Digital meets Culture

The three games have stunning graphics and the beautiful effects added to the positive user experience.

by Rosemary Cisneros, Coventry University

The Europeana Space Games Pilot held its first user tests Wednesday, January 27th 2016 at Coventry University. Participants met at the Institute for Creative Enterprise (ICE), a building that brings together researchers, graduates, businesses and enterprise to support professionals to collaborate, share ideas and to help grow the region’s cultural and creative sectors- a fitting venue for the tests. The users played with the three games developed by the Pilot and offered feedback on engagement and entertainment and also discussed the tools in relation to education, museums, cultural heritage and tourism.

The users played with three different and exciting tools: The Educational game which presents players with a self-portrait painting from the Europeana archive, the Creative game which allows the user to create a collage from provided footage from the archive, and the Casual game where the player is presented with a classical style painting covered in dust and tasked with restoring the painting.

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The three games have stunning graphics and the beautiful effects added to the positive user experience. The discussions offered insight into the friendliness of the user-interface and helped the pilot asses the responsiveness, stability, functionality and ease of interaction with thegames. In summary, testing the three games was a crucial activity to ensure that our games are successful in the highly competitive landscape of apps and games. Usability testing has never been more exciting and the pilot’s games are adding to today’s mobile game ecosystems.

Photos courtesy of Coventry University

Images from Europeana:

Cleopatra’s Banquet | Lairesse, Gerard de / Self-portrait (1887) | Gogh, Vincent van

Berlin, 11-21 February 2016

Berlin International Film Festival

Source: https://www.berlinale.de/en/das_festival/festivalprofil/profil_der_berlinale/index.html

Berlin: an exciting, cosmopolitan cultural hub that never ceases to attract artists from around the world. A diverse cultural scene, a critical public and an audience of film-lovers characterise the city. In the middle of it all, the Berlinale: a great cultural event and one of the most important dates for the international film industry. More than 330,000 sold tickets, more than 20,000 professional visitors from 128 countries, including more than 3,700 journalists: art, glamour, parties and business are all inseparably linked at the Berlinale.

The entire world of film

The public programme of the Berlin International Film Festival shows about 400 films per year, mostly international or European premieres. Films of every genre, length and format find their place in the various sections: great international cinema in the Competition, independent and art house in Panorama, films for young audiences in Generation, new discoveries and promising talents from the German film scene in Perspektive Deutsches Kino, avant garde, experimental and unfamiliar cinematography in the Forum and Forum Expanded, and an exploration of cinematic possibilities in Berlinale Shorts. The Berlinale Special, including Berlinale Special Gala, is showing new and extraordinary productions and honours great cinema personalities. Berlinale Special Series, which began in 2015, presents selected international series. The programme is rounded out by a Retrospective as well as an Homage, which focuses on the œuvre of a great personality of cinema, curated by the Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen. Beginning in 2013, the Retrospective expanded to include presentations of Berlinale Classics. They show current restorations of film classics as well as rediscovered films.

Furthermore the Berlinale has regularly organised a programme of special presentations that open up new perspectives, provide insight into key themes, make new connections and explore realms where film intersects with other creative disciplines. Food, pleasure and the environment – these are the topics that lie at the centre of the Culinary Cinema. Berlinale Goes Kiez is travelling from arthouse cinema to arthouse cinema within the city to present selected films from the Berlinale programme and NATIVe – A Journey into Indigenous Cinema is devoted to the cinematic story-telling of Indigenous peoples worldwide.

The European Film Market in the Martin-Gropius-Bau

The film industry at the Berlinale

The Berlin International Film Festival is a source of inspiration in the global film community: film programmes, workshops, panel discussions, joint projects with other social and cultural actors – the forms of cooperation and the possibilities for creative interaction are countless.

The most important meeting point is the European Film Market (EFM). Around 400 companies and more than 8,000 professionals from 95 countries build and foster contacts here, strengthen their position in the industry or negotiate film rights.

The Berlinale Co-Production Market, affiliated to the EFM, offers fertile ground for international co-productions.

Berlinale Talents brings high profile professionals attending the Berlinale to workshops and discussions with 300 promising young film talents from all over the world. Both sides benefit. The talents profit from the experience of the professionals, who in turn gain fresh ideas from taking part.

The World Cinema Fund (WCF) provides financial support to film projects in countries with weak film infrastructure thereby helping strengthen the regions’ position on the international film market.

The Berlinale Residency programme offers international directors a grant to come to Berlin for several months. Working in close contact with individually selected mentors and market experts, the directors can take a decisive step toward placing their next film project on the way to a successful theatrical release.

The close connection between the festival and market is a unique characteristic of the Berlinale and always results in exceptional synergies.

Further information

Event website: https://www.berlinale.de/en/HomePage.html

an hackathon to redefine the concept of the book was held in Athens.

Hack the Book Festival!

by Greg Markus (NISV)

On January 22-24 the Europeana Space Project held their third hack event, the Hack the Book Festival. The event was organized and hosted by the Onassis Cultural Centre (OCC) in Athens in coordination with the Open and Hybrid Publishing pilot “Photomediations“.

Books are about to be “re-invented” moving to a hybrid, ‎phygital phase. The event challenged users to create their own publications, finding the technical and legal limitations and learning to use cultural heritage data sources to create inspiring and innovative open-access books.

By every standard, the hackathon was a success. The OCC received over 300 applications. Through a series of questions and assessment 10 select teams were chosen to participate.

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Dreamland

The event, which took place in the basement of the OCC building, was a developer/tinkerer/creative’s dreamland. There was a “genius bar” featuring eSpace project partners Postscriptum and NTUA, work stations with soldering irons, crafts supplies, and it seemed like every team had access to at least Raspberry Pi and Arduino.

The event started off on Friday night with inspiring talks from stalwarts like Chris Mead, Gary Hall, and Joanna Zylinska and REMIX’s Simon Cronshaw who is head of business modeling and incubation for the E-Space project.

During the two full days of hacking participants were incredibly busy building their new products. The energy was high and the windowless basement with intense mood lighting made everyone down there lose track of time and place. It was for intents and purposes its own secluded universe.

It was a mad dash for teams to finish not only their products but also perfect their pitches. Pitches are an extremely important aspect of the Europeana Space hackathons. They inform the judges on several key aspects most importantly being “who’s going to use this?”. E-Space’s goals are to create jobs and deliver 6 sustainable products by the end of the project.

With that said, after a long deliberation process the jury decided upon 3 winners who will move onto the eE-Space Business Modelling Workshop in London out of which 1 winner will be chosen for incubation.

Without further ado, the winners of the Europeana Space Hack the Book Festival are:

SinkAFutre
Vivlio
CookLee

Each project is extremely different from the other and all projects presented at the hackathon showed a wide swath of diversity amongst the participants’ thinking. This perfectly shows the possibilities in store for the written word and text.
We look forward to exploring how the three projects during the next Business Modeling Workshop in London.

Read about the event also on OCC website.

2 – 6 May 2016, Cambridge and London

Medieval and Modern Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age

DiXiT, the project funded under Marie Curie Actions within the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme (supported by DARIAH-EU) with the Institute of English Studies (London), the University of Cambridge, the Warburg Institute, and King’s College London, announced the sixth year of this course that will run in two parallel strands: one on medieval and the other on modern manuscripts.

“The course is open to any arts and humanities doctoral students working with manuscripts. It involves five days of intensive training on the analysis, description and editing of medieval or modern manuscripts to be held jointly in Cambridge and London. Participants will receive a solid theoretical foundation and hands-on experience in cataloguing and editing manuscripts for both print and digital formats.

The first half of the course involves morning classes and then afternoon visits to libraries in Cambridge and London.

Participants will view original manuscripts and gain practical experience in applying the morning’s themes to concrete examples. In the second half we will address the cataloguing and description of manuscripts in a digital format with particular emphasis on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). These sessions will also combine theoretical principles and practical experience and include supervised work on computers.
The course is free of charge but is open only to doctoral students (PhD or equivalent). It is aimed at those writing dissertations relating to medieval or modern manuscripts, especially those working on literature, art or history. Some bursaries will be available for travel and accommodation. There are fifteen vacancies each for the medieval and modern strands, and preference will be given to those considered by the selection panel likely to benefit most from the course. Eight need-based bursaries of up to £375/€500 will also be awarded to cover directly incurred costs of travel and accommodation. Applications close at 5pm GMT on Monday 22 February 2016 but early registration is strongly recommended.”

More information here: http://dixit.uni-koeln.de/mmsda/

or contact dixit-mmsda@uni-koeln.de

Schedule: http://dixit.uni-koeln.de/wp-content/uploads/DiXiT-MMSDA-Schedule-2016.pdf

Application form: http://dixit.uni-koeln.de/wp-content/uploads/DiXiT-MMSDA-Application-Form-2016.docx

Flyer: http://dixit.uni-koeln.de/wp-content/uploads/DiXiT-MMSDA-Flyer-2016.pdf

Next edition will be held at American University of Beirut, Lebanon on 1-2 December 2016

e-AGE 2016: Call for Papers, Presentations, Posters and Participation

Integrating Arab e-infrastructure in a Global Environment, e-AGE, is an annual international event organized by the Arab States Research and Education Network, ASREN. Since its launch in December 2010 at the League of Arab States, It goes in line with ASREN’s main objectives related to creating awareness, promoting R&E collaboration and joint activities and establishing human networks in order to facilitate collaboration and cooperation among researchers and academicians in the Arab region and the rest of the world.

Next edition will be held at American University of Beirut, Lebanon on 1-2 December 2016 and it will include:

Main Conference e-AGE 2016, 1-2 Dec, 2016
The 9th Event on Euro-Mediterranean e-Infrastructure
The 6th annual meeting of ASREN
AROQA 8th Annual Conference
OSSCOM 2nd Annual Conference, OSSCOM 2016
EUMEDCONNECT3 and Africaconenct2 Project Meetings
Technical workshops on R&E networking including AAI, Clouds, Global Applications, etc..

A call for participation is currently open for the following Topics of interest:

Scientific computing and data-intensive e-Science in the scientific areas related to energy, environment, health, climate, water, agriculture, biology, economy, medicine, as well as in social sciences and humanities.
Perspectives on NRENs, including challenges, operation, sustainability, funding, governance, business models, security and services.
Problem-solving environments and access to research and education resources, repositories, libraries and contents, clouds, grids, parallel and distributed computing, and high performance computing.
Virtual Research Environments, Internet of Things, Science Gateways, Federation of Identities, AAI services.
Visualization and Virtual Reality

Website: http://asrenorg.net/eage2016/

Purpose of this Call

1. Call for Papers – deadline 15 September 2016

Scientists, researchers and educators are invited to submit papers to be presented in this conference in special sessions for research papers. Paper contributions are accepted in English. Papers should be submitted with no more than 8 to 10 pages, and no more than 8000 words. Each paper should include (1) Abstract with no more than 500 words and 7 keywords that refer to the key subjects and concepts that have been developed in the paper (2) Author(s) biography: First name, Last name, Institution, Full address, Fax, Email, and short CV. Papers should be submitted in MS-Word. After submission, all contributions will be reviewed by the Scientific Committee to evaluate the pertinence of each submitted paper. If the manuscript is accepted, then paper should be submitted using THIS template’s format for publishing purposes.

Submit your Participation HERE

2. Call for Presentations – deadline 15 October 2016

Renowned speakers and experts are invited to give presentations and participate in panel discussions on latest developments in e-Infrastructure services and application areas, various aspects of R&E networks, telecommunications technologies and the Internet, industry and research case studies of e-Infrastructure use, R&E infrastructure sustainability and funding issues, etc..

3. Call for Participation – registration deadline 25 November 2016

Representation from academia, research, industry, telecom and networking organizations, NRENs, governments and those interested in the developments of R&E networks and e-Infrastructures are invited to join the conference and share experience and exchange knowledge in the wide array of topics of interest.

Interested participants can register HERE.

4. Call for Posters – deadline 15 October 2016

Students’ and researchers’ participation in the conference is facilitated by providing them with a space to show high quality posters that summarize their work. Posters will help students and researchers to advertise and promote their work. For those interested, please send a summary in MS-Word format including title of the poster, name and affiliation of author(s) and a short abstract of maximum one page.

Submit your Participation HERE

Call for proposals open until 29 February 2016

Join the Europeana Labs Challenge and win up to €25,000 funding for your project

This is a call out to all creative thinkers! From now until 29 February, Europeana Labs is asking you to submit your designs for fantastic products and services which make the most of Europe’s rich digital cultural heritage. We’ve selected three diverse and interesting topics – First World War, Art & Design and Europe’s Music Heritage.

Competition criteria

We are looking for products, services and projects which:

Re-use Europeana openly licensed content
Are dedicated to the competition themes of First World War, Art & Design and Europe’s music heritage
Demonstrate clear social and/or economic impact. Successful entries will meet at least one of these criteria:
- Offer novel and engaging ways of experiencing and/or interacting with digital cultural content
- Support lifelong learning e.g. have a strong educational element
- Enable commercial re-use of cultural data
Have a clear business model (address key elements, such as target group, value proposition, technical feasibility, sustainability)

We are open to entries at various stages of maturity (concept, prototype, early stage product). Suitable entries include apps, online services, games, e-books, or artistic and product designs.

Prizes

Competition winners will receive a share of the total prize fund of 25,000 EUR for further development of their projects. The exact amount of funding will vary depending on the project quality (how well the entry meets the competition criteria) and development needs. To receive the funding, the winner will be required to sign a subcontract with the Europeana Foundation.

In addition, competition winners may be eligible for non-financial support, such as participation in co-creation and crowdfunding workshops.

How to apply

Firstly, check out some of the resources we have compiled for each theme, as examples of the sort of content that is available on Europeana.

Then develop your idea. Concentrate on the judging criteria – you’ll have the opportunity to include demos, but it’s really the vision, impact and viability of the idea that we’re interested in.

Then submit your application via the simple entry form available on the competition page.

Deadline: 29 February 2016.

Within two weeks after the competition deadline we will contact short-listed applicants and schedule Skype interviews to further evaluate their application. Competition winners will be announced on 31 March 2016 on the Europeana Labs website.

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