Digital meets Culture

Posted on TownsWeb Archiving blog by Ryan Kyle

JPEG2000 and Digitisation: Expert round table

With digital preservation, and in particular the preservation of digital assets created by digitisation, very much a hot topic in the archives and libraries communities recently; we are being asked more and more frequently by clients which is the “best” image format to use.

Of course the answer is almost always “It depends on your project’s goals.”

But more specifically, we are finding an increasing number asking about JPEG2000. Some are concerned that they might be unable to access their collections in the future if they don’t digitise to JPEG2000, others have a strong trust in tried and tested TIFF files and have some trepidation at switching to a new format, and yet others aren’t completely sure of the advantages JPEG2000 provides over the original JPEG format…

TownsWeb Archiving interviewed four experts (Dave Thompson – Digital Curator, Wellcome Library, Melissa Terras – Director, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, Paul Sugden – Senior Digitisation Consultant, TownsWeb Archiving, Michael Pritchard – Director-General, The Royal Photographic Society) to shed light on JPEG2000 as a format, it’s potential role in digitisation, and it’s suitability for digital preservation.

Read here the whole interview…

Source: TownsWeb Archiving blog

A new beta version of JHOVE 1.12 is now available to download

OPF releases JHOVE 1.12 beta

JHOVE (JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment) is an extensible software framework for performing format identification, validation, and characterisation of digital objects. The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) took over stewardship of JHOVE in February 2015 to provide it with a permanent and sustainable home.

A new beta version of JHOVE 1.12 is now available to download at http://downloads.opf-labs.org/dev/jhove-xplt-installer-dev-latest.jar

The focus of this release is on stability of the code base, so very little code has changed. The JHOVE README provides an overview of the steps we have taken to put in place automated build, testing and deployment, and mavenisation of the code base. The main functional change is that JHOVE now has a dedicated cross-platform installer.

Installation instructions for Windows, Mac and Linux users are here in the README.

Instructions are available for developers to try including the new Maven version in their own projects. It should continue to work identically to the previous version apart from one or two small output details (e.g. version number, mentions of OPF).

We welcome feedback on the new release. Please tell us whether the installer is an improvement on the previous zip distribution package and what we could do to make installation and configuration of JHOVE easier. The best method for providing feedback is by using the JHOVE issue tracker on GitHub. Here is an example of a recently logged and fixed issue.

The JHOVE web page has been restructured to make it easier to navigate. The logo has been refreshed and work will continue on the look and feel over the coming weeks.

A new mailing list for the discussion of use and development of JHOVE is being set up and will be available shortly.

This JHOVE beta release and plans for future development have been made under the guidance of the JHOVE Product Board. OPF members received a preview of this release to test and provide feedback.

To find out more about becoming an OPF member or software supporter visit: http://openpreservation.org/about/join/.

the expert meeting organized by Waag on co-creation was awarded with a wide audience and very interesting insights which feed RICHES research and tools.

“HACK THE AUDIENCE!” event was a success

On Monday October 5th 2015, almost 60 heritage professionals gathered in the Waag’s Anatomical Theatre in Amsterdam and discussed how co-creation can be applied in the heritage sector to create new stories or new connections with audiences.

The session was organized as part of the EU funded RICHES project, the main objective of which is to reduce the distance between people and culture: the focus of the afternoon was, therefore, on the audience and what their potential new relationships with heritage institutions might look like, and on how a co-creation approach could potentially drive this process.

Museum representatives delivered their experience and lessons learnt on co-creative projects in museums; while others talked about inclusiveness and non-exclusivity, citizens/visitors participation and involvement, user-generated new heritage and new meanings of collections and other interesting topics.

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Photos CC BY-NC-SA courtesy of WAAG, more available here

The experts at this meeting gave a beautiful overview of important, co-creation values, and the various pitfalls encountered while trying to uphold these values, which will be integrated and used in the co-creation part of the upcoming RICHES Resources webiste that is currently under construction, which aims to provide heritage professionals with inspiration about how to implement this in their own work

Read more about the day on the entire WAAG’s blogpost here.

Stockholm (Sweden), 13 - 17 June, 2016.

Presenting the Theatrical Past. Interplays of Artefacts, Discourses and Practices

This conference addresses questions concerning our relationship to theatre history, i.e. the relation between present and past. How and why do we deal with history? What do we do with history? To what extent is historical research an exploration of our present?

Organized by the International Federation of Theatre Research, IFTR 2016 focuses on critical perspectives on theatre history. The theatre of the past is accessible to us via historical objects, theoretical discourses and archive materials. But we can also experience it through performance practices that keep traditions alive or engage in re-enactments of theatre events and representations.

Conference takes place in Stockholm on 13-17 June 2016.

A wide Call for Papers was open for the various sections and working groups of the conference, and of particular currency is the call on Digital Humanities in Theatre Research, by the working group with the same name. Papers are welcome that:

explore the theoretical implications of Digital Humanities for our research into
theatre and performance
describe existing cyber projects in theatre and performance research
propose needed digital projects in these fields
explicate problems relating to the pedagogy and technology of such projects (and
perhaps propose solutions to them)
focus on digital theatre history and historiography

Santa Clara, California (USA), 29 October 2015.

III Workshop on Big Humanities Data

Santa Clara convention centre, California, USA

The third IEEE Workshop on Big Humanities Data will be held on Thursday, 29 October 2015, in conjunction with the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2015), which takes place between October 29 and November 1 2015 in Santa Clara, California, USA, and which provides a leading international forum for disseminating the latest research in the growing field of “big data”. This workshop will address applications of “big data” in the humanities, arts, culture and social science and the challenges and possibilities that such increased scale brings for scholarship in these areas.

The use of computational methods in the humanities is growing rapidly, with the increasing quantities of born-digital primary sources (such as archives of emails and social media) and the large-scale digitisation programmes applied to libraries and archives. This has resulted in a range of experiments with new methodologies and new applications. At the same time, humanities and culture research is itself challenged by interpretative issues raised by applying such data-driven methods for answering humanities research questions.

Moreover, the questions and concerns raised by the humanities themselves have consequences for the interpretation in general of “big data”, the uses to which it is put and the challenges of producing quality (meaning, knowledge and value) from quantity. The workshop will thus also address complementary research that uses the humanities and its methods to provide a critical appraisal of “big data” in other areas, both inside and outside academia.

Research topics covered – Topics covered by the workshop include, but are not restricted to, the following:

Text- and data-mining of historical and archival material.
Social media analysis, including sentiment analysis
New research objects for humanities analysis such as digital music, film
Cultural analytics
Social analytics
Crowdsourcing and big data
Cyber-infrastructures for the humanities (for instance, cloud computing)
NoSQL databases and their applications in the humanities
Big data and the construction of memory and identity
Big data and archival practice
Corpora and collections of big data
Linked Data and Big Data
Constructing big data for research in the humanities

Programme Chairs:

Dr. Mark Hedges Department of Digital Humanities King’s College London, UK
Dr. Tobias Blanke Department of Digital Humanities King’s College London, UK
Prof. Richard Marciano College of Information Studies – “Maryland’s iSchool” University of Maryland, USA.

For more info click here

Gathering people from both creative industries and ICT fields in order to exchange ideas on shared strategic collaboration.

E-Space invited in CRe-AM networking session at ICT Lisbon 2015!

In force of the cooperation with sister project CRe-AM, E-Space representatives were invited to join a networking session organized by this latter in the huge EU event ICT 2015, taking place in Lisbon.

The CRe-AM networking session aims to gather people from both creative industries and ICT fields in order to exchange ideas on shared strategic collaboration. It focuses on the role of technologies and actors working as bridges between creative sectors and ICT Research & Development. Representatives of related European large clusters and initiatives will present key examples and analyses, in order to raise awareness among the ICT community about the most recent trends in the creative one. Delegates coming from Design, Art, ePublishing, Gaming, Art and Architecture industries convened to exchange ideas with ICT researchers and developers and to contribute to the discussion.

The session agenda and information are available here, and E-Space is represented by Technical Coordinator dr. Antonella Fresa (Promoter SRL) and Prof. Carla Fernandez (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), who presented the project in general and the Dance Pilot in depth. Particularly the Dance Pro tool was illustrated as a video annotator to work as digital note-book to support choreographic processes.

Other speakers at the session were Jean-Dominique Meunier (NEM) Silvia Boi (TISP project), Luis Miguel Girao (Artshare) and Frederik de Wilde (University of Hasselt).

The main outcome of the CRe-AM networking session will be a set of recommendations for the future ICT European Agenda, in order to maximise its impact on the development and adoption of new technologies for supporting the creative processes, as well as enhance existing tools and platforms to better correspond to the needs of specific creators’ groups. The session will allow the coordination of different EC initiatives working at the bridge of technology and creative industries, and its outcomes will enrich CRe-AM roadmaps with a better understanding of cross-sectorial trends and engagement with potential users.

More info: http://www.cre-am.eu/join-cre-am-at-ict2015/

Important speakers and wide participation awarded the event organized by RICHES project

RICHES POLICY SEMINAR, Brussels, 19 October 2015

“NEW HORIZONS FOR CULTURAL HERITAGE – Recalibrating relationships: bringing cultural heritage and people together in a changing Europe”.

The Policy Seminar of the RICHES project (Renewal, Innovation and Change: Heritage and European Society) just concluded. The scope of the seminar was to discuss how the project can provide insights to support evidence-based policymaking in Europe. The event, organized in cooperation with the Project Officer was held at the Nowotny Auditorium, Covent Garden building of the European Research Council.

The Seminar comprised 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.

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Speakers at the Policy Seminar included personalities and experts as Maria Da Graca Carvalho, Senior Adviser in charge of cultural heritage in the Cabinet of Commissioner Carlos Moedas, DG RTD, Federico Milani, Deputy Head of Unit, DG CONNECT, Unit “Creativity”, Jens Nymand Christensen, Deputy Director General, DG EAC; Prof. Neil Forbes, RICHES Project Coordinator, Coventry University; Dr. Antonella Fresa, RICHES Technical Coordinator; Dr. Artur Serra, i2CAT Foundation; Dr. Dick van Dijk, WAAG Society; Prof. Charlotte Waelde, University of Exeter. Dr. Silvia Costa, MEP, President of the Culture Committee of the European Parliament, was eventually unable to join but delivered a message.

Prof. Gábor Sonkoly, Vice-Dean of International Affairs, Faculty of Humanities – Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest was the chair of a Round table discussion including as pannelists Nathalie Doury, Parisienne de Photographie; Paul Klimpel, Lawyer and expert on IPR for digital cultural heritage; Philippe Keraudren, Deputy Head of Unit, DG RTD, Unit “Reflective Societies”; Victoria Walsh, Professor at the Royal College of Art, London, Head of Programme Curating Contemporary Art.

View here details of the speakers and panellists of the Policy Seminar.

The policies presented by RICHES are related to the need to develop and use a common taxonomy, innovation in copyright frameworks and open access to data and information, and co-creation practices to facilitate innovation in the cultural heritage sector – all with the purpose of overcoming a range of barriers and constraints.

Here you can find the presentations delivered during the Policy Seminar: http://www.riches-project.eu/first-policy-seminar.html

The event was preceded in the morning by a Networking Session where invited participants in EC-funded projects discussed aims and achievements in the light of establishing new, profitable collaborations and synergies. Read more about the 13 project involved here: http://www.riches-project.eu/networking-session.html

The RICHES project office, dr. Zoltán Krasnai, commented the day after the event: “I am very proud of the RICHES project and the policy seminar so professionally organised and managed yesterday. I found the seminar very successful from several points of view: it gave the opportunity for networking among many projects and organisations from much different backgrounds; we had high quality policy updates from DG EAC and the cabinet of Commissioner Moedas; we had concise, very well-structured presentations of the policy recommendations of RICHES and the work of RICHES in general; we had a vivid round-table discussion among enthusiastic professionals with different backgrounds in CH management, research, promotion and policy making. Also, the seminar showed the complexity of research and policy domains covered by cultural heritage and the fragmentation of CH stakeholder communities. Any European policy efforts to move forward a more integrated approach toward cultural heritage has to deal with and overcome this stakeholder fragmentation. I look forward with the greatest interest to the second policy seminar.“

Interested on the RICHES project? Subscribe to the RICHES newsletter to receive updates, by emailing info@riches-project.eu

Follow the project updates on twitter! #richesEU

Panel including E-Space, RICHES, Civic Epistemologies and Photoconsortium was included in this important UK event

From Digitization to Preservation, Creative Re-Use of Cultural Content, and Citizen Participation – goes to DCDC2015

From Digitization to Preservation, Creative Re-Use of Cultural Content, and Citizen Participation is the title and theme of this workshop presented within the conference DCDC2015 Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities, in Manchester on 14 October 2015. Following the good results of the similar panel presented at DH15 in Granada, the workshop presented an overview of initiatives and EU projects such as Europeana Space, RICHES, Civic Epistemologies, Photoconsortium.

DCDC2015: Exploring new digital destinations for heritage and academia brought together over 70 speakers from across the UK, Europe and further afield exploring key questions facing the future of digital engagement.

Neil Forbes and Sarah Whatley from Coventry University, and John Balean international marketing manager of the photographic archive Topfoto.co.uk and member of CEPIC and BAPLA presented the different projects and invited the audience to a question and answer session. This was probably one of the few sessions of the conference that had a confident European focus, most other presentations were focused on UK activities and projects (even though the delegates were international). There was interesting discussion about crowdsourcing, the citizen participation to research and the role researcher possibly being threatened by the apparently popular expectation that all knowledge should be made available for free.

Download the presentation (PDF, 2,8 Mb)

Website of the event: http://www.rluk.ac.uk/dcdc15/. Videos of the sessions will be available in the website.

Rotterdam, 7-8 December 2015

DISH conference upcoming! with 2015 theme: Money and Power

On December 7th and 8th 2015 the next edition of DISH, the conference about digital strategies for heritage, will take place in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The theme for DISH2015 is Money and Power.

About DISH
Digital Strategies for Heritage (DISH) is the bi-annual international conference on digital heritage and the opportunities it offers to cultural organisations. Triggered by changes in society, heritage organisations face many challenges and need to make strategic decisions about their services. This year the fourth edition of the Digital Strategies for Heritage conference is jointly organised by the DEN Foundation (Digital Heritage Netherlands), Het Nieuwe Instituut and Europeana.

Theme and tracks
On the DISH website you can read more about the main theme Money and Power. The four tracks that accompany this theme are: Lose your modesty!, Stand up for yourself!, Lose control, gain influence! and Power to the people!.

Speakers are announced and the preliminary programme is online

For more information and tickets, please see www.dish2015.nl. Have any questions or suggestions? You can reach us contact DISH@den.nl or send a tweet to @DISHconference!

Bangkok, 23-27 November 2015.

VICTA: Visions on Internet of Cultural Things and Applications – workshop at SITIS conference 2015

The international workshop on Visions on Internet of Cultural Things and Applications (VICTA) is part of the 11th International Conference on Signal Image Technology & Internet Based Systems (SITIS 2015), being held in Bangkok, Thailand, on 23-27 November 2015.

The adoption of Future Internet (FI) technology, and in particular of its most challenging components like the Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Services (IoS), can constitute the basic building blocks to progress towards unified ICT platforms for a variety of applications within the large framework of smart cities.
The combination of the Internet and emerging technologies such as near-field and BLE communications, real-time localisation and embedded sensors lets us transform everyday objects into smart objects that can understand and react to their environment.
In the last years, Cultural Heritage has turned out to be one of the most suitable domains in which such achievements can be profitably exploited, since it characterises a domain where several aspects have to be considered at the same time.
In line with SITIS’ tradition of promoting interdisciplinary research, the international workshop on Visions on Internet of Cultural Things and Applications, VICTA 2015, aims to be a profitable informal working day to discuss together hot topics about Internet of Things and its applications to Cultural Heritage.
This second edition of VICTA will be organised by DATABENC, the high technology
district for Cultural Heritage in Campania Region, Italy.

All the papers accepted for the workshop will be included in the conference proceedings. The proceedings will be published by IEEE Computer Society.
Contents will be submitted to the indexing companies for possible indexing. They will be available at the conference.
An extended version of the selected accepted papers will be considered for publication in special issues of a major journal.