Digital meets Culture

Developing a common framework of CH-related terms, definitions and explanation

Released the RICHES Taxonomy policy brief

Seattle Library, internal framework (Wikimedia commons)

As cultural heritage (CH) institutions are rethinking and remaking themselves, shifting from traditional to renewed practices of CH representation and promotion, using new technologies and digital facilities, new meanings associated with terms such as “preservation”, “digital library” or “virtual performance” emerge every day. With the absence of a common Taxonomy in Europe, a variety of definitions of these CH-related concepts are shared and used interchangeably, making the task of research and recognition difficult.

The new RICHES policy brief, published on the project website under the title “RICHES Taxonomy of cultural heritage definitions”, presents evidence and recommendations emerging from the research undertaken to develop the RICHES Taxonomy of terms, concepts and definitions, which aims to: ensure appropriate academic, professional and technical standards for research are met in identifying, analysing and understanding both existing ways and new models for defining CH and CH practices; develop a common CH language to serve the interests of the wider CH community, including policy-makers, cultural ministries of member states, regional, national and state authorities, public administrations, European institutions and researchers and professionals generally. This policy brief aims to consider whether CH communities have a clear understanding and a coherent framework to use when addressing social and cultural issues, including technical, organisational, legal, economic and educational issues and the question of standards and audit/certification. The RICHES Taxonomy addresses the rise of new CH concepts, considering their multiple dimensions and their meanings, which can vary and shift in unpredictable and unexpected ways. RICHES has acknowledged that there is currently a genuine lack of a clear, shared understanding of what CH is, how it is interpreted and communicated differently in the digital age and what questions it should be seeking to answer for the future. The Taxonomy has been developed in response to the emergence of new terms and concepts that are used in the context of CH in contemporary European society. Of particular significance in this respect is the way digital environments have impacted upon the management, interpretation, communication, preservation and reception of CH (for instance, terms such as “digital archiving”, “digital curation” and “digital preservation” are now commonly used).

Download the RICHES Taxonomy policy brief (PDF)

Two policy briefs by the RICHES project published on the official website of the European Commission

RICHES’ policy briefs in the e-Library of the EC

“RICHES Taxonomy of cultural heritage definitions”. “Digital Copyright Framework. The move from analogue to digital and new forms of IPR”. These the titles of the two policy briefs produced by the RICHES project and recently published by the European Commission (EC), in the e-Library of the Social Sciences and Humanities section of the Directorate General Research and Innovation.
«Getting policy insights at a glance, discovering thought-provoking results and comparisons in Europe, checking quickly a methodology. This is why the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities (SSH) programme publishes policy briefs: to communicate research results in a structured way in only a few pages». So the EC clarifies its concrete objective of “disseminating research success through policy”. Objective pursued by RICHES too, whose papers (policy papers, foresight studies and recommendations) are conceived as evidence-based resources into which the main research outputs produced by the project are distilled. These practical resources are intended to provide support and advice to decision-makers at all levels, including policy makers, programme owners, cultural managers, public administrators and private entrepreneurs.

The first mentioned policy brief (RICHES Taxonomy of cultural heritage definitions) presents evidence and recommendations emerging from the research undertaken to develop the project’s “Taxonomy of terms, concepts and definitions”, which aims to: ensure appropriate academic, professional and technical standards for research are met in identifying, analysing and understanding both existing ways and new models for defining cultural heritage (CH) and cultural heritage practices; develop a common CH language to serve the interests of the wider CH community, including policy-makers, cultural ministries of member states, regional, national and state authorities, public administrations, European institutions and researchers and professionals generally.
The second one (Digital Copyright Framework. The move from analogue to digital and new forms of IPR) describes how European policy-makers and European CH institutions should develop European copyright policies and strategies for the CH sector using the rights to culture and cultural rights as guiding principles. The impact is to lay emphasis on inter alia access to culture, cultural integrity and cultural communication and to develop ways in which copyright can support those goals.

The documents are available also on the website of RICHES, which has other policy papers in the works…so stay tuned on www.riches-project.eu!

Visit the EC e-library

To promote the use and quality check of common standards for text digitisation and long term preservation.

MoU signed with Impact Centre of Competence in digitisation

A Memorandum of Understanding has been signed between PREFORMA and the Impact Centre of Competence in digitisation for the promotion and presentation of the respective results and for the organisation of joint events and other activities, focusing in particular on the use and quality check of common standards for text digitisation and long term preservation.

PREFORMA (www.preforma-project.eu) is a Pre-Commercial Procurement project co-funded by the European Commission within the framework of the FP7 ICT Programme (Grant Agreement 612789) with the aim to address the challenge of implementing good quality standardised file formats for preserving data content in the long term and to give memory institutions full control of the process of the conformity tests of files to be ingested into archives.

IMPACT Centre of Competence in digitisation (http://digitisation.eu) is a not for profit organisation with the mission to make the digitisation of historical printed text “better, faster, cheaper”. It provides tools, services and facilities to further advance the state-of-the-art in the field of document imaging, language technology and the processing of historical text.

First public prototype of veraPDF’s validation software released

veraPDF consortium issues first public software release

The first public prototype of veraPDF’s validation software has been released. The software can be downloaded at: http://downloads.verapdf.org/rel/veraPDF-library-GUI-0.2.0.zip.

veraPDF is developing the definitive open source, file-format validator for all parts and conformance levels of ISO 19005 (PDF/A). The software is designed to meet the needs of memory institutions responsible for preserving digital content for the long term. The project is led by the Open Preservation Foundation and the PDF Association and is supported by leading members of the PDF software development community through their Technical Working Group.

This initial public release of veraPDF’s software is incomplete, and is not to be used as a validator; it is currently more a proof of concept than a usable file format validator. The release notes are published at: https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/releases/latest

veraPDF’s website is now up at http://verapdf.org/. The site contains information on the project’s software and roadmap, the team behind it, and how you can get involved.

If you’d like to keep up to date with veraPDF’s progress, and be among the first to find out when new software is available sign up to our email list: http://verapdf.org/subscribe/.

About

The veraPDF consortium is a unique collaboration, bringing together an end user community of digital preservationists and a software industry rooted in the principle of interoperability based on ISO standardised technology to develop the definitive conformance checker for PDF/A. veraPDF is funded by the PREFORMA project.

PREFORMA

(PREservation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives) is a Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) project co-funded by the European Commission under its FP7-ICT Programme.

Derry-Londonderry, 11-20 September 2015

CultureTECH: Northern Ireland’s Innovation Festival

This year, CultureTECH festival is being held on 11-20 September 2015.
The event takes place each September in Derry-Londonderry. Every year the organisers work closely with a variety of partners who help design the programme. The festival is open access, so there’s room for anyone who wants to go and get involved!

First edition in 2012 was organised in a little over 4 months and focused on industry with a fringe of public facing events; it lasted 3 and a half days and attracted around 8.000 people.
For 2013, the CultureTECH team decided to up the ante in line with Derry’s term as the inaugural UK City of Culture. They ran for a full week, shifted the focus to incorporate more public events and carried out their first “Junior” programme for schools. Around 24.000 people attended, including 8.000 students.
2014 was undoubtedly the best event to date, attracting over 43.000 attendees across 200+ events hosted by 134 partner organisations. The festival brought the education strand into the main fold of the programme (with 16.000 students taking part) and shifted even further towards a family-friendly programme that encourages everyone to get hands-on with technology. Highlights included an enormous Minecraft event, a conference designed and delivered by young people, a HD video dome, Friday Night Mashup, DANI Awards and the launch of the NW Regional Science Park.

For 2015 (Sept 11-20), CultureTECH has even more ambitious plans. The festival is now squarely aimed at an audience of young people and families and the team is planning for in excess of 60.000 people. They are partnering with the BBC’s Make It Digital for a huge public engagement programme, they will host CoderDojo’s annual global conference and will crank up the volume on their gaming events. Attendees can expect 5 industry conferences and Ireland’s largest Maker exhibition.

For more info visit the Culture TECH website

Coventry, 16 July 2015; 6.30 – 7.30pm (new time for this month only!)

Emerge Networking on Tour: Coventry MakerSpace

This month Emerge Networking is at Coventry MakerSpace – Make, Build, Learn, Hack, Create, Socialise. Based at the Koco Community Resource Centre, the Makerspace is a membership-run organisation that provides people in Coventry with the tools (and space) needed to complete projects. You can learn a new skill, try out new tools and socialise with like-minded makers.

Richard Knowles, founding Director of Makerspace, will talk about the space, its membership model and philosophy and there will be opportunities to tour the space and try out tools and resources.

Following the talks there will be plenty of time for Q & A and networking and refreshments will be available.

Emerge is an informal networking event for creative people which takes place on the 3rd Thursday of each month. It’s a chance to make new contacts and keep up to date with news and opportunities in the region. It’s managed by the Creative Enterprise team and is part funded by ERDF, Coventry University and Coventry City Council.

Where: Coventry MakerSpace, Koco Community Resource Centre, 15 Arches Industrial Estate, Coventry CV1 3JQ.

Emerge is a free event but please click here to reserve your place.

For further info visit creativeenterprisecoventry and coventrymakerspace.

July 2015 – Sustainability of E-Space

workshop organized in the framework of PSValueTalks, 2-day conference in Athens, by E-Space partner PostScriptum

E-Space @ Digital infrastructure and Value Production in Culture

The two-day conference PS Value Talks Digital Sustainability – New prospects for museums and cultural organizations called on 22nd and 23 of May 2015 dleading representatives of European Union institutions to talk about six themes and present the newest trends in the management and promotion of cultural heritage goods with emphasis on the components of our digital world and the contribution of the institutional managers of cultural heritage to the sustainable development of the societies to which they belong. Prominent Greek representatives of national universities and cultural institutions had been invited as speakers and moderators towards a fruitful and constructive dialogue with the participation of the audience. The Minister of Culture Mr. Nikos Xydakis and Mayor of Athens Mr. Yorgos Kaminis delivered salutation.

The conference was organized by PostScriptum LTD in cooperation with Innovathens hub of the City of Athens and the Greek Free /Open Source Software Society (GFOSS), in the context of the celebration of International Museum Day 2015 “Museums for a Sustainable Society” and was under the auspices of the Greek Section of ICOM (International Council of Museums).

The first day 22 May a workshop on Digital infrastructure and value production in culture analysed how providing data to different repositories as well as participating in their research and strategic programs contribute to the sustainability of cultural reference organizations and what is meant by the virtuous cycle of the data value chain.

The workshop included speeches from Evi Sahini, “Transforming the integrated digital space of science and culture”, and Harry Verwayen, “Museums@Europeana” .

Following, other interesting themes were tackled in two other sessions:

OpenGLAM – Cultural Organizations Open and Reusable Content including speeches of Prodromos Tsiavos: “One Way Road? Open GLAM Trends”, Peter Gorgels: “Rijksstudio – make your own masterpiece” and Filippos Mazarakis-Ainian: “The endeavor of an old museum: The transition in the era of image in the National Historical Museum

and Management of cultural heritage and the creative industries with speeches of Vasilis Avdikos: “New trends and policies to support the creative economy”, Ingrid Maria Meijer: “Etsy empowers makers to stimulate creative diversity in Art” and Despina Geroulanou: “Benaki Museum shops: Creative spaces of cultural heritage management”

The whole event was a great occasion for dissemination of Europeana Space, to showcase the value of content re-use, to present the project and to establish contact and dialogue with representatives of external targeted organisations and other initiatives and stakeholders.

The event attracted about 200 attendees and 1754 viewers in the live streaming, representing the Culture and Academic sectors next to Policy Makers, Media and agencies & Industry (ICT, Development, Designers, Google etc).

Website of the event: http://psvaluetalks.gr/en/

The playlist of the speeches is available here

big dissemination efforts for the E-Space pilot on Open and Hybrid Publishing

Photomediations: An Open Book on tour

by Kamila Kuc and Joanna Zylinska, Goldsmiths

Photomediations: An Open Book, (http://www.photomediationsopenbook.net), produced by one of the pilots of the Europeana Space, has recently enjoyed an enthusiastic response from a variety of international audiences. Kamila Kuc gave a talk at the Archives of/For the Future NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies) annual conference in Lodz, Poland (18-20 June 2015) titled ‘Photomediations: An Open Book: Writing and Curating Visual Arts Online’. The talk explored the nature of this innovative digital platform in relation to the traditional book as a paper object. Part of the ‘Post-Internet-Archives in Digital Aesthetics’ panel, the presentation used Photomediations: An Open Book as a case study to argue for the need to experiment with new ways of displaying textual and visual content online by using resources under Creative Commons and other open licenses.

Photomediations: An Open Book was also the key concern of Kuc’s other talk, presented at the Transformative Practice and Theory: Where We Stand Today MeCCSA conference at Coventry University (2-3 July 2015). Part of the ‘Immersive, Mobile and Interactive Communications’ panel, her paper, titled ‘Photomediations: An Open Book: The Book as Curated Object’, concentrated on the wider debates about, and possibilities enabled by, open access and hybrid publishing. By looking at the book-as-a-curated-object, Kuc also explored new ways of curating online content in the digital age. She discussed issues of authorship, collaboration, interactivity and ethical responsibilities that are raised by the engagement with various forms of reading at a time when the book’s modes of production, distribution, organisation and consumption are affected by the shift from analogue to digital and from codex to net.

Last but not least, the pilot leader Joanna Zylinska gave a presentation about Photomediations: An Open Book at the Radical Open Access conference in Coventry (15-16 June 2015). The conference was designed as a space for critical discussion and debate in support of an ‘alternative’ vision for open access and scholarly communication, beyond its dominant corporate and institutional models. Its aim was to explore some of the intellectually and politically exciting ways of understanding open access that are currently available internationally – predominantly in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Our Europeana pilot found itself in rather good company, which included the following international open access presses and initiatives: BABEL Working Group, Culture Machine, CLACSO, Journal of Radical Librarianship, Mattering Press, MayFly Books, Minor Compositions, MediaCommons Press, MLA Commons, Meson Press, Open Humanities Press, Open Knowledge Foundation, Punctum Books, Scalar, Spheres, tripleC and Vectors.

The conference ended with a ‘call to arms’: a proposal to start a horizontal collaborative consortium of radical open access initiatives worldwide. Under the umbrella of our sister project Photomediations Machine, we will be a founder member of this consortium.

A report on scientific and research impacts to the European Commission and IMPACT-EV

RICHES for achieving impact through SSH

Unit B6 “Reflective Societies” of DG Research & Innovation of the European Commission (EC) is currently working with the project IMPACT-EV (Evaluating the Impacts and Outcomes of EU SSH research) on a report entitled “The ex-post evaluation of SSH projects funded under the FP7 Cooperation Programme (2007-2013)”. Aim of the report is to monitor and evaluate the social, political and scientific impacts of Social Science and Humanities (SSH) research from a SSH perspective, in order to illustrate the relevance and importance of SSH research in our societies.

RICHES, ongoing project about «the decentring of culture and cultural heritage away from institutional structures towards the individual and about the questions which the advent of digital technologies is posing in relation to how we understand, collect and make available Europe’s cultural heritage», recently gave its contribution to the survey by delivering to the EC and the IMPACT-EV consortium a review of its scientific and research activities:

six publications, among which a book, on the topic “cultural heritage in a changing world”, being released at the end of the project, and three policy briefs (1_Digital Copyright Framework. The move from analogue to digital and new forms of IPR – describing how European policy-makers and European cultural heritage institutions should develop European copyright policies and strategies for the cultural heritage sector using the rights to culture and cultural rights as guiding principles; 2_RICHES Taxonomy of cultural heritage definitions – presenting evidence and recommendations arising from the research undertaken to develop the RICHES Taxonomy of terms, concepts and definitions, referred to the new emerging meanings of the digital era; 3_Co-creation strategies: from incidental to transformative – giving a short overview of the potential benefits of co-creative methods in the cultural heritage sector and a number of suggestions to further stimulate co-creation in cultural heritage on a strategic level) soon available on the project’s website;
participation in many conferences around Europe and outside (by invitation or submission), to present the project, disseminate its key messages and its underway activities and to establish new collaborations and synergies with SSH-sector experts and professionals;
organisation of two workshops (1_Building the project’s foundation – brainstorming and crowdsourcing session devoted to the development of the RICHES Taxonomy; 2_The context of change and the move from analogue to digital – exploring how the ways cultural heritage is made, held, collected, curated, exhibited or simply exists have completely changed in the 21st century), three co-creation sessions, one international conference (Cultural Heritage: Recalibrating Relationships – attended by over 150 people from all over the world and aimed at presenting the initial project results), one seminar on “The Romani Community in Coventry: Digital Practices, Cultural Identity and Cultural Change” and one international meeting on “Food and Cultural Heritage in the Digital Urban Age. A workshop to explore the role of local food-based social movements in constructing European cultural heritage and identity”;
underway international collaborations with 4 other projects (Civic Epistemologies, E-Space, MeMoLa and EMEE) and with 22 research/culture organisations;
launch of a national e-learning project, for a networked school in digital cultural heritage arts and humanities, arisen from the RICHES collaborations;
employment of 37 researchers (out of them 16 junior researchers) within the project.

Such so far the main outcomes of RICHES, which next year is concluding its lifetime with the objective to trigger a process of political developments and social improvements…Stay tuned!

Visit impact-ev.eu