Digital meets Culture

ACM TVX2015, the ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for Television and Online Video, was the perfect occasion to showcase Europeana Space TV pilot!

EuropeanaTV pilot succesfully promoted at TVX2015 conference in Brussels

by Kelly Mostert, NISV

During the 2015 ACM TVX conference, hosted by the iMinds Digital Society Department, that took place on the 3^rd – 5^th of June at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Brussels the EuropeanaTV pilot of Europeana Space project was presented during the ‘Social experiences and awareness’ session in the TVX Industry track.

The crowd was interested to learn about the pilot prototypes, the different use cases and scenarios, and the future plans for user testing. Also the EuropeanaTV hackathon held the previous month at the Waag Society in Amsterdam was presented and the future hackathons were announced.

The Culture Derby concept developed by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision got the audience to start using their smartphones and enjoy a cultural derby race – ensuring the ‘X’ in TVX was well represented during this talk!

The response to the pilot and other project activities was very positive. The ‘Rewind’ prototype app targeted at senior users definitely gets the attention of SmartTV producers interested in standalone apps to offer with their TVs.

The toolkit was well received by education professionals especially.

View the PowerPoint slides presented during the speech:

TVX2015: EuropeanaTV Open Up Culture, Enrich Television from Sound and Vision R&D

Questions or comments? Contact Kelly Mostert of the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision:
kmostert@beeldengeluid.nl – @kellymostert

www.europeana-space.eu

Photo taken by Lyndon Nixon of MODUL University.

user testing was organized to improve the two prototypes that the Dance pilot is developing for creative re-use of digitized dance content.

E-Space Dance pilot in Portugal

by Rosemary Cisneros, Coventry University

The Europeana Space Dance Pilot travelled to Lisbon, Portugal mid-May, to hold its first usability test for the two applications it has been developing. A two-day session was organized by FCSH-UNL under the coordination of team members Carla Fernandes and João Gouveia but included all members of the Pilot, Sarah Whatley, Alexandru Stan and Rosamaria Kostic Cisneros. Coventry University, IN2 , and FCSH met at the RE.AL Studios, a company led by contemporary choreographer João Fiadeiro, to evaluate the “DanceSpaces” tool and the “DancePro” tool.

[Show as slideshow]

“DanceSpaces” focuses on the needs of the general public and dance enthusiasts (e.g dance audience/viewers and tourists, dance learners and educators, those who participate in dance as a social and/or recreational activity, etc.) who want to share and explore content about a particular dance aspect. As such, DanceSpaces targets leisure, teaching and learning at the same time.

“DancePro” is an application developed as a new version of the “Creation Tool” software, which is a video annotator working as a digital notebook in real time for dance professionals during creative and compositional processes. It focuses on the needs of researchers and dance experts (e.g. dance artists, choreographers) who need a set of powerful tools for accessing dance content and creating extensive metadata. It allows different types and modes of annotation of video in real time but also with pre-existing videos.

[Show as slideshow]

The two days of testing allowed the developers to gain insight into what its target audience thinks of the two applications using a “think aloud” method. All partners were pleased with the results and gained valuable insight while validating critical assumptions made at the start of the project. There is a real need for such tools and the data supported this claim.

The day was captured by freelance photographer José Ramos and included local choreographers, dancers and members of the general public. Together with João Fiadeiro, other Portuguese choreographers such as Rui Lopes Graça, Ana Trincão and Sylvia Rijmer have had a chance to try the DancePro tool, having offered valuable feedback on additional functionalities they would like to see added to the tool in the future.

Conducting tests is only one part of the project and the usability tests in Lisbon have offered the E-Space Dance Pilot valuable information. The designers are now moving into the implementation of phase of the feedback and look forward to sharing the tools with those Dance Hackathon Participants, scheduled to take place in late Autumn 2015.

Dublin, 6-7 July 2015

EIUG/IIUG Joint Conference

The EIUG (European Innovative Users Group) 2015 conference will be a joint conference with the Irish Innovative Users Group (IIUG). The conference will be hosted by Trinity College Dublin and will take place on 6th and 7th July 2015. You can register for the conference at https://eiug-iiug-conference2015.eventbrite.co.uk

Innovative Personnel Attending EIUG/IIUG Joint Conference

The following III personnel have been confirmed as attending this year’s joint conference:

Leif Pedersen – Senior VP of Product Management, R&D and Marketing
John Owens – Director of Technical Support
Robert Jacobs – Sales Director, Europe and Africa
Charo Díez – Senior Manager (VTLS/EMEA), Customer Support
Graham Woodruff – Sales Account Manager
Cat Strong- Sales Account Manager
Colin Carter – Director of Library Engagement
Richard Bramwell – Sales Account Manager
Sílvia Guivernau – Library Relations Manager, EMEA

If you would like to present or have any ideas for the conference please contact one of the EIUG committee.

For further information:

Submit your paper or poster by 13 July 2015

Cloud Forward 2015 calls for papers!

Pisa, Palazzo della Carovana, Scuola Normale Superiore
CC BY-SA 3.0

Authors are invited to submit abstracts for poster and paper presentations related to the Topics of Interest for the Cloud Forward 2015 Conference: From Distributed to Complete Computing. The 2015 edition will take place at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, from 6 to 8 October 2015, in friendship with Internet Festival.

EXTENDED SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 13/07/2015 (hard deadline)

The CF2015 conference (cf2015.holacloud.eu), organised under the auspices of EGI (European Grid Infrastructure) MISE (Ministero Italiano dello Sviluppo Economico), Regione Toscana, CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche), APRE (Agency for the Promotion of European Research), Municipality of Pisa, Fondazione Sistema Toscana (FST) and University of Pisa , is a scientific forum supported by the European Commission under the framework of the HOLA Cloud project (www.holacloud.eu), featuring a number of core research topics in the area of distributed computing (through the Distributed and CLOUD computing track), as well as new technologies beyond CLOUDs, requirements and future goals (through the COMPLETE computing track), while special emphasis will also be on open-source approaches (through the Open-source track).

The conference provides opportunities for posters and demonstrations. Proposals (including title, short abstract and contact information) shall be submitted on the same schedule as the papers.
Each poster must be original and unpublished work, not submitted for publication elsewhere.

Posters will be showcased within the Digital Exhibition on the conference website.

Important dates:

Paper/Poster submission: ~~28.06.2015~~ 13.07.2015 (hard deadline)
Author notification: 02.08.2015
Camera ready: 23.08.2015

For more information and details about the Call for Papers click visit the Conference website.

VIEW THE POST PUBLISHED BY THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION TO ANNOUNCE THIS CALL. CLICK HERE.

MediaArea is pleased to announce the first release of MediaConch (Media Conformance Checker)

Initial release of MediaConch now available

MediaArea is pleased to announce the initial release of MediaConch (Media Conformance Checker). Part of the PREFORMA project, a Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) project co-funded by the European Commission under its FP7-ICT Programme, MediaConch consists of a suite of tools and features to enable comprehensive control, testing, and modification of select archival audiovisual formats, specifically Matroska, lossless FFV1, and LPCM.

At this early stage MediaArea is presenting their first release to facilitate testing, oversight, and feedback to the project as they move forward with development. Currently MediaConch is available as a GUI and CLI application, with support for the following features:

Generation of detailed technical metadata report from audiovisual files in text or XML format.
Generation of ‘MediaTrace’ document which provides an textual reference to the architecture of an audiovisual file by categorizing all bytes of data according to their underlying specification for a highly comprehensive and standard-specific report.
Support for basic policy checking.

MediaConch anticipates including exhaustive means for creating and evaluating policy sets against collections of audiovisual media. Use cases for such policy checks include: assess that a digitization vendors deliverables meet the requested set of significant characteristics, ensuring that files are self-descriptive, and testing for coherencies (such as a file using a PAL frame size if using a PAL frame rate). Expression of policies are being standardized using Schematron (ISO/IEC 19757-3:2006), an XML document assertion language. MediArea has prepared a demo of test files, sample policy sets expressed in Schematron, and instructions on how to use MediaConch to validate such policy. MediaArea anticipate that future releases will make such processes far more seamless.

Feedback and comments on MediConch are invited. Requests, issues, or questions may be directed at MediConch project’s issue tracker at https://github.com/MediaArea/MediaConch/issues. MediaArea development team may be reached at info@mediaarea.net.

Downloads, demo files, and instructions for policy check applications may be found at:

https://mediaarea.net/MediaConch

Join MediaConch mailing list to receive updates on the MediaConch project.

The Spaces of Europeana Space compose an environment for endorsing and incubating new business based on digital cultural content

E-Space technical infrastructure taking shape

On a very sunny 29th of May in Florence, hosted in the wonderful premises of partner FST Fondazione Sistema Toscana, an interesting workshop of Europeana Space took place to discuss further the technical infrastructure developed by partner NTUA and already presented during the preceding public technical workshop realized in Brussels in cooperation with Europeana Foundation.

The Florence appointment was instead reserved to the partners of Europeana Space; after the opening of the day by the technical coordinator Antonella Fresa (Promoter), Eirini Kaldeli and Arne Stabenau (NTUA) widely illustrated the WITH technical infrastructure on which the Technical Space and the Content Space of Europeana Space are based.

E-Space WITH is an innovative concept for an infrastructure, which exposes APIs from different portals and repositories. It allows the user to search content of interest from a single access point into different and disjointed repositories and databases such as Europeana, the DPLA Digital Public Library of America, YouTube.. and of course the Europeana Space own repository, currently under construction.

[Show as slideshow]

The content is called via APIs, and the WITH infrastructure isn’t duplicating existing tools, while it instead shows innovative features, to leverage on for the development of services of E-Space:

MANAGEMENT OF CONTENT: the infrastructure permits to safely access and use both open content available on line (searching different repositories from a single access point) and non-open/not yet cleared content via the Europeana Space Protected Space
MANAGEMENT OF COLLECTIONS: the infrastructure permits to create and to give access to collections of curated content, to be “marked” and shared with other users or potential users.

The Technical Space and the Content Space developed by the project will therefore complement and feed the Innovation Space, an environment for endorsing and incubating new business based on digital cultural content.

The first instance of E-Space WITH is planned to be running on the server, including first version of the APIs and minimum functionalities, by mid of June. The first stable version will be then available in September and the official launch of the platform is foreseen in the mid-term conference of Europeana Space to take place in December 2015 in Tallin.

Photos courtesy of Fred Truyen

A good opportunity to present PREFORMA, TI/A and DPF Manager

Annual conference for memory institutions in Catalonia

PACKED and the University of Girona presented the PREFORMA, TI/A and DPF Manager initiatives at the Annual conference for memory institutions in Catalonia, an event which aims to help reducing this distance and promoting a great number of digital preservation initiatives in the field of archives and document management.

In a networked world, where access to information has become a necessity and also a civil right, the preservation of data and documents has become the main factor in ensuring this access. The creation of digital archives, which makes this information accessible beyond the barriers of immediate use and technological obsolescence, it is now more than ever a service requirement which any organization, public or private, cannot renounce to. This means not only to build passive deposits, where the information is stored using a retrospective. This means to ensure that any organisation who provides a service, public or private, preserves the data and the documents that provide evidence and allow to talk with real and effective transparency. And this involves the use of digital preservation techniques.

Digital preservation or long-term preservation of electronic documents, has evolved for years and belongs to the ICT sector. There is technology, methods and sufficient experience in the world to say that this is a field of knowledge still growing and consolidating. But the strength of the concept contrasts with the lack of experience and operational deployments in many countries, both in the public and private sectors, and especially in the archival field.

Download here the presentation of PREFORMA.

For further information visit http://arxivers.cat/.

Towards the largest repository of accessible and re-usable digital cultural heritage in the world

Europeana Business Plan 2015: Make the Beautiful Thing

Blowing Bubbles, 1700-1722, Pieter van der Werff, Rijksmuseum (public domain)

In May, Europeana has launched its Business Plan 2015. This is the first year of the Europeana Strategy 2015-2020, which outlines how the company will transition into a multi-sided platform: a truly networked organisation working together to create the largest repository of trusted, accessible and re-usable digital heritage in the world. The Europeana Business Plan 2015 reflects this change in perspective.

Europeana’s main aim will be to make sure its core infrastructure, processes and products are fit for enabling people – Europeana members, collaborators and all audiences, from the casual browser to the professional user – can do more and more with the data. In this sense, the most visible change of this year will be the improved user experience and engagement on the Europeana portal, where thematic channels will be introduced, making it easier to find great content.
To this end, the Network will run a country based campaign to bring in the best art pieces of each country; the new pieces collected will be used for the launch of the thematic channel on Art History in the autumn.
In 2015, Europeana we will take the first steps towards a new aggregation model for Europe, making data-sharing easier and more attractive, and will give partners more direct feedback on the results through a Statistics Dashboard. Finally, Europeana will work on improving its entrepreneurial capacity and on developing more creative tools that allow use of the content made available by the network partners.

This year, Europeana starts working on making the beautiful thing.

Balthasar Wigand Josephsplatz 1835, Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Download the Europeana Business Plan 2015

By Karol J. Borowiecki and Trilce Navarrete

Fiscal and Economic Aspects of Europe’s Book Consumption

One of the available tools in cultural policy at the national level includes the reduction of VAT rates for cultural goods and services. Governments can decide, for instance, to lower the VAT rate for books to encourage reading and literacy. These indirect fiscal incentives receive however very little attention both at policy level as well as by the public. To remedy that, we document the standard and reduced VAT rates in European Union member states in the period from 1993 to 2013 and explored the underlying determinants. The results point at the existence of clear fundamental drivers of the standard VAT rates. However, when it comes to the reduced cultural taxes, we fail to find any correlates – it is as if the decision-making was done in a random-like process. This supports the concern that there is no clear directive on how to efficiently design the reduced rates.

We further introduce a theoretical framework explaining how reduced fiscal rates are expected to decrease prices and increase quantities of the consumed cultural goods and services. We show that a decrease in the VAT rate for books by one percentage point is associated with an economically significant drop in the price of about 2.6 percent. Finally, we show the positive effect of a fiscal reduction on household’s book expenditure, where the results imply that a one percentage point decrease in the VAT rate for books leads to an increase in expenditure by about 2.7 percent.

Figure 1. Prices, expenditure per household and VAT rate for books

An improved understanding of the reduced cultural taxes will allow to effectively employ this policy in order to support consumption of, among others, the fast growing digital heritage markets, such as the e-books market. It has been actually the increased use of digital technology for the production, distribution and consumption of cultural goods and services that has raised questions regarding the VAT Directive. Due to the positive externalities associated with cultural consumption, markets fail to provide the optimum quantity of culture at the right price. Tax instruments are thus proposed as effective tools that can be used to change the quantities and prices, in order to tackle market failures. From a policy perspective, this suggests that a reduction in VAT rates can stimulate household consumption and consequently should be designed in conjunction with a national cultural policy.

Paper can be downloaded here.

The study is part of the FP7 EU funded project RICHES: Renewal, Innovation and Change: Heritage and European Society.

The authors:

Karol Jan Borowiecki, Associate Professor at the Department of Business and Economics, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark. E-mail: kjb@sam.sdu.dk (corresponding author).

Trilce Navarrete, Postdoc at the Department of Business and Economics, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark. E-mail: trilce.navarrete@gmail.com.

The Associated Project will share experiences and guidelines and participate on RICHES Project activities

RICHES signs a Memorandum of Understanding with the “EuroVision – Museums Exhibiting Europe” (EMEE) project

RICHES (Renewal, Innovation and Change: Heritage and European Society) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the project “EuroVision – Museums Exhibiting Europe” (EMEE).

This new cooperation will allow exploring synergies between both projects, especially on the case studies addressing the role of museums. The RICHES workshop “The context of change and the move from analogue to digital” (Ankara, 13-14 May 2015) has been the first opportunity to share experiences. Representatives of the EMEE project have attended the event, which has been the framework to discuss risks and opportunities on this context of change and its impact on Cultural Heritage.

RICHES workshop “The context of change and the move from analogue to digital”
Photo: Promoter Srl

The “EuroVision – Museums Exhibiting Europe” (EMEE) project explores an innovative interdisciplinary approach for national and regional museums to re-interpret their objects in a broader context of European and transnational history. The necessary theoretical and practical framework is developed, put into practice and evaluated by an international, trans-sectoral network bringing together the creative excellence of museums and cultural workers in a project based on the scientific expertise of history didactics in mediating culture.

EMEE_Young Scenographers Travelling Exhibition 3

EMEE Young Scenographers Contest, Travelling Exhibition
Photo: Janine Pichler

The project, which runs for four years (2012-2016) and is funded by the Culture Programme of the European Union, was initiated by the Chair of History Didactics of Augsburg University. It is implemented by eight interdisciplinary project partners from seven European countries. The aim of the project is to advance the modernization of museums by re-interpreting museum objects and topics from a trans-regional European perspective as well as by innovative mediating approaches. Thereby, especially national and regional museums shall be encouraged to try out new ideas and concepts through which a timely orientation of the institution “museum” in today’s intercultural, heterogeneous society can be furthered.