CUTE is a yearly masterclass series on culture and technology, organized by the Numediart research institute, and brings together a panel of world-renowned experts in various high-tech fields and get them to meet all kinds of audiences (research, arts, industry) in a series of “hands on workshops”.
Keynote speakers this year are:
Prof. Petri Toiviainen, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
MasterClass: Introduction to the MoCap Toolbox
Dr. Anthony Brooks, School of Media Technology University of Aalborg, Esbjerg
MasterClass: Control from Non-Control: Digital Media Plasticity – Human Performance Plasticity
Prof. Rebecca Fiebrink, Goldsmiths University of London
MasterClass: Machine learning as a tool for designing embodied interactions
M. James Morley, Creative Industries Community Developer, Europeana
MasterClass: Creative re-use of digital cultural heritage – opportunities, challenges, approaches, impact
The paper has been co-authored with Martin Woolley (Coventry University), Catherine Cummings (University of Exeter) and Janine Prins (WAAG Society). Drawing on research conducted throughout the past year in the frame of the RICHES project, the paper examines the emergence of online maker communities and their engagement with craft-related cultural heritage in online spaces. The paper aims to stimulate discussion around the impacts brought by the emergence of online communities on the way cultural heritage is preserved, communicated and circulated. It will be presented alongside other papers in the Cultural Heritage Communities workshop, which you can download from this page.
In February 2015, a lab test was designed to investigate the usability of the Berlin Wall application, which is representative of an interactive TV application using valuable cultural heritage content. The test was conducted with the on-air application. Test participants were sat in front of the TV set and interacted with the application by using the TV remote control.
The test was composed of four parts:
Information on general media use and interactive TV use in particular – This section is used to more accurately identify the target group.
Task-based validation of usability – Feedback about specific tasks like starting a selected video or change to the full-screen view
General feedback about the application – Feedback about the concept of the application as a whole and the likelihood of a user recommending the application
User experience questionnaire for the application – A mini Attract Diff was used to gain knowledge about the subjective perception of the usage and look of an interactive product.
Tester group
The test was conducted with a group of 8 persons. The group was aged between 20 and 74. For the test evaluation, we decided not to separate the results by age or gender groups to avoid the risk of a biased evaluation of issues. The test group answered a pre-test questionnaire to assess media consumption habits, technical skills and possible role as multipliers.
The basic insights were:
All users owned a TV and watched TV daily.
Five users owned a Smart TV which is connected to the internet and one user owned a Smart TV in combination with a set-top-box.
Six users owned a computer, smartphone and tablet and two users did not own a tablet but a smartphone and a computer.
Seven users used the Internet on a daily basis and some hourly, while one stated he/she used it several times a week.
The Internet was mainly used for communication and information. Three people used video and/or music and four used web 2.0 applications.
The International Journal of Humanities and Social Science (IJHSS) is inviting papers for Vol. 5 No. 7, which is scheduled to be published on July 31, 2015. IJHSS is an open access, peer-reviewed and refereed international journal published by Center for Promoting Ideas, USA. The main objective of IJHSS is to provide an intellectual platform for the international scholars. IJHSS aims to promote interdisciplinary studies in humanities and social science and become the leading journal in humanities and social science in the world.
The journal publishes research papers in the fields of humanities and social science such as anthropology, business studies, communication studies, corporate governance, criminology, cross-cultural studies, demography, development studies, economics, education, ethics, geography, history, industrial relations, information science, international relations, law, linguistics, library science, media studies, methodology, philosophy, political science, population Studies, psychology, public administration, sociology, social welfare, linguistics ,literature, paralegal, performing arts (music, theatre & dance), religious studies ,visual arts, women studies and so on.
The journal is published in both print and online versions. IJHSSpublishes original papers, review papers, conceptual framework, analytical and simulation models, case studies, empirical research, technical notes, and book reviews.
Last date of submission: June 30, 2015. However, an early submission will get preference in case of review and publication process.
The Louvre at night, with the Pyramid censored (altered by 84user from a FOLP photo on Wikimedia). Source: Hyperallergic.com
There’s a big buzz currently going on about the issue of Freedom of Panorama, connected to the neverendig story of copyright in the changing digital world, and particularly connected to photography and to user-generated content.
Freedom of Panorama is a principle, applied in most European Member States regulations, basing on which one can take pictures from public ground of landscapes and buildings and is free to share it, re-use it and also to commercialize it, still acting within the law.
Not all the States recognize this right and for example in France and Italy commercial use of such images of works permanently located in physical public places should be authorized by the right holder, be the authors or any proxy acting for them. In most cases, and especially for non commercial use of these images, the existing restrictive approach isn’t widely enforced, and very unlikely the tourist photos of the Louvre’s Pyramid that we possibly shared on social networks risk to be confiscated.
However, there were attempts by EU Parliament member Julia Reda to extend the Freedom of Panorama to all Member States, so that the European citizens could be assured to act within the law when taking and publishing photographs from public buildings anywhere in Europe.
EU parliament is now called to vote on the harmonization at Member States level on new copyright provisions from the Legal Affairs Committee which has instead a restrictive approach towards the issue, and instead of enlarging the Freedom of Panorama to the States which don’t recognize it, is inteding to limit it in those States where it is applied:
“On the “freedom of panorama” principle, such as the right to create and share images and photographs of public buildings, the text cautions that the commercial use of such reproductions should require authorization from the rightholder” (source: European Parliament News)
If approved, this restrictive approach would have a strong impact on the commercial and professional photographers, who in facts are rising up and are promoting a petition in the name of safeguarding Street-, Travel- and Architecture-Photography, as it would simply be impossible to find out the architect of every public building in order to ask for permission before publishing and possibly selling the photo.
“Atomium 010-censored” by Nro92 + Romaine – File:Atomium 010.jpg + Own work. Licensed under CC0 via Wikimedia Commons
Europeana Creative Culture Jam (Vienna 9-10 July 2015) is the final showcase event of Europeana Creative, a groundbreaking project that explores ways for creative industries to connect with cultural heritage. Culture Jam will mix inspiring keynote talks with lively discussion on topics ranging from copyright to co-creation and from living labs to business models.
Culture Jam will be a celebration of all that Europeana Creative has achieved and the sister project Europeana Space is actively participating in it, with several members in the conference Advisory Board and a lively presence during the event.
Innovation Space leader Gregory Markus from NISV will be talking in the main track of the conference about the Innovation Space, the Europeana Space incubation work flow, the hackathons and business modelling workshops approach and the results thus far, about the plans for the future and the project in general of course, presenting also the upcoming environments of Content Space and Technical Space.
Greg’s speech takes place on the day 2 of the conference on 10th July 2015 and is entitled From Idea to Market, the Europeana Space Innovation Space.
Next to Greg’s talk, Europeana Space TV pilot will be presented by Kelly Mosterts in a talk during the conference’s parallel sessions – explaining how the pilot participants worked within the scenarios of the pilot, showing both the ReWind App designs and the Fall of the Berlin Wall demo app, plus presenting the pilot’s participation in the Amsterdam hackathon.
And of course a huge delegation of partners in E-Space will be attending the conference!
As part of the European Horizon 2020 (Europe’s largest research and innovation programme) ACE Creative is on the hunt to find the top 100 new and emerging creative companies in the EU and accelerate their growth and development.
Over the next 2 years the selected 100 SMEs (50 per year) will benefit from their very own customised support programmes delivered by ACE Creative.
The international team will then help to identify clients, investors and contacts that could help begin the process of international growth.
In addition to the customised support programme:
– The top 30 companies (15 each year) will win the opportunity to pitch to an audience of international investors at the Creative Business Cup finals in Copenhagen in November;
– Up to a further 400 SMEs will benefit from participation in one of 15 ACE Creative international Boot camps being staged across Europe in 2015 and 2016;
– A total of 1000 SMEs will benefit from the ACE Creative online support platform with access to resources in the areas of finance, networking, incubation technology and new markets.
If you have a business within the ICT and creative industries that has the potential to grow internationally, then this European creative business acceleration programme by ACE Creative, may well be of benefit to you.
Founded in 2005, Gamelab is a non-profit organization devoted to create quality events where international professionals, researchers, academics, entrepreneurs and investors from the digital entertainment space get inspired and share innovative ideas and projects.
Gamelab events connect, empower and inspire the next generation of digital creators to play an active role in shaping the future of interactive playgrounds and experiences. Gamelab’s flagship event takes place every June in Barcelona (Spain) and welcomes over 1.000 attendees, representing over 500 different small companies/organizations.
This year the conference programme include keynotes speakers from all over the world, among which Toru Iwatani Professor at Tokyo Polytechnic University; Shinji Mikami Executive Producer at Tango Gameworks; Richard Marks, director of PlayStation Magic Lab, Sony Computer Entertainment; Peter Vesterbacka of Mighty Eagle, Rovio Entertainment LTD (the creator of Angry Birds) and many more.
The event is structured in 5 different and well defined sections:
Main conference track, where world-class speakers share their inspiring vision about the future of interactivity with the general audience and press.
Partners track, where sponsors and partners organize workshops and specialized sessions and talk directly to the professional community.
Networking space, where startups, indie developers and all kind of platforms interact and showcase their latest products and services.
Awards, where the best games and project presented at Gamelab are publicly recognized.
Events, where attendees, sponsors and guest continue networking after work hours (demo sessions, happy hours, parties, dinners, etc.)
On 18 June 2015, the enchanting countryside of Valdera (Pisa, Italy) was seat of an interesting international meeting, focussed on the role of food as element of the European cultural heritage (CH) and aimed at discussing how the changes within our society may have an impact on the wine & food traditions of a territory.
The meeting was organised by Promoter SRL, leading company in the ICT, research, communication and digitisation of CH sectors managed by Dr Antonella Fresa, coordinator of numerous European projects.
The meeting took place in the framework of RICHES, ambitious research EU-funded project, coordinated by Coventry University together with Promoter SRL, investigating the relationship between culture and society. In particular a case study, centred on the relationship between food and territories, is currently underway on a European level, in order to understand how to realise social and economic development through the promotion of typical products, traditional cultivations and the discovery of foods from other countries we are coming in closer and closer contact with.
Prof. Moya Kneafsey (Food, Local Development and Human Geography), Prof. Ernest Taylor (Tourism Management) and Prof. Neil Forbes (lecturer of International Contemporary History as well as general coordinator of RICHES) from Coventry University (UK) intervened. The three scholars exchanged visions in a fascinating debate with Dr Tiziana Nadalutti, expert of agricultural science and operating for more than twenty years for the safeguard and promotion of environment and sustainable farming, and Dr Monica Zoppè, researcher at Pisa’s CNR and interested in themes of environment protection, food and landscape as well. Nadalutti and Zoppè are involved in “Consiglio del Cibo” (“Food Council”), project for an interdisciplinary plan by the University and the province of Pisa, first round table of its kind in Italy; the project aims to structure in a democratic form the relation between citizens looking for a healthy and sustainable diet, public interest and privates’ prerogatives.
During the afternoon Prof Marcello Buiatti too, lecturer of Genetics at Florence’s University and expert in ethics and environment, joined the debate in a teleconference.
Results of the workshop will merge into a public document about the relation between food, culture, identity and sense of belonging in a multicultural context. The document will constitute the ground for a policy brief by the RICHES project, addressed towards the European Commission.
Source: Stefano Caneva’s discussion text on the weLand case study, conducted in the framework of Europeana’s task force “Creating Local Europeana-related Networks” (Connecting Digital Initiatives into a Glocal Network. The case of weLand in South Piemonte, Italy, by Stefano Caneva, Vicepresident weLand Association)
weLandAssociation is a cultural NGO founded in Asti, South Piedmont (Italy), in August 2012. Its aim is to develop a regional network of individuals and groups interested in aggregating, sharing and reusing open data for GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums), education institutions and tourism stakeholders. «The goal – Stefano Caneva, weLand Vicepresident explaines – is to make South Piedmont a smart land: a region with a stronger cultural identity and social cohesion, acknowledging and promoting the potential coming from its history, landscape and environment and able to attract and intercept human and economic resources at an international level». weLand is in other words a glocal network: «a local network interacting with others at a national and international level» (Stefano Caneva). The idea of the association arises from the firm belief that innovation (and so the elements which innovation is generated by, culture and creativity) should take into account a bottom-up engagement of the community, in order to fully realise its potential and to become a real driver of social and economic development.
Let’s consider the case of Europeana. Since its foundation in 2007, it has been playing a fundamental role in the creation of a collaborative network of cultural/research institutions and public administrations, whose joint work has significantly increased the amount and quality of the available digital cultural datasets and enabled the accessibility, openness and reusability of the European Cultural Heritage for a great variety of end-users. As for the strategic placement of Europeana within the European society, during these years it has become evident the the centralised governance of the organisation, which was a consequence of the circumstances in which the organisation was born, needed to open up to more direct participation by the members of the network.
Yet the development of an increasingly larger network of partners has created the expectation for a more shared system of decision making, which would enhance the constructive feeling of being active part of a global movement.
Until recent time, the Europeana policy has been mainly characterised by a top-down approach towards innovation.
«Ongoing EU-funded projects – Caneva writes – such as RICHESand Civic Epistemologies are embracing an innovative approach, which recognises the importance of matching top-down research flow with bottom-up co-curation of the Cultural Heritage (CH) by citizens.
Centralised governance and a predominant top-down approach can be seen as two interrelated causes of the difficulties Europeana has met 1) to have its brand widely recognised by people outside the (Digital) Cultural Heritage professional sector and 2) to activate a fruitful economic reuse of digital datasets». weLand sets itself up as local mediator working to connect a local community in a more engaging interaction with broad transnational networks, like Europeana. Among weLand’s initiatives, we want to mention the following.
•WIKI loves Asti
One of the first initiatives of weLand was a collaboration with Wikimedia Italia, responsible for the Italian edition of the Wiki Loves Monuments photographic contest. Wiki loves Asti is part of a series of local initiatives experimented by Wikimedia Italia for by-passing the national legal restrictions concerning the economic reuse of public CH-related pictures in Italy: during the first edition of the Italian contest (2012), local Public Administrations or associations collected permissions for the monuments they wanted to include in the contest. This, Caneva explaines, «has proven a smart bottom-up solution in the long term, because: 1) it has allowed the Italian Wiki community to be active in an international project, by by-passing the deadlock caused by national legal obstacles; 2) it has spread the Wiki brand through people, making local communities aware of the importance of Open Culture and of the existing legal limits to its implementation; 3) it has built a relationship of mutual trust and collaboration between local communities and Wikimedia Italia».
By its side, since 2012 weLand has never stopped enlarging the list of monuments “liberated” for Wikimedia Italia.
Battistero di San Giovanni in Asti, winner of Wiki Loves Asti 2012. Ranked 5th in Wikimedia Italia 2012 and 15th in Wiki Loves Monuments 2012
•Wikipedia va a scuola @ Asti (Wiki goes to school in Asti)
The initiative, launched in 2014, was aimed at implementing and testing a model of crowd-sourcing and participatory didactics in high-schools and at enabling students to play the role of prosumers, «qualified users who can contribute with their own knowledge and needs to the development of an open platform of knowledge» (Caneva).
In collaboration with Wikimedia Italia, weLand provided a free introduction to the MediaWiki syntax and online tutorship to the involved classes, which contributed so to the digital storytelling of their local CH.
The first product of the project has been recently released: the page dedicated to Asti on the Italian version of Wikivoyage, the free tourist guide administered by Wikimedia Italia. The project has attracted the attention of local stakeholders and on that basis funds will be sought to run a second edition of the project during the school year 2015/2016.
•From the Hills of Europe
in 2014/15 weLand has launched a digital school pilot programme meant to promote European active citizenship. The project has been carried out in collaboration with the Institut für Deutschlandforschung in Bochum (Ruhr Universität, Germany).
Two high-school classes (in South Piedmont and Ruhr) were trained in the effective use of social media and other digital tools for presentations and project management. They learnt moreover the monitoring of administrative Open Data, useful to study the impact of EU structural funds on local CH institutions. The students made large use of OpenCoesione and Monithon.it, two platforms administered by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development. Through these platforms, the youngsters shared the results of their monitoring activity with the whole community.
weLand is planning a second edition of From the Hills of Europe for the school year 2015/2016.
«Starting from these premises – Caneva writes – an ambitious goal of weLand for the upcoming years is to offer regional, small and middle-sized institutions and projects the possibility to join their forces in order to interact with Europeana […] weLand aims to combine the action of a local association with the vision of an international high-knowledge network […] In these first years of activity, weLand has been able to gain and give back a lot thanks to this open, collaborative attitude».
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Sala de la Caritat, Biblioteca de Catalunya and online, 19 and 20th June 2025
On the occasion of the Segones Jornades de Patrimoni Gràfic 2025, EUreka3D project partner Pescia Paper Museum, which digitalized in 3D their historical paper moulds, gave a presentation to display the project and their achievements within its context and beyond. … Continue reading →
Collaboration agreement has started between the SECreTour project and Studio Macaco in June 2025
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Collaboration agreement has started between the SECreTour project and Omnis Vision in June 2025
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Europeana Creative Culture Jam (Vienna 9-10 July 2015)
Innovation Space leader Gregory Markus from NISV will be talking in the main track of the conference about the Innovation Space, the Europeana Space incubation work flow, the hackathons and business modelling workshops approach and the results thus far, about the plans for the future and the project in general of course, presenting also the upcoming environments of Content Space and Technical Space.
Over the next 2 years the selected 100 SMEs (50 per year) will benefit from their very own customised support programmes delivered by ACE Creative.
If you have interesting news and events to point out in the field of digital cultural heritage, we are waiting for your contribution.
