Digital meets Culture

Brussels, 23 May 2016

Civic Epistemologies @ Riches Second Policy Seminar

“New Horizons for Cultural Heritage – Recalibrating relationships: bringing cultural heritage and people together in a changing Europe” was the Second Policy Seminar organised by the RICHES project to discuss how the project can provide insights to support evidence-based policymaking in Europe.

The seminar, hosted at the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA), comprises political updates by representatives from the European Parliament and the European Commission, the presentation of policy recommendations from the RICHES project and a Round Table discussion involving major stakeholders.

The seminar started with a pre-event consisting in a networking session of EC Projects, with the participation of more than 20 projects in different frameworks.

The networking sessions was follow up to the first such session organised on the occasion of the first Policy Seminar in October 2015. The scope of this session was to reflect on how to sustain the organisation of these kind of appointments in the future, after the end of the RICHES project. In facts, as the RICHES events are organized with networking sessions and discussions, they represent a good opportunity to reflect on the impact that cultural heritage projects are delivering, identify opportunities to improve the effectiveness of their results, and identify synergies and the potential for collaboration among projects.

In the light to continue the dissemination of the results of the CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES project and to strengthen the establishment of a valuable network among EU projects, Mauro Fazio (Project Coordinator) presented the results achieved by the project.

The dissemination materials have been also distributed by the staff of Promoter, who realised a Digital Gallery showing the two posters developed by the CIVIC EPISTEMOLGIES project. Have a look to the Digital Gallery here: http://www.digitalmeetsculture.net/projects/riches/digital-poster-exhibition/

For further information, the presentations by the speakers and any further outcome of the Policy Seminar, please visit the event page on the RICHES website.

Dubrovnik (Croatia), 22-24 September 2016

THE BEST IN HERITAGE, global annual survey of award-winning museum, heritage and conservation projects

This year the Best in Heritage celebrates its 15th anniversary, once more giving a featured selection of the most innovative and inspiring award-winning museum, heritage and conservation projects well-deserved attention from the international, professional community. The gathering will consist of two events, representing a balanced variety of best practices, geographically diverse, and accomplished in many different circumstances and contexts: IMAGINES, a one day event where Multimedia and New technology achievements will be presented; and the core event, with its packed two-day schedule. Altogether 44 projects will be presented, with representatives from China, the United States, Japan, India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Vietnam, Russia and Europe taking the stage.

In addition to the global survey of best practice, the conference features rich social and cultural content organised with help of Dubrovnik Museums, all taking place in the Renaissance city centre of Dubrovnik, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The conference is organised in partnership with EUROPA NOSTRA & the Endowment Fund of ICOM, with the support of the City of Dubrovnik and with sponsorship from Meyvaert Glass Engineering.

Links:

Programme: http://www.thebestinheritage.com/conference/programme

Imagines: http://www.thebestinheritage.com/conference/programme/imagines

Registration: http://www.thebestinheritage.com/conference/registration

Contact: Luka Cipek, pm@thebestinheritage.com

https://twitter.com/BestInHeritage

https://www.facebook.com/TheBestInHeritage

https://issuu.com/tbih

https://www.youtube.com/user/TheBestInHeritage

UNESCO PERSIST is looking for feedback from institutions which have used or are thinking on using them

UNESCO/PERSIST Guidelines for the selection of digital heritage for long-term preservation

L to R: Ingrid Parent, Dr. Abdulla El Reyes, Julia Brungs, Frank la Rue. CC BY-SA 2.0

The UNESCO PERSIST Project, an initiative of UNESCO, ICA, IFLA and other partners, for enhancing the sustainability of digital heritage, has now launched the UNESCO/PERSIST Guidelines for the selection of digital heritage for long-term preservation.

The aim of the Guidelines is to provide an overarching starting point for libraries, archives, museums and other heritage institutions when drafting their own policies on the selection of digital heritage for long-term sustainable digital preservation.

The Guidelines target institutions, professionals and administrators on every level and in every region of the world in order to review existing material for selection, highlight important issues, and offer guidance when drafting institutional policies, they were written by a team of seven authors from the libraries, archives, and museums community.

The UNESCO PERSIST Project encourages everyone to use the Guidelines as a starting point for the institutional policies and is looking for feedback from institutions which have used or are interested/planning/thinking on using them in order to improve them and make them truly usable for all communities.

Please send your feedback/suggestions/comments and success stories to: cultural.heritage@ifla.org.

You can find the Guidelines in English, Arabic and French here: http://www.ifla.org/node/10315?og=7607.

Deadline for Abstract submission was 3 June. DI4R 2016 is organized jointly by EGI, EUDAT, GÉANT, OpenAIRE and RDA Europe.

Preparation for the first cross e-infrastructure event DI4R 2016

The deadline for abstract submission to the Digital Infrastructures for Research 2016 event was on 3 June.

The DI4R 2016 will be held in Kraków on 28-30 September 2016. The conference will be hosted by ACC Cyfronet AGH and organised jointly by EGI, EUDAT, GÉANT, OpenAIRE and RDA Europe.

The Call for Abstracts is now closed and the Programme Committee welcomed abstracts for presentations, workshops and training sessions submitted until the 3rd of June. (More details and instructions for submission.)

http://www.digitalinfrastructures.eu/content/call-participation

The four conference tracks are:

Challenges facing users and service providers
Services enabling research
A changing environment, changing research
Working with data

The goal of the organisers is to develop an engaging programme to foster new collaborations, promote innovation and strengthen a wider understanding of e-infrastructures within the research community. For the e-infrastructure and resource providers, the conference will be a chance to work together towards the integrated services and roadmaps that are needed to better serve the user base.

Bern, 5 October 2016

PREFORMA @ IPRES 2016

PREFORMA will contribute actively at IPRES 2016, the 13th International Conference on Digital Preservation, with both a workshop and a presentation.

The workshop, entitled “Quality standards for preserving digital cultural heritage” will be held on Wednesday 5 October 2016.

The speech (“Status of CELLAR: Update from an IETF Working Group for Matroska and FFV1“, by Ashley Blewer and Dave Rice) will present the IETF CELLAR working group and MediaArea’s efforts towards the standardisation of Matroska and FFV1.

iPRES is the longest standing digital preservation conference in the world. This important event brings together key theorists, researchers and practitioners to explore the latest trends, innovations, policies and practices in digital preservation.

About the workshop

Memory institutions face increasing volumes of electronic documents and other media content for long term preservation. Data are normally stored in specific formats for documents, images, sound, video, etc., produced by software from different vendors. This software is controlled neither by the institution producing the files, nor by the institution that archives it. This obligates memory institutions to carry out conformance tests before accepting transfers of electronic collections, but again these are beyond the control of the institution and can be unreliable. This poses problems for long-term preservation. Digital content, meant for preservation, passing through an uncontrolled generative process can jeopardise the preservation process. The objective of PERFORMA (PREservation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives) – a Pre Commercial Procurement project co-funded by the European Commission under its FP7-ICT Programme – is to give memory institutions full control of the conformance testing of files created, migrated and ingested into archives. This is achieved through the development of open source tools which enable this process within an iteration that is under the full control of memory institutions. The project aims to establish a sustainable ecosystem involving interested stakeholders from a variety of backgrounds, including researchers, developers and memory institutions. The workshop will present the results of the project, including demonstration of the conformance checkers developed during the prototyping phase. This will inform a discussion with the digital preservation community – open source community, developers, standardization bodies and memory institutions – about the opportunities offered by PREFORMA and the challenges that are still to be addressed.

About the speech

The Internet Engineering Task Force, an open and independent international standards organization, has chartered a working group named CELLAR (Codec Encoding for LossLess Archiving and Realtime transmission) in order to develop specifications for Matroska (audiovisual container), FFV1 (lossless video encoding), and FLAC (lossless audio encoding) for use in archival environments and transmission. This paper will review the status of this ongoing work and provide an overview of the challenges and intricacies of audiovisual specification development. Topics will also include the benefits of open standards within the context of digital preservation, methods for advocating for and supporting implementation of standards, and the relationships between specification development and validator development. Additionally the paper will compare and contrast existing implementations of lossless audiovisual workflow and present current best practices for lossless audiovisual encoding and which practices may be feasible in the future.

For further information about the workshop visit the IPRES website at www.ipres2016.ch/frontend/index.php?page_id=2833.

Amsterdam, 7 June 2016

SILVER Final Conference and Workshop

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.