Digital meets Culture

IETF 93 in Prague, VideoLAN Dev Days in Paris and much more

Further standardisation of Matroska and FFv1

Here are a few updates about the efforts that PREFORMA is conduction towards the standardisation of Matroska and FFv1 thanks to MediaArea, one of the PREFORMA suppliers that is working in the prototyping phase.

Tessa Fallon and Jerome Martinez, members of MediaArea’s team, facilitated much of the interaction between the project and the IETF, which was determined as the most appropriate standards body to collaborate with. This interaction led to Tessa chairing 35 minutes of conference time at IETF 93 in Prague on the subject of whether the IETF should proceed with efforts to further standardize Matroska and FFV1. Attendance at IETF allowed MediaArea and PREFORMA to establish relationships with IETF members/directors who could assist in coordination of standardization efforts within IETF guidelines and procedures. Representatives from both formats participate in the meeting and subsequent online discussion were carried out with the IETF DISPATCH working group.

Representatives of cultural heritage organizations that use Matroska and FFV1, such as the Austrian Mediathek and the UK National Archives also participated in discussions on these formats directly with IETF representatives. Tessa Fallon has worked with Matroska, FFV1, and Flac (at the request of IETF) communities to draft and propose a working group charter which is currently under consideration by the IETF’s IESG. Prior to the approval and establishment of the working group, much of the work is focused on building relationships and offline coordination and planning.

Dave Rice gave a presentation in Bern, Switzerland discussing the PREFORMA project and discussed it at VideoLAN Dev Days , an “unconference” held in Paris, France. The discussion at VDD included many Matroska users such as representatives from YouTube, Obencoder, and other open media groups on the standardization effort and there was a productive conservation on merging the standardization efforts from Google/YouTube on webM (a Matroska derivative) with the PREFORMA-facilitated IETF work on the Matroska specification. This has led to itemized listserv discussions of proposals to advance the container towards making it more selfdescriptive and futureready, see: http://lists.matroska.org/pipermail/matroskadevel/2015September/thread.html.

Riksarkivet presents PREFORMA at three National events

Updates about the National Working Group in Sweden

Here is an update of the next appointment where you can learn more about PREFORMA in Sweden:

20 October 2015: Börje Justrell and Magnus Geber (Riksarkivet) will give a presentation at a conference arranged by FAI, the largest archival association in Sweden: http://fai.nu/wp-content/uploads/FAI_konferensprogram_www_2015_final.pdf. This will be a general presentation of the project and of how external stakeholders can participate in testing the PREFORMA prototypes.

3 November 2015: Benjamin Yousefi and Magnus Geber (Riksarkivet) will give a presentation at a conference on PDF/A: http://dokumentinfo.se/konferenser/pdfa/. The focus will be on the role of PDF/A at the National Archives of Sweden and in PREFORMA.

4 November 2015: Magnus Geber (Riksarkivet) will give a presentation at a meeting of the network of “Forum iFörvaltning”(information administration): http://www.sis.se/tema/iforvaltning/Forum-iforvaltning-verksamhet/. The network is administered by the Swedish Standardisation body. The presentation will focus on use of standardised file formats for preservation and on how PREFORMA aims to interact with the official standardisation organisations, providing them with useful feedback.

RICHES partner Karol Borowiecki participates with a speech on cultural consumption in the digital age

7th Conference on Cultural and Media Economics

On Thursday 24th and Friday 25th September 2015, at the François-Mitterrand site of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the 7th Conference on Cultural and Media Economics was held, organised by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication’s Department of Studies, Forward-Looking Analysis and Statistics (Département des études, de la prospective et des statistiques – DEPS), the KEDGE Business School’s “Creative Industries, Culture and Sport” research cluster and Sciences Po’s Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies (LIEPP).

Karol Borowiecki, Associate Professor at the Department of Business and Economics at University of Southern Denmark, intervened with a presentation of the RICHES project (whose research objectives, among others, are providing an economic analysis of the impact of taxation and public-private support on the production, distribution and consumption of cultural heritage and an improved understanding of the geography of cultural activities and ways in which fiscal policy can become more efficient in the age of digitisation) and a speech under the title “Europe’s cultural consumption in the digital age: does fiscal policy matter?”.

This year, the conference theme was “Arts, culture and media: how to evaluate public policies?”.
At various regional levels, public authorities intervene in the economic activities of the media, cultural and artistic sectors, whether it be in the form of public expenditure, in the form of fiscal measures, in the form of regulatory provisions or industrial policies, in the form of measures designed to support the job market, in the form of measures regarding the international exchange of goods and services. The evaluation of public policy governing the arts, culture and media is vital in improving our understanding of public action, determining their usefulness and enabling changes to be made to their management.

The 7th Conference on Cultural and Media Economics provided researchers with the opportunity to present and discuss the latest results of the evaluation of the impact of subsidised festivals, the HADOPI Law, educational policy, support for the press and fiscal policy. Discussions focused also on the range of different evaluation methods currently in use, retrospective analysis of public policy and an examination of local experiences.

Download the conference brochure

ONLINE RESOURCES:

An article by Fred Truyen of KU Leuven, coordinator of the E-Space photography pilot

IPR: good or bad for Creativity in the Digital World?

Jan van Eyck. Hubert van Eyck. Lam Gods Open: Our Lady Mary, detail: Dress Collection Glass slides KU Leuven Saint Baafs Cathedral, Ghent Public Domain Marked

In a recently published post on the Cultural Studies Leuven blog, Prof. Fred Truyen (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), coordinator of the E-Space project’s photography pilot, offers some reflections on his experience with Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in the successfully concluded EuropeanaPhotography project, devoted to contributing about 450.000 high quality images of early photography to Europeana. «We spent golden moments just sifting through brilliant collections of early photographs – Truyen writes. «IPR imposed itself as an unwanted burden; a horribly complex but unavoidable issue when you’re dealing with photography […] And an interesting one, I must confess».

In uploading the images, the first glitch appeared with the Europeana “Rights Labelling Campaign”, which for each object uploaded to the digital library tries to identify the copyright status.
Consider that for individual use they are not relevant, but copyrights tend to block any re-use other than personal re-use. This means that «even a teacher who would want to make a website for the students cannot simply copy these images, without checking the copyright».
Furthermore «Private photo agencies, whose business model is completely IPR oriented, feared their older work, when labelled Public Domain, would be reused without them receiving any revenue. Similarly, public archives, who feared misuse of heritage photos (e.g. as backgrounds in video games or commercials), were not at ease».

Certainly, Truyen observes, IPR is essential in order for those who create valuable works to be able to earn and sustain their work, but it’s also certain that with the massive sharing of data in the digital and smartphone age «IPR doesn’t seem very much up to the task».
More generally, Truyen goes on, «copyrights should be embedded in a broader discussion, involving moral and cultural rights. One of those rights is the right to culture! A very convincing proposal has been worked out in the RICHES project policy brief, a must read for anyone interested in Cultural Policy and Creative Industries. Real access to culture means also appropriation by stakeholder communities and the possibility for co-creation».

Read Fred Truyen’s full article

This time Waag interwieved Janine Prins, RICHES member and anthropologist-filmmaker

Co-creation interview series: Q&A with Janine Prins

What are the innovative ways museums can present their collections to the public, in order to benefit all interested audiences and communities?
RICHES partner Waag Society experiments co-creation practices to start a dialogue with the public and come together to create great, new ideas!
Its staff started moreover an interview series where several museums and team members of the RICHES project are asked about their vision on co-creation within the heritage sector.

This time, Waag did a Q&A with Janine Prins, RICHES member and anthropologist-filmmaker.

Who are you and what do you do within the RICHES project?
I am an independent anthropologist-filmmaker, currently affiliated with Leiden University and researcher-in-residence at Waag Society for the RICHES project.

What does the term “co-creation” mean to you, personally?
An opportunity to discover new approaches by letting go of control and inviting others. For instance: instead of me deciding to make a film and directing it, I let others decide the means and content of communication and expression. The result is a collaborative effort, rather than authorial or institutional. I am curious what such interactive processes might bring in terms of innovative narratives and new communication technologies.

Why is heritage important for our society?
It depends very much on how you define “heritage”… I see it as something fluid, constantly being reinterpreted, remixed, reused both institutionally as on a personal basis. Like one of our research assistants from Moroccan descent, Ilias Zian, always says: «I need to know my past in order to design my future». And then, that contemporary remixing may become heritage in the future.

I believe that in increasingly culturally diverse societies the concept of “heritage” itself needs some reevaluation. Think for instance about the heated debates in the Netherlands around Black Pete.

How could the implementation of new technology affect the heritage sector?
In theory it could all become more accessible, playful and interactive. But technology in itself is not the game changer; people and socioeconomic structures are. And these rarely adapt with the same speed as technological changes. The heritage sector is in itself slow – a unique strength – so that is a nice challenge, to combine two different speeds or temporalities as it were.

What have you learned so far from the RICHES project?
To collaborate with professionals outside my own disciplines and most of all: how situational any approach needs to be, how little we can generalise findings.

Do you have any co-creation tips that you would like to share with others?
In my view co-creation methods are rooted in an ongoing tradition since the 1940s, applied mostly abroad in so-called “development” and “aid” work where the “haves” wanted to “empower” perceived “have nots”. This I find problematic. In our own society, including the heritage sector, it often takes the guise of consultation, rather than real equal creation.

So I would first make absolutely clear to all those involved to what extent you intend to actually co-create. How do you intend to define “co-creation”.

And then, to really benefit from this method, recruiting seems key: carefully organise real diversity of perspectives. Allow enough time and preferably a variety of networks and recruiters.

A third “tip” would be: do not seek compromises too quickly. Allow “wild cards” and unruly multiple approaches; agree to disagree.

An open attitude is essential as well for entering such a process whereby you need to learn to view the world from other perspectives, before starting to generate something new together.

Keep updated about the outcomes of the co-creation process on the dedicated section of the RICHES website!

Interview by Kate Murray with PREFORMA MediaConch’s Project Manager Dave Rice and Archivist Ashley Blewer

Improving Technical Options for Audiovisual Collections through the PREFORMA Project

The digital preservation community is a connected and collaborative one. I first heard about the Europe-based PREFORMA project last summer at a Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative meeting when we were discussing the Digital File Formats for Videotape Reformatting comparison matrix. My interest was piqued because I heard about their incorporation of FFV1 and Matroska, both included in our matrix but not yet well adopted within the federal community. I was drawn first to PREFORMA’s format standardization efforts – Disclosure and Adoption are two of the sustainability factors we use to evaluate digital formats on the Sustainability of Digital Formats website – but the wider goals of the project are equally interesting.

In this interview, I was excited to learn more about the PREFORMA project from MediaConch’s Project Manager Dave Rice and Archivist Ashley Blewer.

Read the full interview at http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2015/09/improving-technical-options-for-audiovisual-collections-through-the-preforma-project/!

Source: The Signal

http://www.digitalmeetsculture.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/rch_flyer_digitallibraries_exe.pdf

RICHES Digital Libraries, Collections, Exhibitions and Users Flyer

Open Source Meetup at IBC in Amsterdam

PREFORMA presented at IBC 2015

Erwin Verbruggen from the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision presented PREFORMA at the EBU Open Source Meetup at IBC 2015 in Amsterdam.

The presentation, which is available for download here, focused on the media conformance checking of AV files.

MediaConch, the conformance checker for AV files that is developed by MediaArea in the framework of PREFORMA, was also presented at the Conference. The presentation is available here.

Just like last year, the Open Source Meetup at IBC featured a series of 5 minutes lightning talks on open source projects and use cases from the broadcast domain, covering topics on production, contribution and distribution, such as: graphics and video play-out, audio & video encoding, transcoding in the cloud, DAB+ radio broadcasting, …. for further information visit the Conference website.

Pisa, 8-11 October 2015

#IF2015: Space for the Digital Revolution

Internet Festival 2015 took place on 8-11 October, as every year in Pisa. One of the most important European events dedicated to the digital world, IF is an unmissable date to understand what the technological innovation can represent for the future of Italy and the Italians.
The meeting provideed a programme packed with appointments and hundreds of guests. Space is the topic of this edition 2015: how it, and the perception of it, has changed in time.

The Web changes the space. Which becomes multidimensional due to cultural, economic, social and political dynamics, upset by digitisation and constantly mutating.
The web’s geographies help “designing/imagining the world” and “governing” the world’s complexity through innovation, which balances two different needs: understanding and planning.
If geography means “drawing the world”, then its coordinates are routes using new reference points to move within the digital ecosystem. Modern explorers follow routes that run along inclines and directions driving the development of the relations and information flow.

#IF2015 was held in friendship with the conference “Cloud Forward 2015 – From Distributed to Complete Computing“.