Digital meets Culture

veraPDF is building the definitive, open source PDF/A validator

veraPDF 0.12 released alongside first version of wiki validation rules

The latest software release features improved PDF/A-2b and PDF/A-3b validation and the fully featured REST API.

veraPDF 0.12 has the following features:

Conformance checker:

PDF/A-2 and PDF-A/3 improvements: implemented checks for optional content, JPEG2000 requirements
full compliance with BFO test suite (PDF/A-2b)
PDF/A-1b fix: check for form field appearance
code refactoring to enable PDF model implementation via different PDF parsers
performance and memory optimization

Test corpus:

full coverage of all predefined XMP properties

Documentation:

The first version of the wiki identifying all PDF/A validation rules is availabe at: https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-validation-profiles/wiki

Infrastructure:

veraPDF-library project refactored into multiple projects
PDF Box validator implementation in separate project
Automated source packaging with dependencies
Corpus test results published online

The veraPDF validation engine implements the PDF/A specification using formalisations of each requirement in PDF/A-1, PDF/A-2 and PDF/A-3. The wiki determines each rule used by the software and provides details on the error(s) triggering a failure of the rule.

Download veraPDF 0.12 at: http://downloads.verapdf.org/rel/verapdf-installer.zip

Release notes are published at: https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/releases/tag/v0.12.4

veraPDF is building the definitive, open source PDF/A validator. Please download and test the software. If you encounter problems, or wish to make suggestions, please add them to the project’s GitHub issue tracker. Your feedback is very important, it helps to improve the software.

European Policy Brief. Food Heritage and Culture: Changing Spaces of Production and Consumption. (March 2016).

RICHES: policy brief on food and cultural heritage

The aim of this RICHES policy brief is to highlight the growth of community-led food initiatives and the changing spaces of food production and consumption. It shows how food culture can be a force for change and how citizens can co-create cultural heritage around food. It provides some brief examples of community-led food initiatives and makes recommendations for policies which are needed to enable these to thrive.

The research makes clear that across Europe, there has emerged a dynamic vein of community-led food initiatives, which seek to reconnect people with food cultures that have been threatened by the rise of convenience and fast foods, the erosion of food knowledge and skills, and the emergence of monocultures in food and farming. Such projects have potential to revive endangered practices of food production, and at a community level, can contribute to the transmission of knowledge and skills about food, the preservation of food heritage, and improved understanding and tolerance between different socio-economic groups.

The Policy Brief on Food and CH, led by the experts of Coventry University, has just been released and can be downloaded at the RICHES Resources website HERE.

You can also download the RICHES flyer on Food and Cultural Heritage in the Urban Age: the Role of Local Food Movements (PDF, 1,7 Mb)

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).

The event introduced the tools developed by E-Space Dance Pilot through a series of practical workshops

E-Space Digital Dance Day in Coventry

by Hetty Blades and Rosamaria Cisneros, Coventry, University (UK).

As part of the EU funded Europeana Space (E-Space) project, C-DaRE held its Digital Dance Day March 16th, 2016, to showcase two recently developed digital tools for dance practice and scholarship.

E-Space is a three-year project, now in its third year, which examines the creative reuse of cultural heritage across a range of art and media forms. As part of the project researchers at C-DaRE have teamed up with partners from New University Lisbon and IN2 to develop two digital tools to facilitate and encourage creative engagement with digital dance content.

DancePro is a digital annotation tool, which allows users to inscribe on top of live streamed and recorded footage. It is designed for use during and after the creative process, allowing artists to notate their work and draw attention to key features. The tool allows for aspects of choreographic thinking to be communicated across disciplines and has great potential for use in educational contexts.

DanceSpaces is an online portal that allows users to search, collate and organise dance content. It facilitates the development of virtual exhibitions, specialist educational resources, and expansive collections of online and personal content.

E-Space Digital Dance Day from Rosamaria E. Kostic Cisneros on Vimeo.

The E-Space Digital Dance Day introduced the tools through a series of practical workshops led by Sarah Whatley, Rosa Cisneros and Hetty Blades. The morning session explored the potentials of annotation in studio contexts and participants had the opportunity to experiment with using DancePro in their own practice, and explore the multiple ways they can be used for research and education. The afternoon session looked at ‘remixing’ dance, using DanceSpaces to source, learn, re-make, and share online content. The Pilot explored embodied interaction with digital dance, developing new works and collections for submission to an online dance exhibition.

Photos credit: KoZin Photography

Jasná, Slovakia, 14-16 March 2016

PREFORMA presented at ILIDE 2016, Innovative Library in Digital Era

Antonella Fresa, Technical Coordinator of PREFORMA, presented the project at the 19th edition of the ILIDE Conference.

The presentation focused in particular on the open source approach and on the forthcoming testing phase, showing how the conformance checkers can be used and integrated in other systems.

ILIDE, Innovative Library in Digital Era, is the continuation of well-known and prestigious Digital Library Conference and brings together digital preservation, digital collections access and digital processing experts from around the world. The presentations were delivered by leading representatives of the most important institutions dedicated to librarianship, archiving, information technology, cultural and collecting activities.

For further information please visit the Conference website.

Athens, 22 March 2016

Repurpose, Experience, Taste and Rethink Culture

How to creatively reuse & participate in digital culture: an event organized by NTUA with the support of PostScriptum, to present the WITH platform technology that is at the basis of E-Space Technical Space.

This one day conference brought together speakers from the ICT, Creative Industries and Cultural Heritage communities to present and discuss the impact of digital content on sustainable economic and social development.

It highlighted the growing efforts to share the wealth of cultural resources, research and knowledge found in institutional repositories in order to promote creativity, generated innovation and lead to richer interpretations of the past that improve our understanding of the national and European identity.

The event aimed 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.

During the event, 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 newly founded collaborative WITH platform was be demonstrated via focused presentations and showcased with applications to different spaces: Audio-Visual, Food & Drink, Museums & Art, Smart Cities.

Event’s page: http://mint-events.image.ntua.gr/

Visit event’s page in other websites:

Europeana: http://pro.europeana.eu/events…

FB: https://www.facebook.com/events… NTUA

PostScriptum: http://www.postscriptum.gr/events …

ERT: http://www.ert.gr/…

Brussels, 8 April 2016

EC Workshop on CULTURES & CITIZENSHIP: RESEARCH & INNOVATION

Friday, 8 April 2016, 9.00-16.00
Brussels, Covent Garden, 9th floor, room 183 (COV2 9.0183)
16, Place Charles Rogier, BE-1210 Brussels

This workshop gathered projects on Social Sciences and Humanities
that focus on different aspects of cultures and citizenship.

Agenda and speakers

8.45 Registration and welcome coffee
9.00 Welcoming address
Elisabeth Lipiatou, Head of Unit B.6, Open and Inclusive Societies, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, European Commission
9.20 RICHES Renewal, Innovation and Change: Heritage and European Society
Neil Forbes, Coventry University, United Kingdom
9.40 CULTURALBASE Social Platform on Cultural Heritage and European Identities
Arturo Julio Rodriguez Morato, University of Barcelona, Spain
10.00 MEMOLA MEditerranean MOntainous LAndscapes: an historical approach to cultural heritage based on traditional agrosystems
María Teresa Bonet García, Arqueoandalusí – Arqueología y Patrimonio
10.20 CRE8TV.EU Creativity for Innovation & Growth in Europe
Mickael Benaim, University of Manchester, United Kingdom
10.40 Coffee break
11.00 MIME Mobility and Inclusion in Multilingual Europe
Francois Grin, University of Geneva, Switzerland
11.20 ATHEME Advancing the European Multilingual Experience
Lisa Cheng, Leiden University, The Netherlands
11.40 DIMECCE Defining and Identifying Middle Eastern Christian Communities in Europe
Fiona McCallum, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom
12.00 Discussion & Conclusions of the Morning Session
Sylvie Rohanova and Zoltán Krasznai, Policy Officers, Unit B.6, Open and Inclusive Societies, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, European Commission

12.30 Sandwich lunch

13.40 bEUcitizen All Rights Reserved? Barriers towards EUropean CITIZENship
Sybe de Vries, Europa Institute, Utrecht University
14.00 LIVEWHAT Living with Hard Times: How European Citizens Deal with Economic Crises and Their Social and Political Consequences
Marco Gabriele Giugni, University of Geneva, Switzerland
14.20 RESCuE Patterns of Resilience during Socioeconomic Crises among Households in Europe
Markus Promberger, The Institute for Employment Research (IAB), Germany
14.40 SOLIDUS Solidarity in European societies: empowerment, social justice and citizenship
Marta Soler Gallart, University of Barcelona, Spain
15.00 Coffee break
15.20 TransSOL – European paths to transnational solidarity at times of crisis: Conditions, forms, role-models and policy responses
Ulrike Zschache, University of Siegen, Germany
15.40 Discussion & Conclusions of the Workshop
Yuri Borgmann-Prebil, Policy Officer, Unit B.6, Open and Inclusive Societies, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, European Commission
End of the Workshop

Download the Agenda in PDF

Pilots applications were displayed and many attendees were interested and wanted to learn more on the project

Digital Echoes Symposium 2016: Dance Pilot and Games Pilot on show

by Hetty Blades and Rosamaria Cisneros, Coventry University (UK)

The Europeana Space Dance and Games Pilot joined forces and organised the 6^th edition of the Digital Echoes Symposium. The event took place at Coventry University in the UK on Friday March 4^th 2016. The day opened with a keynote by Professor Matthew Fuller (Goldsmith University) “Just Fun Enough to go Completely Mad About: on games, procedures and amusement” and welcomed a number of experts in dance, arts and humanities, and saw a range of practitioners who are critically engaging with archival material.

[Show as slideshow]

We invited contributions that considered the impacts of public/user participation on archival practice and research, and their legacy for the future. The symposium saw a series of presentations that ranged from a silent lecture by C-DaRE’s own PhD student, Emilie Gallier, whose instructions led participants to manipulate and dance with archival material, to case studies and projects by leading artists and researchers who are working in an interdisciplinary fashion of bringing Cultural Heritage and the arts and/or dance together through the use of archival practices. C-DaRE’s visiting researcher, Monica Dantas, also presented her work on the process of building a dance archive in Southern Brazil and referenced C-DaRE’s Siobhan Davies RePlay archive (http://www.siobhandaviesreplay.com/sdda) as a key pillar of her research.

In addition to organizing the event, the Pilots set up their applications and allowed delegates to engage with the tools. The two applications DanceSpaces and DancePro were on display as well as the Games Pilot’s casual, educational and social games. The Europeana Space corner was frequented throughout the day and many participants spoke with the Pilot coordinators to gain more knowledge on Europeana, Europeana Space and its various activities.

The event titled (Re)Collecting the Past:(Re)Making the Future, focused on participation as one of the most prominent legacies of the digital, in particular how it invokes processes of collectivity, democratisation and decentering. The tools were a great asset to the day as they allowed users to see how the re-use of digital content can be (re)worked to support new ways of (re)making the future.

Learn more on the Dance Pilot: http://www.europeana-space.eu/dance-pilot/

Learn more on the Games Pilot: http://www.europeana-space.eu/games-pilot/

photos credit to Koko Zin

Results of the EC concertation meeting for PCP projects

The third concertation meeting for on-going PCP projects in DG Connect, organised by the European Commission in Brussels on 10 March 2015, gave the opportunity to the attendees to network and share experiences on common issues that they face while implementing PCPs.

The meeting started with a plenary session, which provided an update on the state of play of PCP implementation, including the main lessons learned so far, indications how to prepare the deployment of the innovative solution through PPI already during the PCP, and a presentation of the new Horizon 2020 CNECT PCP projects.

In the afternoon, two paralles workshops took place, the first one dedicated to the ongoing FP7 project to discuss how to test, assess and evaluate the results of the PCP and how to measure its impact, the second one dedicated to the new H2020 projects, to discuss how to carry out the market consultation and how to prepare the invitation to tender.

Antonella Fresa, Technical Coordinator of PREFORMA, presented the methodology and approach to evaluate and improve the software prototypes, i.e. how set up a framework and an infractucture that allows to “train” the tools during the prototyping phase and to evaluate them during the testing phase.

Download here the agenda of the meeting.

Download here the presentation by PREFORMA.

Prof. Fred Truyen participated with a lecture about the actitvities of E-Space in the domain of the education, also announcing the upcoming MOOC.

E-Space at INTED 2016

by Clarissa Colangelo, KU Leuven

From the 7^th till the 9^th of March 2016, the 10th annual International Technology, Education and Development Conference took place in Valencia, Spain. Every year, INTED brings together more than 700 delegates from 80 different countries, providing the opportunity to present own projects, research and innovative methods in teaching and learning. It is a platform to discuss the latest developments in the field of teaching and learning methodologies, educational projects, innovations and new technologies applied to education and research, with experts from all over the world.

Among the various sessions and panels of the interesting and large conference program, E-Space was present. Prof Fred Truyen (KU Leuven, coordinator of the E-Space Photography pilot and president of Photoconsortium) didn’t miss the opportunity to give a lecture about the contribution of Europeana and Europeana Space to education during the session dedicated to Open Educational Resources. His talk focused on the Europeana portal and collections, right labels, the E-Space Educational channel and the upcoming E-Space MOOC.

The Conference Proceedings, among which is the article by Fred Truyen “MOOCs and Online Learning: the Contribution of Europeana to Education”, will soon be available online, in the iated Digital Library.

Read the Photography pilot blog HERE.

Jasná (Slovakia), 14-16 March 2016

Innovative Libraries In a Digital Environment

For the 19th time, the beautiful surroundings of Low Tatras will create a scenery for the ILIDE 2016 Conference where as usually the digital preservation, digital collections access and digital processing experts from around the world will gather.

The conference is the continuation of well-known and prestigious Digital Library Conference. The organisers felt that the name should reflect the broader area of topics the conference has recently presented and ilide: Innovative Library in Digital Era fully represents the conference’s broader scope. However, the ilide2016conference is not losing its attractive atmosphere and remains a unique opportunity to connect with library professionals, who work in a variety of government, academic and private sectors.

The presentations will be given by leading representatives of the most important institutions dedicated to librarianship, archiving, information technology, cultural and collecting activities.

Antonella Fresa, from Promoter srl, Technical Coordinator of PREFORMA, will present the project, focusing in particular on the open source approach and on the forthcoming testing phase, showing how the conformance checkers can be used and integrated in other systems.