Digital meets Culture

Berlin, 7-8 May 2015

SMPTE FORUM 2015: Entertainment Technology in the Internet Age

Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers® (SMPTE®), worldwide leader in motion-imaging standards and education for the communications, media, entertainment and technology industries, organises the SMPTE Forum 2015 “Entertainment Technology in the Internet Age: A European Perspective.” Produced in partnership with the Fernseh- und Kinotechnische Gesellschaft (FKTG) and in collaboration with EBU’s Technology and Innovation department, the SMPTE Forum is being held on 7-8 May 2015, at the Fraunhofer-Forum in Berlin.

European broadcasters and studios are exploring the new landscape of web delivered media while new media players join the market. What does this mean for the traditional content creators and distributors and what is the technological impact? Factors as wide as EU policy, net neutrality, copyright and mining “big data” are shaping the possibilities in the complex European market and redefining how the industry engages its audience. The SMPTE Forum 2015 will examine these topics and how connectivity, bandwidth and media technology improvements will impact media production and distribution across all platforms, from cinema and broadcast to mobile and interactive new media technologies.

Chris Fetner, director of global content partners operations at Netflix, will give a keynote on the supply chain impact of Internet distribution, followed by discussions on the vision of the European Commission for Internet streaming and on the EU regulatory environment.

For more information and registration https://www.smpte.org/forum2015

MEMOLA rehabilitates the traditional irrigation system of Barjas

Sierra Nevada (Spain)

After twenty years of abandonment, and even forty in the case of the branch of La Hijuela, the traditional irrigation system of Barjas (Granada, Spain) was rehabilitated in collaboration with the National and Natural Park of Sierra Nevada and CEAMA. This campaign was undertaken between the months of February and March of 2014, using traditional techniques and knowledge provided by the local irrigators’ community. This activity involved 180 national and international volunteers and concluded with 5 kilometres of the channels restored, including the branch of La Hijuela.

WATCH THE DOCUMENTARY!

The initiative was launched and led by the MEMOLA project, an interdisciplinary approach to cultural landscapes of Mediterranean mountainous areas, taking as a central axis the historical study of two natural resources essential to generate agro-systems: water and soil. The study focuses on four areas: Sierra Nevada (Spain), Monti di Trapani (Italy), Colli Euganei (Italy) and Vjosa Valley(Albania).

Landscapes and their structure are strongly conditioned by the need to ensure the livelihood of rural communities over time. Essentially they are the spatial representation of production and reproduction strategies of societies over time. Understanding them necessarily requires knowledge of the historical processes that have led to specific relationships with nature: mainly extraction and use of resources. These uses have largely shaped the medium, generating not only its shape, but also the culture that makes possible its management and maintenance.

Vjosa valley (Albania)

The various exploitation strategies have resulted in different landscapes and forms of cultural expression throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, but have also produced very important common areas. Agro-systems represent one of their greatest expressions. Agricultural traditions and the different ways of exploiting natural resources including management over time are crucial for conservation of the landscape and its ability to adapt to current global changes: globalisation and agrarian industrialisation, loss of peasant knowledge, loss of rural population and climate change.

Conservation can be achieved through the exploitation of this heritage to generate environmental and cultural conservation strategies for sustainable development in rural areas; with the aim of protecting this cultural heritage and, at the same time, increasing and transmitting knowledge about it in order to benefit the local and wider European society.

MEMOLA’s main objectives are 1)investigating the logic that rules the process of historical landscapes formation in relation to natural resources within a diachronic framework 2)introducing the historical perspective (4^th dimension), which is considered to be a powerful interpretation key, in landscape studies:

conduct a specific historical and archaeological study in the four Mediterranean mountain landscapes of Sierra Nevada (Granada-Almería, Spain), Monti di Trapani (Trapani, Italy), Colli Euganei (Padova, Italy), Vjosa Valley (Albania);
quantitatively assess the long-term historical uses of water and soils in the study areas – analysis of agrosystems (crops and livestock) via the collection and examination (archaeological fieldwork and ethnographic surveys) of the historical traces that remained fossilised in the landscape;
comparative study of the four sample-areas in order to unveil their commonalities and differences;
analysis of the productivity and resource use efficiency in the four historic sample-areas, through agronomic and hydrological resource-management models, taking into account the global climate change and the EU policies and strategies (European Landscape Convention, European water policy, Common Agricultural Policy, Joint Programming Initiative – JPI – on Cultural Heritage and Global Change).

For more information visit the MEMOLA project’s website

To enable and promote greater re-use of cultural heritage resources by creative industries.

MoU between PREFORMA and Europeana Creative

A Memorandum of Understanding has been signed between PREFORMA and Europeana Creative to enable and promote greater re-use of cultural heritage resources by creative industries, starting from the open source tools developed in the framework of PREFORMA PCP and of Europeana Creative.

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 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.

Europeana Creative (pro.europeana.eu/web/europeana-creative) is a European project that enables and promotes greater re-use of cultural heritage resources by the creative industries. Europeana Creative sets the stage for fascinating collaborations between content-providing cultural heritage institutions and creative industries stakeholders in the education, tourism, social networks and design sectors. Its development takes place through inspiring pilot applications and open innovation challenge events..

Manchester, 25-28 February 2015

Future Everything’s XX anniversary

This year, FutureEverything celebrated its 20^th anniversary. For the last two decades the festival has brought people together to imagine, shape and question the vision of a truly participatory society. A belief in the emancipatory and creative potential of new technologies runs throughout digital culture. It is found both in the open source community and in the rhetoric of Silicon Valley start-ups.

In recent years, the contradictions in this vision have come to the surface. The digital age has brought a collision of positives and negatives. Today we live with the consequences of the digital turn and these are not all benevolent. Centralisation, inequality, electronic waste and loss of privacy at an unprecedented scale have challenged our assumptions about the universally positive effects of digital innovation. We see how disruptors like Uber and Airbnb create huge opportunity for a few, while protesting taxi drivers on the streets of our cities give an image to a side-lined majority.

These disruptions were foretold: Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s denunciation of “the Californian Ideology” was published the same year that FutureEverything celebrated its first festival. Their essay gave voice to a critical current in digital culture that has run through FutureEverything down the years. But only in the last eighteen months have the commonplace and simplistically positive narratives surrounding the digital age in wider technology culture at last run out of hot air.

That made this year an ideal opportunity for FutureEverything to hit pause on its headlong rush into the future, to reflect on the consequences of the past decades and the prospects for the decades to come. Today FutureEverything can question some of the most heartfelt values and narratives in digital culture. Should these be revised? Or abandoned? Or should we champion their foundational premises more than ever to counterbalance the corrosive forces inherent in the digital economy?

Is a bottom up localism the answer to economic inequality, centralisation, stacks, silos and moats? Are distributed architectures the answer to government surveillance and advertising intrusion? Are smart citizens the answer to smart cities? Is DIWO (Doing It With Others) the sharp edge of devolution or its undoing?

FutureEverything is an award-winning innovation lab for digital culture and annual festival, established in Manchester in 1995. For almost 20 years FutureEverything has been exploring the meeting point of technology, society and culture which lies at the heart of the digital debate. Through a community network and regular events it makes connections between thinkers, developers, coders, artists, designers, urbanists and policy makers, inspiring them to experiment and to collaborate in new ways.

The FutureEverything festival brings people together to discover, share and experience new ideas for the future. Pioneering the practice of city-wide ‘festival as laboratory’, it combines a large scale cultural event (encompassing art, music and discussion) with new technology, novel research methods and playful social experiments. It has been named by The Guardian as one of the top ten ideas festivals in the world.

Year round, FutureEverything champions the role of grassroots innovation in the digital creative economy. It creates opportunities for artists, programmers and coders though regular commissions, hackdays and innovation challenges. Through its research it identifies and explores areas in which technological, creative and societal innovation could facilitate change. Through policy work and thought leadership it advocates for the creative use of open data to improve government and empower citizens and communities.

As a world-leader in the digital art sector, FutureEverything commissions artists to illustrate new ideas through creative prototypes, interactive design and participative experiences. It is seen by Arts Council England as “one of the key touch-point organisations” connecting creative communities with academic research, the business sector and policy makers.

For further information visit www.futureeverything.org

by Benjamin Sutton

Angered Archaeologists allow thousands to enter the Louvre for free

On the 5^th of February 2015 the lobby of the Louvre in Paris was took over by about 100 peeved archaeologists, blocking the ticket booths for nearly five hours and allowing visitors to enter the museum without paying admission.

The protesters were members of CGT-Sud-FSU-CNT, a coalition of unions representing cultural workers. They were all preventative archaeologists, who are brought in to investigate construction sites to ensure that any remaining artifacts are safely unearthed and cared for, and that no vestiges are destroyed.

A sign on a Louvre ticket booth put up by protesting archaeologists (photo courtesy CGT-Sud-FSU-CNT, via cgt-culture.fr)

Public sector workers, since the passage of a law in 2003 they have been forced to compete for job sites with private enterprises, a situation they say has greatly affected the quality of the archaeological work being done. Initial diagnostics at construction sites must still be done by workers from the National Institute for Preventative Archaeological Research, but the actual digs can now be carried out by private companies.

“Their arrival has created an imbalance in research – Thomas Bouquin, a member of the union, told France TV Info – they don’t share their findings and have no obligation to serve the public.”

Protesters are demanding that preventative archaeology no longer be subject to 2003’s law. They chose the sunken Louvre lobby beneath I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid and the Cour Napoléon because it was the site of a major preventative archaeology project when the museum expanded in the 1980s.

A statement posted on the website of the SGPA-CGT-Culture explained:

«This February 5, more than 100 archaeologists of the preventative archaeological public service occupied the Louvre museum and conducted a free admission operation for nearly five hours. The archaeologists chose this site because it is emblematic in the history of French preventative archaeology (the excavation of the Cour Napoléon, the Cour Carrée, and the Jardins du Carrousel from 1983 to 1990 that forged the development of this profession) to denounce the catastrophic situation into which their discipline has been plunged.»

The museum’s initial response to the protest was to block the entrances, but it eventually decided to allow visitors to enter free. Ordinarily, admission to the Louvre costs €12 for the permanent collection and €16 for all temporary and permanent exhibitions. The institution offers free admission to its permanent collection on the first Sunday of every month between October and March.

View Benjamin Sutton’s post

Paris, 10 February 2015

Seminar on Museology, Museography and new forms of address to the Public

On 10 February 2015, at the Salle Triangle of Centre Pompidou, in Paris, is being held the seminar “Social Hermeneutic Networks”, centred on the topic “museology, museography and new forms of address to the public”; Alain Garnier, Yuk Hui and Henry Story are intervening in the event.

How to establish new forms of dialogue between researchers and critics, between the museums and their public, between teachers and learners? If the digital revolution brought substantial changes to the didactic, scientific and educational sectors of knowledge transfer, we are compelled to think a new model of social network, improving value and significance of the contribution of its users.

In the light of the social network theory developed by Yuk Hui and Harry Halpin on the basis of Gilbert Simondon’s philosophical theses and Bernard Stiegler’s philosophical research, the seminar will show how the social network can become matter of study and subject of a dissertation or a course, as well as tool for the student, the researcher or the non-professional user. The new social network shall not feature the individualism of Facebook and shall not be a showcase of oneself but a true mean for the sharing among members of knowledge, ideas, experiences. Such sharing and exchange shall contribute to the development and improvement of the social network itself.

For more information visit www.iri.centrepompidou.fr and http://polemictweet.com/

Abuja, Nigeria, 12-13 March 2015

WACREN 2015 Conference

WACREN is organizing its 2^nd Annual Conference on 12-13 March 2015 in Abuja, hosted by the Nigerian Research and Education Network (NgREN).

The main theme of the conference is: “Enabling Virtual Research and Education Communities”, with the following sub-themes:

Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure (AAI) and Mobility
NREN Business and Governance Models
Innovation in R&E Networks
Network Design and Operation
Online Teaching and Learning
Shared Experiences, Best Practices and Collaboration

For more information visit the conference website.

About WACREN

WACREN is the West and Central African Research and Education Network which has been established to build and operate a world class network infrastructure, develop state of the art services, promote collaboration among national, regional, international research and education communities and build the capacity of the REN community.

The objectives of WACREN is the promotion and establishment of interconnections between national research and education networks in West and Central Africa to form a regional research and education network, the interconnection of this network with other regional and continental networks, and the provision of services aiming at fostering collaboration between research and education institutions in the region as well as between them and peer institutions at continental and international levels.

Coventry (UK), 13 February 2015

Digital Echoes Symposium 2015: Intangible and Performance-based Cultural Heritage

Coventry University Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE, http://c-dare.co.uk/) held the 5th edition of the Digital Echoes Symposium.

Digital Echoes Symposium 2015: Intangible and Performance-based Cultural Heritage

13 February 2015, Institute for Creative Enterprise, Coventry University

Convenors: Sarah Whatley, Rosamaria Cisneros, Amalia Sabiescu

Digital Echoes 2015 brought together artists, researchers and practitioners interested in exploring how digital environments intervene in the creation, documentation, circulation and reception of culture. The focus of this year’s event was on the potential and limits of digital technology for affording new ways to engage with traditional forms of cultural heritage as audience, user, artist, author, researcher and co-creator.

Antonella Fresa, Promoter’s Director, delivered a presentation on Citizen science in the research on cultural heritage and humanities (PDF, 1 Mb) during the afternoon panel. She talked about the experience of the Civic Epistemologies project. She is the project’s technical coordinator.

Keynotes

Charlotte Waelde, Chair in Intellectual Property Law, University of Exeter

Matthew Causey, Associate Professor in Drama and Director of the Arts Technology Research Laboratory, Trinity College Dublin

Read more about the events themes and background: http://c-dare.co.uk/events/digital-echoes-2015/

Download the full programme of the Symposium here

Registration for the event will cost £20 concession/£30 full price.

Organising committee: Sarah Whatley, Rosamaria Cisneros, Lily Hayward-Smith, Emma Meehan, Amalia Sabiescu

For more information please write to researchadmin.ad@coventry.ac.uk

Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA, 2-6 November 2015

International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES) 2015

iPRES is the premier international conference on the preservation and long term management of digital materials. The iPRES 2015 will be held on November 2-6, 2015 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Contributions are currently being sought that present research and innovative practice in digital preservation.

The iPRES 2015 conference is seeking contributions from research and innovative practice in digital preservation.

The conference site is:
http://ipres2015.org

This call is available at:
http://ipres2015.web.unc.edu/call-for-contributions/

Author information and guidelines are at:
http://ipres2015.web.unc.edu/author-info-guidelines/

Contribution topics

iPRES 2015 welcome contributions that address at least one of the following topics:

1. Institutional opportunities and challenges

local, regional and national approaches
legislative context and requirements
institutional contexts for preservation
collaboration and alignment
collection content profiling
research data management
personal archiving
documenting authenticity and integrity
demonstrating benefits and incentives
providing and documenting added value
evaluating options: products, tools, registries, services, service providers
exploring the potential of bartering

2. Infrastructure (organizational and technological) opportunities and challenges

intelligent and secure storage
scalability
complex formats
large web data sets
software and hardware dependencies
system architectures and requirements
distributed and cloud-based implementations
digital forensics
standards-based practice

3. Frameworks for digital preservation

models
standards and practice
core concepts
business models
sustainability and economic viability

4. Preservation strategies and workflows

preservation strategies (e.g., migration, emulation, normalization)
preservation metadata management
preservation planning and action
archival storage and archival packages
acquisition, ingest, and submission packages
long-term access management and dissemination packages
measuring and mediating risks
content-specific approaches (e.g., GIS, digital art, audiovisual, research data, web-based content, models)

5. Innovative practice

implementations
repositories
issues and wins
lessons learned
the future of digital preservation

6. Training and education

educational needs
evaluating curricula and impacts
innovative offerings
support for lifelong learning
career management

Program strands

iPRES 2015 is being structured around two key strands – research and innovative practice. Papers are invited for both strands.

The purpose of this distinction is to promote work from both a research and innovative practice perspective and work that is clearly rooted in the actual experience of institutions undertaking digital preservation. We expect that there will be work that manages to encapsulate both of these strands, and that is welcomed.

All papers for iPRES 2015 should:

be leading edge
be innovative
help inform debate around what digital preservation is.

San Diego, US, 9-11 March 2015

Connecting the Data Dots: the Research Data Alliance (RDA) 5th Plenar

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/connecting-data-dots-research-alliance-rda-5th-plenar-hilary-hanahoe

It’s all about Adoption at the RDA Fifth Plenary Meeting, San Diego, US 9-11 March 2015

“The so called data revolution this isn’t just about the volume of scientific data; rather, it reflects a fundamental change in the way science is conducted, who does it, who pays for it and who benefits from it. And most importantly, the rising capacity to share all this data – electronically, efficiently, across borders and disciplines – magnifies the impact.” The Data Harvest: How sharing research data can yield knowledge, jobs and growth (http://europe.rd-alliance.org/documents/publications-reports/data-harvest-how-sharing-research-data-can-yield-knowledge-jobs-and)

The Research Data Alliance (RDA – www.rd-alliance.org) rises to this challenge providing concrete solutions to address some of today’s many, many data challenges. In less than 2 years since its launch RDA has already published tangible outputs all aiming to achieve seamless interoperability, trust and ultimately to provide growth & employment opportunities:

Data Foundation & Terminology with a simple unifying data model facilitating interoperability
Data Type Registry with a registry of data types to facilitate their usage
PID Information Types with a generic interface for PID service providers and users and a harmonized category set
Practical Policies with best practices for a wide number of automatized data management and processing policies

The RDA Fifth Plenary is taking place in San Diego, US from 9th – 11th March 2015 and is open to RDA members and the public, particularly individuals that share the core values of creating the building blocks of common data infrastructures that can bridge disciplinary activities under a community-driven and non-profit model. Data experts, scientists, researchers and other professionals are encouraged to attend, as well as students and early career professionals in industries related to the fields of research data sharing and exchange. https://rd-alliance.org/plenary-meetings/fifth-plenary/programme.html

Adoption Day on 8th March will focus on the current RDA outputs and will see practical examples of European & US adoption. From the European grouping, European Collaborative Data Infrastructure (EUDAT – http://www.eudat.eu), Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN – http://www.clarin.eu/) and the German Climate Computing Center (Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum – DKRZ – https://www.dkrz.de/) are all implementing RDA outputs.

The Large-scale data projects session immediately after Adoption Day (8th March) will address how to advance the goals of RDA Output take up by following up with the tool developers and the researchers in the larger context of large data facilities and projects and identify additional uptake and dissemination possibilities from the side of the data projects with invited speakers from large impact projects in around the world. Interested parties are invited to submit a paper by February 8th https://rd-alliance.org/large-scale-data-projects-meet-rda-rda-5th-plenary-session.html