoperability and API; usability and user requirements, user groups, scenarios; testing for quality assurance and accuracy; code transparency, media files, and more; achieving reference implementation; awareness of what is still missing; status and progress in format specifications; reporting formats; scalability and optimization for large file sets; collaboration with other projects (such as for the integration of MediaConch with Archivematica) and with the open source community; status of standardization activities.

In addition, the PREFORMA members could drop in on the PDF/A Technical Working Group meeting to gain an insight of how it works.

a unique cultural institution that is both a museum and also a center for research and production center.

ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe

The Center for Art and Media ZKM in Karlsruhe extends the original duties of a museum, which it was since 1989 with the mission to perpetuate classical arts in the digital age, becoming a cultural institution unique throughout the world.

It is a house for all media and genre, a house for both spatial arts, such as painting, photography, and sculpture as well as time-based arts, such as film, video, media art, music, dance, theater, and performance.

Digital culture, digital art, digital heritage

By combining archive and collections, exhibitions and events, research and production, the ZKM is able to aptly illustrate art’s development in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; no least due to the symposia and other platforms for theoretical discourse between philosophy, science, art, politics, and the economy that accompany its collection, exhibition, and research activities. The final aim of ZKM is to share knowledge and to improve our understanding of the world, being both a museum and also a center for research and production center.

In facts it was the first museum to exhibit and collect art spanning all media and genres, from painting through to App Art, sculpture to performance, installation to dance, photography through to video, film to computer art, and acousmatic music through to Sound Art. The center remains, to date, the only cultural center to systematically address the interlinking of research and production, exhibitions and events, and archive and collection.   Through multiple of exhibitions and events held throughout the year, the ZKM provides insights into the range of projects developed at the ZKM, cultural history, and also cutting-edge developments in art, music, culture, politics, economy, and technology.

The digital annex

Already in 2014, the ZKM introduced its new website, which differs fundamentally from the web presence of cultural institutions. It offers interested visitors from around the world the chance to participate in the scientific research and cultural education at the ZKM and links expert knowledge to the public sphere. zkm.de defines itself as a digital annex and is an independent mode of existence – not an »interactive web brochure,« which refers only to events in real space. In contrast to pure service sites, it also explicitly addresses the purely virtual visitor. For the on-site museum visitor, it is to be seen as a component of the overall experience.

Learn more on http://zkm.de/en

During the event it was also possible for attendees to test the Toolbox on site, allowing partners to gather feedback and evaluation

Museums Pilot outcomes presented at the annual meeting of German Museums Association in Berlin

On 12-14 October 2015 the annual meeting of German Museums Association took place at Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik. The event was attended by professionals in the museums and museum documentation sector and it was a huge gathering of about 230 attendees; a perfect occasion for partner SPK to present Europeana Space, the Museums Pilot and its outcomes: the Toolbox and the Blinkster app.

An extensive presentation by Marlene Scholz (SPK) and Beatrix Lehmann (Museummedien) discussed E-Space in general, the pilots (with a focus on Museums pilot and TV pilot), the Technical Space and WITH tool and the functionalities of the Blinkster app and of the Toolbox (presentation in German available here).

During the event it was also possible for attendees to test the Toolbox on site and it was a very useful moment of exchange and evaluation with the main target group of the Museums pilot.

Florence, 25-27 February 2016

Immersive and Emotional Museum Design – workshop

Immersive and Emotional Museum Design – What is the role of emotions in designing the 21st century museums?

Emotion, involvement and participation: key issues that are increasingly important and decisive in the context of the new trends related to museums of the twenty-first century.

Museums as generators of “special” educational moments and multiform experiences where new languages are declined with immersive technology solutions, capable to attract, excite and engage different audiences: dynamic social spaces where the new digital media give voice to different stories that explore the collections in a creative, emotional and customized way.

In this context the NEMECH laboratory of the University of Florence aims to address the theme of “emotional museum” in the light of a multi-faceted approach in a concrete multidisciplinary perspective, through highly-qualified innovative courses aimed at public and private operators, responsible for museums and art galleries and professionals in the field of cultural heritage.

Experts will present the theoretical and practical techniques for the design and construction of exhibition spaces, interactive multi-sensory experiences through practices and use cases in interactive and immersive environments.

The workshop will be held from 25 to 27 February 2016 in Firenze in the monumental complex of “Le Murate”.

For further information please visit the event website: http://nemech.unifi.it/portfolio-posts/musei-emotivi/

London (UK), 19 February 2016

Photomediations: a symposium and book launch

The Open and Hybrid Publishing pilot of Europeana Space have the pleasure to announce the publication of a book that arises from our work. Photomediations: A Reader (Open Humanities Press, 2016), edited by Kamila Kuc and Joanna Zylinska.

We’re holding a symposium to celebrate the launch of the book and to discuss the activities of the pilot: come and join us for a half-day event exploring the relationship between photography and other media, and celebrating the launch of the open access book.

The book is available on an open access basis: it’s free to download in a pdf format HERE, but you can also buy a paper copy.

Also, you can visit here the Photomediations Open Book, the main outcome of the Open and Hybrid Publishing pilot.

Programme of the Symposium:

19 February 2016, 3pm-7pm

Goldsmiths, University of London, Room PSH326.

FREE AND OPEN TO ALL. NO NEED TO REGISTER.

The concept of photomediations brings together the hybrid ontology of ‘light-based media’ and the fluid dynamism of ‘mediation’. The papers presented in the symposium will challenge the traditional classification of photography as suspended between art and social practice in order to capture the dynamism of the photographic medium today. They will also explore photography’s kinship with other media – and with us, humans, as media.

Speakers:

Professor Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths): Photography Reloaded, or What Are Photomediations?
Dr Kamila Kuc (Goldsmiths) and Dr Michael Wamposzyc (University of Portsmouth): Panel on Curating Open Photography
Dr Rob Coley (University of Lincoln): Ecological Detection
Professor David Bate (University of Westminster): Colour Space
Dr Anna Dahlgren (Stockholm University): Magazined Photographs

Launch of Photomediations: A Reader and wine reception

—–

How to get to Goldsmiths and campus maps:

http://www.gold.ac.uk/find-us/

NB. Due to Crossrail works there will be no London Overground service to Goldsmiths on 19.02: you’ll need to take a replacement bus, or travel one stop on the train from London Bridge to New Cross instead.

The Reader and the symposium are part of the activities of Europeana Space, a project funded by the European Union’s ICT Policy Support Programme under GA n° 621037.

Brussels, 23 February 2016

CRe-AM final event / ICT & Creative Industries in Europe: current trends and future policies

The event will present CRe-AM’s roadmapping work and results. The day will be divided into two parts to present the main outcomes of the CRe-AM project and to allow networking among participants. The morning plenary session will present roadmaps for each creative sector tackled by the project (Art, Architecture, Design, ePublishing & Media, Games) and discuss future avenues with key experts.

The second part of the event will allow all participants to express their opinion for a collaborative thinking exercise taking the shape of a World Café workshop and encouraging exchanges on all the sectors studied during the lifetime of the CRe-AM project.

You will find the registration and the event agenda at a glance on the CRe-AM website.

The CRe-AM project aimed at bridging communities of creators with communities of technology providers and innovators, in a collective roadmapping effort to streamline, coordinate and amplify collaborative work. This was achieved through research processes implying the creation and publication of many supporting documents, such as Trends & Weak Signals or Gap Analyses, leading to the project final Roadmaps both on a sectorial (Art, Design, Media & E-Publishing, Games and Architecture) and a cross-disciplinary bases.

Artists from UK and around the world converge at International Surrealism Now Project.

“International Surrealism Now” art exhibition goes to US

The next editions of International Surrealism Now will be held in United States, Mississippi at Cullis Wade Depot Art Gallery, MSU Welcome Center; it will be in January and February and in Partícula Coimbra, next February, and Multimedia Poros Museum in Condeixa-a-Nova, Portugal 2016.

The follow artists will exhibit in United States, Mississippi at Cullis Depot Gallery located above the Mississippi State University welcome center:

American: Jay Garfinkle, France Garrido, Joe A. MacGown, K.D. Matheson, Patrick McGrath Muniz, Shahla Rosa, Olga Spiegel.

Portuguese: Santiago Ribeiro, Paula Rosa, Victor Lages, Francisco Urbano.

Video by Steve Smith

“International Surrealism Now” is a project by the surrealist painter Santiago Ribeiro, who has dedicated himself to promoting the surrealism of the 21st century, through exhibitions worldwide. The “International Surrealism Now” began in 2010 in Coimbra, when Santiago Ribeiro conceived a major exhibition organized by Bissaya Barreto Foundation. This event has been in Conímbriga celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Monographic Museum (second most visited museum in Portugal). The show has also been in Paris with the support of GAPP – Art Gallery Portugal Presente and Liba WS, organized once again by the Bissaya Barreto Foundation and Santiago Ribeiro, and in Madrid with the support of Yamal Din. After that it went to Dallas with the support of the American surrealist artist Shahla Rosa. Lately it has been presented at the medieval Castle of Paço da Ega, organized by Rede de Bibliotecas and House Mayor of Condeixa-a-Nova

At present, the “International Surrealism Now” includes artists from 30 countries: Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Spain, USA, Philippines, France, Holland, Indonesia, England, Iran, Iceland , Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, Ukraine, Vietnam.

The exhibition consists of a variety of artworks including drawing, painting, photography, digital art and sculpture.

Artists: Agim Meta, Spain / Ana Neamu, Romania / Ana Pilar Morales, Spain / Anna Plavinskaya, Russia/USA / Andrew Artist Baines, Australia / Asier Guerrero Rico ( Dio ), Spain / Brigid Marlin, UK / Bien Banez, Philippines / Daila Lupo, Italy / Dan Neamu, Romania / Daniel Hanequand, Canada / Daniele Gori, Italy / Domen Lo, Slovenia / Edgar Invoker, Russia / Egill Ibsen, Iceland / Erik Heyninck, Belgium / Ettore Aldo Del Vigo, Italy / Farhad Jafari, Iran / France Garrido, USA / Francisco Urbano, Portugal / Gromyko Padilla Semper, Philippines / Héctor Pineda, Mexico / Hector Toro, Colombia / Hugues Gillet, France / Isabel Meyrelles, Portugal / Keith Wigdor, USA / Leo Wijnhoven, Holland / Leo Plaw, Germany / Liba Waring Stambollion, France / Joe MacGown, USA / Lubomír Štícha, Czech Republic / Ludgero Ludgero Rôlo, Portugal / Lv Shang, China / Maciej Hoffman, Poland / Magi Calhoun, USA / Maria Aristova, Russia / Martina Hoffmann, Germany / Mehriban Efendi, Azerbaijan / Naiker Roman Cespedes, Spain / Nazareno Affonso, Brazil / Nikolina Petolas, Croatia / Octavian Florescu, Canada / Oleg Korolev, Russia / Olga Spiegel, USA / Otto Rapp, Austria / Paula Rosa, Portugal / Paulo Cunha, Canada / Pedro Diaz Cartes, Chile / Philippe Pelletier, France / Rudolf Boelee, New Zealand / Santiago Ribeiro, Portugal / Sergey Tyukanov, Russia / Shahla Rosa, USA / Shoji Tanaka, Japan / Shan Zhulan, China / Sio SandraJaya, Indonesia / Slavko Krunic, Serbia / Sônia Menna Barreto, Brazil/ Steve Smith, USA / Stuart Grigz, UK / Svetlana Kislyachenko, Ukraine / Tatomir Pitariu, USA / Ton Haring, Holland / Victor Lages, Portugal / Vu Huyen Thuong, Vietnam / Yamal Din, Spain / Yuri Tsvetaev, Russia / Zoran Velimanovic, Serbia.

Happy New Year from the MediaArea team!

MediaConch Newsletter #3 (January 2016)

New Release

What’s new in MediaConch 15.12?

Database support introduced

With an introduction of a database built into the GUI, the most noticeable improvement is speed. Instead of parsing a file every time it is analyzed, it will only be parsed once, with subsequent policies then applied to the pre-analyzed content. Having a database will, in the future, allow users to apply custom policies to the full library content without having to wait a long time. This will also allow for the generation of custom statistics based on collections instead of just individual files. For example, if a percentage of the parsed library has “Error X,” it will be easier to gather similar files and determine which writing library was producing the error. This is one of many ideas other developers could implement with so much data available in the database.

New logo

MediaConch finally has its own logo, never to be confused with MediaInfo again! More details about the logo can be found in this blog post about the design.

More explicit licences

MediaConch and MediaInfo library are licensed as GPLv3+ and MPLv2+, as stated in the software. Additionally, a list of third party libraries and their licences are available on our Github readme page.

Implementation test improvements

Implementation tests now load logic from an XML representation of the Matroska EBML Schema. The XML tests on valid parent elements, element multiplicity, and mandated child elements, among other things.

EBML

As part of our goal to standardize and clarify the formats, Matroska/EBML draft specifications are being regularly updated. These changes are reflected in MediaConch 15.12.

Other bug resolutions

Support for negative timecodes in Matroska files

Better support of non-English filenames

Display format is now also applied on invalid files

MediaTrace now documents the parser used for raw streams within Matroska.

MediaConch releases updated software on a monthly basis. Nightly builds are also available for testing the most recent development.

Homebrew

For Mac users, MediaConchCLI can now be downloaded via Homebrew. brew install mediaconch will install the latest version of the software. Moving forward, brew upgrade mediaconch will upgrade the package to the latest release.

Artefactual Collaboration

MediaConch will be working with the Artefactual team to integrate into their Archivematica software during the upcoming year. Artefactual will provide testing and feedback on software tools being developed by MediaArea as part of the PreForma project. Artefactual will also integrate select MediaConch tools into Archivematica and provide associated documentation and support for those features.

CELLAR

Ongoing work towards the standardization of Matroska and FFV1 can be followed via the recently-founded IETF working group, CELLAR (Codec Encoding for LossLess Archiving and Realtime transmission).

More information on CELLAR and opportunities to join in the discussion via mailing list are available on their website: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/cellar/charter/

FOSDEM

Project lead Jérôme Martinez will be presenting on our work at the upcoming FOSDEM conference in Brussels (30-31 January, 2016). FOSDEM is a conference held annually for open source software developers. The title of his talk is “CELLAR, Status report on an IETF Working Group for Matroska, FFV1, and FLAC.”

Conference website: https://fosdem.org/2016/

Event page: https://fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/mediaconch/

Past and future events

In case you missed it, MediaConch was represented at the Association of Moving Image Archivists in Portland (20 November) and Fédération Internationale des Archives de Télévision / The International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT/IFTA) World Conference in Vienna (8 October). If you weren’t able to make it, we covered the events on our blog.

AMIA: https://mediaarea.net/MediaConch/2015/12/02/MediaArea-presents-at-AMIA/

FIAT/IFTA: https://mediaarea.net/MediaConch/2015/12/02/MediaArea-presents-at-AMIA/

MediaConch will be holding a webinar in January or February. More details to come soon.

Team member Ashley Blewer will be speaking at Code4lib (7-10 March, Philadelphia, PA, USA) about community-driven audiovisual archiving microservices, including MediaConch development. Project lead Dave Rice will also be attending.

MediaConch will be presenting at the PREFORMA Open Source Preservation Workshop in Stockholm on 7 April, 2016 at the National Library of Sweden. Registration is free and open until 31 March: http://www.digitalmeetsculture.net/article/preforma-open-source-preservation-workshop/

In July, MediaConch will be attending the IETF conference held in Berlin (17-22 July) and plans to hold an open source workshop for MediaConch users at that time.

Feedback

MediaArea is eager to build a community of collaborators and testers to participate in and use the results of the project. You can contact us here for more information.

Best,

The MediaConch Team