Digital meets Culture

a series of events across twined European cities, on stationary bicycles equipped with virtual reality technology!

#BigArtRide from April to June 2016

Appointments are:
21-23 April – Brussels & Amsterdam
27-30 April – Wroclaw & Amsterdam
06-08 May – Rome & Amsterdam
20-22 May – Prague & Amsterdam
25-28 May – Brussels & Amsterdam
30 May-1 June – Berlin & Amsterdam
9-11 June – London & Amsterdam
23-25 June – Paris & Amsterdam

and then the evnt moves to Slovakia!

Imagine racing through a city of both past and present, a city which is responsive to your every move, a city filled with amazing art, that is built before your eyes as you ride. A virtual city that reflects Europe’s heritage, its culture, its future. A cutting edge experience which allows you to (re)discover Europe’s most striking masterpieces alongside its most unique works of art, its fascinating cultural history in a digital world.

The event will invite participants to get on stationary bicycles equipped with virtual reality technology and immerse themselves in a spectacular journey through a city, experiencing centuries of Europe’s art which will take the shape of buildings, roads, trees and help build the city. Passers-by, in the meantime, will help or disrupt the cyclists by interacting with giant objects in public spaces.

Prince Constantijn from the Netherlands cycled at the Campus Party in Utrecht while MEP Mircea Diaconu cycled in Brussels. Attendance for both events were excellent. #BigArtRide gathers more and more momentum as the virtual cycling continues across Europe.

The event series are organised jointly by Europeana.eu, the Dutch design studio DROPSTUFF.nl, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid and Embassies of the Kingdom of The Netherlands across Europe.

#BigArtRide brings art and people and innovation together across Europe to explore our shared cultural heritage in a fun way through virtual reality. It has been on a journey connecting people across cities in Europe since May. Thanks to Virtual Reality technology people in different countries can share a virtual bike ride, racing each other through virtual cities filled with artworks from across Europe.

The #BigArtRide tour celebrates the Dutch Presidency of the EU by building virtual bridges between people across Europe and is part of Europeana’s ‘280’ campaign to get people across Europe excited about our shared artistic heritage.

And now #BigArtRide is on the final leg of its journey, it arrives in Bratislava, Pribinova, 17 on 28th June 2016 and finishes on 30th June 2016. And at the same time the #BigArtRide will be in Amsterdam at Kattenburgerplein.

The Bratislava leg of #BigArtRide also celebrates the handover of the presidency of the European Union #EUPresidency from the Netherlands to Slovakia. June 30th is the last day of #BigArtRide and the last day of the Dutch Presidency.

#BigArtRide – Connecting Europe through Culture and Creativity from Europeana on Vimeo.

Results of the workshop organised by PREFORMA at the National Library of Sweden

Open Source Workshop: presentations now online!

PREFORMA is a project in which a team of scientists, librarians and archivists jointly invited proposals for open source applications to be funded – with support from the European Commission. The open source tools created would have to help archival and museum collections check whether the files that enter or are present in their collections adhere to specific format standard specifications. As a main requirement, the standards the tools are developed for had to be available under open licenses. Not every domain can count on the availability of such open standards, and thus the project also supports the development of such standards.

Demonstration booth at the Open Source Workshop. credit: Erwin Verbruggen CC BY-SA

Three groups of developers have been working for the past year. MediaArea, the developers of the popular MediaInfo application, develops the MediaConch application for Matroska mediafiles that make use of FFv1 video. EasyInnova, together with the University of Basel, works on the DPFManager toolset and an archival application of the TIFF photography format. And a consortium that includes the Open Preservation Foundation, called VeraPDF, works on the puzzle of getting 1000+ pages of PDF/A standards to a coherent set of rules.

After some introductory talks from invited speakers, the three projects were presented and demo’ed to an international audience on April 7, 2016 at the Open Source Workshop, an event hosted by the National Library of Sweden. The event was a great success with more than 100 registered attendees from all over Europe.

>>> All presentations and demos are now available for download on the event website! <<<

Audience during the workshop presentations. Image credit: Erwin Verbruggen CC BY-SA.

Peter Bubestinger from Austria sung the praise and pointed to the pitfalls of Open Source development. Many people misunderstand the ‘free’ in free or open software: While it offers you the freedom to tinker with it (much as your bathroom offers you the freedom to tinker with its design and set-up once it’s yours), it needs support from users to be developed further. Support can exist in terms of funding for developers, but also in help on creating documentation or doing user testing and reporting back.

Till Jaeger then dove in the complex world of open licenses and how lawyers can spent months and months on picking apart the different varieties of restrictions that exist within. Simply said: Some licenses require all subsequent usage to adhere to the open license model as well. Others don’t have that requirement and its code can then be reused on (more) closed projects. The solution in PREFORMA is to make sure all projects adhere to two licenses to be maximally compatible.

Demo of the DPFManager application. Image credit: Erwin Verbruggen CC BY-SA.

Melanie Imming presented the LIBER Europe network and how it sees ‘open’ as a crucial aspect of science development: science relies on openness to move forward. She also stressed how important the efforts of the digital preservation community had been to improve the requirements for research projects: in the Horizon 2020 research projects funded by the European Commission, every project now is required to think in advance about how to manage the data it will generate in dedicated Data Management Plans.

The tools created in PREFORMA will hopefully prove useful for managing large collections of various formats. You are very welcome to take a look by downloading any of the tools and report your findings to the developers directly through one of the three GitHub environments.

More info

About the workshop: http://opensourceworkshop.preforma-project.eu
About the PREFORMA project and tools: http://preforma-project.eu/open-source-portal.html

Interview by Gregory Markus

Who’s Using What: PREFORMA Project

Source: Europeana Pro blog

For this edition of Who’s Using What, Gregory Markus looks towards the digital preservation challenges that GLAMs face. He interviewed two developers from the PREFORMA Project: Xavi Tarres from Easy Innova (who is working on DPF Manager, the conformance checker for TIFF images) and Jérôme Martinez from MediaArea (who is working on MediaConch, the conformance checker for MKV/FFv1 audiovisual files).

PREFORMA will develop open source tools that double-check files being preserved long term and adhere to open standards. This will allow memory institutions full control over the process of conformity testing files which will be ingested into their collections – vital to resolving issues, such as non-conformity, that can arise from digitization to preservation, dramatically slow down workflow, and drain precious resources.

A problem that many institutions face in terms of long term digital preservation is that the files they receive may not be compliant with standard implementations – in turn, causing read, write or playout problems later on. The PREFORMA project published a call to support the development of three open source projects developed around an open reference implementation for documents, photographs and video files and to develop tools that check file conformance. The project has organised an open workshop in Stockholm where the early stage tools will be presented. You can download the presentations here. For more information about the project, see the PREFORMA website.

Read here the whole interview.

Happy Spring From the MediaArea Team!

MediaConch Newsletter #4 – April 2016

New Release Notes

What’s new in MediaConch 16.03

Local GUI

New page for the results (analyze and update in background, delete/add jobs during the processing of the queue)
GUI usage is saved and restored when it is restarted
Support of plugins (VeraPDF and DPF Manager)
Dynamic selection of the policy and the display format in the policy viewer
Dynamic selection of the display format in the implementation viewer
CAVPP access and preservation policy sets
Update of implementation checker tests, including some FFV1 checks
Expanded REST API of the server
Bugfixes

Online GUI

New page for the results (analyze and update in background, delete/add jobs during the processing of the queue)
Update of implementation checker tests, including some FFV1 checks

CLI

Update of implementation checker tests, including some FFV1 checks
Server
Expanded REST API of the server

Latest Downloads

Download MediaConch’s latest release or a daily build.

MediaConch now supports plugins including VeraPDF and DPFManager!

The Online MediaConch GUI enables accessibility across platforms.

Updates

MediaConch now supports plugins for other implementation checkers such as the DPF Manager for TIFF files and VeraPDF’s checker for PDF files. MediaConch will select the appropriate implementation checker based upon the associated format as determined by MediaInfo.

To facilitate large-scale testing and provide research to efforts in the IETF Cellar working group, we’ve created a website to catalog discovered sample Matroska files in a manner that allows faceted browsing according to their technical characteristics and their conformance status according to the MediaConch implementation checker. See this work in development, which contains a collection of over 64,000 Matroska files.

Upcoming Events

April 7th, 2016, Stockholm, Sweden: PREFORMA’s Open Source Preservation Workshop – Serving the Cultural Heritage at the National Library, Stockholm.

Week of July 17th during IETF96, Berlin, Germany: Save the date for Deutsche Kinemathek, a free workshop hosted by MediaArea. Let us know if you’re interested in attending!

Team MediaConch in the Wild

Take a sneak peak at Jérôme’s upcoming presentation for the Open Source Preservation Workshop in Stockholm, April 7th, 2016.

Dave shared updates at his Code4LibNYC talk at Metro NYC.

Ashley’s MediaConch shout-out was brimming with gifs in her Code4Lib presentation: Free Your Workflows.

Feedback

MediaArea is eager to build a community of collaborators and testers to integrate the software in their workflows and participate in usability testing. Please contact us if you’d like to be involved!

Nottingham (UK), 16-17 April 2016

ART // GAMES // HACKATHON

The ART // GAMES // HACKATHON was an intensive weekend workshop, which will allow artists, coders and technologists to collaborate, team up and develop prototypes of game art projects. This exciting event took place at Game City in Nottingham – home of the National Videogame Arcade on 16th and 17th April 2016.

The ART // GAMES // HACKATHON is part of Europeana Space, a large EU-funded project, which examines the creative reuse of online content across a range of media and art forms.

This is the sixth hackathon to be hosted by the project. Previous events have focussed on a variety of disciplines, including dance, publishing and photography. Building on three game prototypes developed as part of the project, this event explored the gamification of online culture, and considered how innovative new game projects might cultivate new forms of participation.

Event page: http://www.europeana-space.eu/hackathons/games/

Follow the Twitter channel of the event: @ArtGamesHack

Participants entered into a competition, which involved regularly pitching their ideas and prototypes to a jury of experts, over the two days and a final presentation. The three winning projects will now receive further mentoring from Simon Cronshaw from Remix Summits, and the chance to participate in a Business Modelling Workshop to further shape their projects and develop business plans. These three finalists will then compete for three months of tailored business incubation from world-class industry leaders.

The ART // GAMES // HACKATHON organising partners:

E-Space http://www.europeana-space.eu

Coventry University http://www.coventry.ac.uk

Game City http://gamecity.org/

Remix Summit: http://www.remixsummits.com

European Policy Briefs: about Craft and about Economics (April 2016).

RICHES: new policy briefs just published

The RICHES Policy Brief series is enlarged with two new releases:

European Policy Brief. The Economic and Fiscal Dimension of Cultural Heritage. (April 2016). This policy brief focuses on the effects of two forms of government support: VAT regulation for CH goods and services and direct subsidies to CH organisations. It presents the results and outcomes of the research that explores the relation between the characteristics of different European countries and the effects of government support in VAT rates for CH organisations, and it describes the actions that can be taken to stimulate a CH-rich and CH-engaged European society.

European Policy Brief. Towards a Craft Revival: Recalibrating Social, Cultural, Economic and Technological Dynamics. (April 2016). This policy brief makes recommendations for unlocking the potential of the craft sector and craft skills, with a focus on maximising their economic value without undermining their social and cultural value. Policy recommendations are formulated from an holistic perspective, which recognizes the interplay of social, cultural, economic, legal and technological dynamics in determining the standing of craft, and realising its potential.

The growing collection of RICHES Policy Briefs and Think Papers is available at http://www.riches-project.eu/policy-recommendations.html. They are the focus of the RICHES Policy Seminar in Brussels (23 May 2016).

San Francisco (US), 6-7 December 2016

Future Technologies Conference 2016 – FTC 2016

About the Conference

FTC attracts researchers, scientists and technologists from some of the top companies, universities, research firms and government agencies from around the world.

Join us for FTC 2016, the world’s pre-eminent forum for reporting technological breakthroughs in the areas of Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Security, Robotics, Electronics and Communications. The conference is predicated on the successful conferences by The Science and Information (SAI) Organization that have been held in the UK since 2013. FTC 2016 combines a stimulating technical program with an exciting new venue, San Francisco, a city renowned for its steep rolling hills, eclectic mix of architecture, and landmarks including the Golden Gate Bridge and cable cars.

A call for papers, posters and demo was open until 1 May 2016.

Conference Tracks:

Technology Trends

Internet of Things
Cloud Computing
Big Data
Smart Cities
Machine to Machine
High Performance Computing
Mobile Applications
Knowledge Management
Social Computing
Software Engineering and Quality

Intelligent Systems

Artificial Intelligence
Neural Networks
Fuzzy Logic
Expert Systems
Agents and Multi-agent Systems
Natural Language Processing
Data Mining
Support Vector Machines
Ambient Intelligence
Sentiment Analysis

Machine Vision

Human Computer Interaction
Computer Vision
Image Processing
Robotics
Geographic Information Systems
Video Analysis
Medical Diagnosis
Segmentation Techniques
Augmented Reality
Virtual Reality

Security

Privacy
Surveillance
Biometrics
Internet Security
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)
Web Services and Performance
Secure Transactions
Cryptography
Secure Protocols
Cyber Security

Communications

Connected Machines
Networking
Wireless/ Mobile Communication
Quantum Computing
Satellite Communication Systems
3G/4G Network Evolutions
Mobile Adhoc Networks
Open Spectrum Solutions
Communication Protocols
Cognitive Radio

Electronics

Green Computing
Smart Grids
Sensing and Sensor Networks
E-Waste
Digital Circuits
Analog Circuits & Signal Processing
Design Automation
Computer Aided Network Design
Assembly and Packaging
Systems Architectures

e-Learning

e-Learning Tools
Mobile Learning
e-Learning Organisational Issues
Gamification
Collaborative Learning
Curriculum Content Desig
Educational Systems Design
Virtual Learning Environments
Web-based Learning
Delivery Systems and Environments

e-Business

e-Business Ontologies and Models
e-Commerce Application Fields
e-Commerce Economics
e-Commerce Services
Digital Marketing
Enterprise Resource Planning
Data Analysis
Virtual Organisations
Business Intelligence
Web Analytics

Website of the event: http://www.saiconference.com/FTC2016

Call for papers: http://www.saiconference.com/FTC2016/CallforPapers

Colleagues and friends from Europeana Space and other sister projects celebrated the new platform for accessing and experimenting with cultural heritage, developed by NTUA

Repurpose, Experience, Taste and Rethink Culture, event to present the WITH platform

by Vassilis Tzouvaras (NTUA)

The workshop «Repurpose, Experience, Taste and Rethink Culture», was held on March 22, 2016 at INNOVATHENS, Technopolis, City of Athens. The workshop was organized by the National Technical University of Athens and with the support of PostScriptum. The main aim of the event was to generate new perspectives and facilitate the creative re-use of cultural heritage and associated metadata made available through online digital collections within a framework of creative experimentation and novel dialogue between multidisciplinary sectors, explore the potential of crowdsourcing as a means of promoting increased public participation in core tasks such as collecting, describing, categorizing, or curating heritage collections.

The conference gathered speakers from the National Technical University of Athens, the National Documentation Centre, Onassis Cultural Center, the Athena Research Centre, the Europeana Fashion International Association, PostScriptum, the National History Museum, as well as young enterpreneurs from the creative industry, who presented their ideas and and discussed the impact of digital content to sustainable economic and social development. The event attracted an enthusiastic audience with a creative, practical or strategic interest in culture ranging from content providers to producers, exhibitors, artists, curators and makers of cultural/creative content, architects, archeologists, librarians, museologists publishers, broadcasters, telecoms and distributors of digital content, IT experts.

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Photo credits: Katerina Komninou

The event was divided in 4 sessions, each one representing a thematic category. Session “Repurpose Culture: Creative Reuse”, set the scene of the creative reuse of cultural content and the ways in which users can be engagged in the process, and intrduced the collaborative WITH platform for creative reuse through the Europeana Space project activities. Session “Experience culture: A tour in European projects”, explored the experience of digital culture through different paths and European projects such as EuscreenXL, Europeana Sounds, Europeana Food and Drink and Europeana Fashion. Session “Taste Culture: Food and Drink”, drew into focus the example of food and drink in the digital culture, stressing the importance of reuse of European gastronomic heritage. Session “Rethink culture: Museums and Arts” served to identify and promote creative ways of cultural material reuse in the area of museums and arts.

Throughout those sessions, there was a mix of inspiring talks and lively discussions on cultural heritage discoverability and creative reuse, community engagement and the implicit business potential that lies in this. The demonstration of the newly founded collaborative and interoperable WITH platform, showcased via different applications spaces, attacted the audience’s interest and set the field for further discussion.

Learn more on E-Space Technical Space based on WITH platform.

More photos of the event available on Flickr.

Madrid, 18 - 20 October 2016

Cloud Forward Conference 2016

Following the successful CF2015 conference organised by Promoter srl in Pisa October 2015, the Cloud Forward 2016 Conference: From Distributed to Complete Computing took place in Madrid at the Circulo de Bellas Artes from 18 to 20 October 2016.

>> Check out the full programme and the confirmed speakers. <<

The CF2016 Conference gathered experts from industry and academia to present and discuss the future of and beyond Cloud Computing. Based on the HOLA Cloud project and platform – which documents European research, development and innovation in CLOUDs – the conference reviewed experiences and discusses future directions to overcome problems and provide new opportunities for the utilisation of leading edge CLOUD Computing by industry and academia and for ICT developers providing innovative solutions.

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The conference provided the scientific community a dedicated setting for presenting and discussing innovative technologies in the area of distributed computing, as well as new technologies beyond CLOUDs, ranging from architectures over methodologies to new applications and services.

Integral to the conference, the work of the clusters of experts and EC projects working on ‘beyond current CLOUD’ topics was presented.

The event also hosted a dedicated SME event to investigate innovative technologies, promote business ideas and foster current game-changers arising on the market.

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CF2016 was organised under the auspices of AMETIC, CDTI, Chamber of Commerce, EGI, Madrid+d, UNED and IEEE Cloud Computing Magazine.

For further information, visit the event website: http://cf2016.holacloud.eu

CF2016 website: http://cf2016.holacloud.eu

HOLA CLOUD Website: www.holacloud.eu

Twitter: @HolaCloud #cloudforward2016

An interview with Antonella Fresa who explains how the citizen can be actively engaged in the Research processes on Cultural Heritage

“Roadmap for Citizen Researchers in the Age of Digital Culture” presented in Rome

INTERVIEW with ANTONELLA FRESA (Promoter srl, Technical Coordinator of the CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES project)

The CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES project, funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration, ended on November 2015 but has foreseen a very ambitious programme of dissemination of its research and outcomes.

The project was about the participation of citizens in research on cultural heritage and humanities and its main outcome is the Roadmap for the use of e-Infrastructures to support for improved social cohesion arising from the sharing of knowledge and understanding of Europe’s citizens common and individual cultures.

An iterative process started for the development of the Roadmap which received a lot of feedback and contributions during the life of the CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES project (Requirement analysis, Workshops, online activities, direct exchanges with stakeholders). The Roadmap was intended in facts as a living document, open to contributions from researchers, e-Infrastructure providers, cultural managers, artists, students, teachers, and citizens interested in the matter. An online version of the document is published on the project website where visitors can deliver their comments to improve and ameliorate; it is in other words an instrument offered to the community for free use and re-use.

The Roadmap has been presented to a selected number of different italian stakeholders in Rome, 13 January 2016, in the premises of the Italian Ministry of Economic Development (MISE), which is the public body who coordinated the project. Mauro Fazio has succesfully led the project on behalf of the Italian Ministry.

The experts had the opportunity to discuss about the value of engaging citizens in the research, and about the role that artists can have in terms of introducing innovative practices and mediating between sectors of the society, which are not used to work together.

The encounter has been filmed by TG CULTHER, a local newscast specialized in the themes around the Cultural Heritage, and they realized an interview with Antonella Fresa (Promoter srl – Technical Coordinator of CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES).

The interview (in italian language) is available on You Tube channel and embedded above.

More information about the CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES project are available here and on the project website.