Digital meets Culture

important dissemination action towards the NEM - New European Media community

E-Space at NEM Summit and General Assembly

The NEM Summit, organised every year since 2008 by the NEM Initiative in close cooperation with leading industrial and academic players worldwide, is the “not-to-be-missed” annual event for all those interested in Future Internet developments and in the fast paced evolution of the networked and electronic media industry.

The presentation of E-Space was during the “Expression of Interest” session during the NEM General Assembly. This session provides an opportunity to introduce to the entire NEM community relevant activities and collaboration opportunities. Prior registration is mandatory and a selection is made by the organisers.

The presentation given by partner IN2 introduced the Europeana Space project, giving some details on the Dance Pilot and stressing the various ways in which it is possible to collaborate with the best practice network. Finally an invitation to attend the first E-Space conference in Venice was made. Flyers about the conference were made available. The presentation followed the speech of James Morley from Europeana, complementing it nicely.

The event was attended by EC representatives (DG Connect), researchers, industry, broadcasters, SMEs and creative industry, SME cluster representatives, venture capital firms and business angels.

Presentation by Alex Stan (PDF, 2.6 Mb)

the best idea will receive a tailor made Incubation Support Package as a prize, helping to bring it successfully to the market.

Europeana Creative – Final Open Innovation Challenge Launched!

Europeana Creative is once again looking for creative developers, designers, start-ups and other entrepreneurs to re-use Europe’s digitised cultural heritage from Europeana in innovative and creative ways!

We are pleased to announce the launch of our final challenge encouraging YOU to design and create products & applications that re-use Europeana content in the theme of Design.

Our previous Challenges, on the themes of Natural History & History Education, Tourism & Social Networks, attracted applications from 16 different European countries demonstrating innovative ideas for cultural heritage re-use. If you wish to learn more about previous winning applications please visit our blog here and here.
As always, the best idea will receive a tailor made Incubation Support Package as a prize, helping to bring it successfully to the market! The prize consists of specialist support measures delivered by a team of experts providing business mentoring, technical support, assistance with identifying and accessing finance, facilitation of business partnerships, access to specialised testing environments, marketing and promotion support.

Apply by submitting your project on http://ecreativedesign2015.istart.org. The deadline for entries is January 15th, 2015. The best applications will be invited to pitch during our final Challenges Event in Manchester hosted during the arts & innovation event, Future Everything Festival, at the end of February 2015, where the winners will be selected.

Download the press release with full information on the Challenge (PDF, 421 Kb)

What should you create? We welcome a wide range of works for the Design Challenge, and appreciate contemporary and creative approaches to digital cultural heritage materials. For example, including but not limited to results of digital fabrication, media art, design objects, web/mobile applications and services.
Where to get content? Search for it on Europeana Labs. Use our APIs for your own developments! You can access the collections and incorporate them into things like apps, games, websites, even creating mash-ups using other APIs. The possibilities are endless. Want to work with these collections? The Europeana APIs allow you to access exactly what you want, delivering your own customised view of Europeana content.

Learn more about Europeana Creative: www.europeanacreative.eu

Policy, sustainability, partnership with EPOS and B2DROP

EUDAT News bullettin – October 2014

Anyone can sync and exchange research data with EUDAT’s latest service

B2DROP is a secure and trusted data-exchange service to keep your research data synchronized and up to date and to exchange with colleagues.

B2DROP offers you a simple and easy-to-use solution to store and exchange data with colleagues and team members, to synchronize multiple versions of data and to ensure automatic desktop synchronization of large files. Find out more and give B2DROP a go on the EUDAT website.

Sustainability – a word on everyone’s lips

Sustainability – having the resources and the policy framework to deliver services and support users into the future – is at the heart of EUDAT’s mission.

A plenary session on sustainability at EUDAT’s Third Conference, held in Amsterdam on 24 and 25 September 2014, brought together experts from across Europe to debate what sustainability should encompass and how it can be achieved. Read the full report on the EUDAT website.

Data access and reuse: all you need to know

Research data policy: are we winning? To help find answers, EUDAT is holding a workshop with its data access and reuse policy working group in Rome on 11 and 12 November 2014. This workshop will inform a report which will incorporate results from EUDAT’s survey on open data and contain insights into the path towards a common policy framework. Get a sneak preview of key topics on the EUDAT website.

Providing IT solutions to the solid Earth sciences community

EPOS and EUDAT join forces to provide researchers with basic e-science services.

This month, EUDAT speaks to Massimo Cocco, Director of Research at the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology. Massimo is coordinating the preparatory phase of a European project named European Plate Observing System (EPOS). In this interview, Massimo tells us about EPOS and explains why its adoption of EUDAT’s solutions is important. You can read the full interview on the EUDAT website.

An action-packed autumn for EUDAT

EUDAT will be at key events in the areas of data infrastructure and supercomputing over the next few months. First, we’ll be speaking at the e-IRG Workshop in Rome on 10 and 11 November. Next, we’ll be at SC14 in New Orleans from 16-21 November – pop by the PRACE booth (no. 2215) and BSC booth (no. 3427) for EUDAT information and goodies. Finally, in December we’ll be taking part in the Research Data Alliance Global Data and Computing e-Infrastructure Challenges event, also in Rome.

On November 4th the virtual kick-off meeting will take place.

Results of the PREFORMA CfT published!

The results of the call for tender launched by PREFORMA in June 2014 are now available.

All tenders eligible and not subject to the exclusion criteria have been evaluated by a number of experts and a decision panel.

By a decision on the 28th of October 2014, Riksarkivet, on behalf of the PREFORMA Consortium, has decided to award contract to the following tenderers:

VeraPDFa Consortium (to work on PDF/A)
Preservica (to work on PDF/A)
Easy Innova (to work on TIFF/EP)
MediaArea (to work on MKV/FFV1/LPCM)
KU Leuven – Libis Library IT Services (to work on TIFF/EP)
Université Catholique de Louvain (to work on MKV/JPEG2000/LPCM)

The 6 tenderers will start working starting from November 2014 on the design and development of an open-source toolset for conformance checking of digital files intended for long-term preservation in memory institutions.

The PREFORMA project would like to express its thanks to all the organisations who participated in the Call for Tenders and would like to remind to all interested parties to join our community and to follow the progress of the project.

Florence (Italy), 11 November 2014

Sharing Local Cultural Heritage through Europeana – LoCloud workshop

11th November, 14.30, at Palazzo Coppini, via del Giglio 10, Florence, Italy.

The workshop, whose theme is “Sharing Local Culture through Europeana” will present LoCloud, its on-going activities and results achieved so far, including demonstrations of the services that the project is developing to help make collections held by local institutions more widely available. The workshop will start at 14.30 and will last the whole afternoon.

Objectives of the workshop:

To stimulate discussion and collaboration between curators, experts and stakeholdersin digital libraries, cultural heritage, tourism and local communities on new ways to make holdings more widely available.
To showcase the latest developments in supporting small and medium-sized cultural institutions in making their digitised collections available online via the Europeana portal through the LoCloud project.

Download the workshop flyer with agenda of the day (PDF, 908 Kb)

LoCloud project is developing a cloud-based infrastructure to be used by small and mediumsized local heritage institutions, to make their digital collections discoverable through Europeana (www.europeana.eu), the great Europeana digital library. Moreover, LoCloud will offer a series of services, including a geo-location tool, a collection management system, multilingual vocabularies for local history and archaeology, and historic placenames. These services will enrich the digital content, increasing its usefulness, and enhance the user’s experience.

Learn More about LoCloud: http://www.locloud.eu/

ICOMOS is a global non-government organisation dedicated to the promotion of the application of theory, methodology, and scientific techniques to the conservation of the architectural and archaeological heritage. This year the General Assembly will focus on ‘Heritage and Landscape as Human Values’ and it will last for the entire week, from 9 to 14 November 2014.

2 year innovative EU-funded demonstration activity for semantic solutions

StoM project is semantic technology at your service!

StoM project commenced on 1st May 2014 and is carried out by a strong consortium committed to develop a commercial pathway for software-as-a-service solutions. Consortium members are leaders in ICT (NET7, IN2, SpazioDati) and business development (Techin and Innova).
The services to be developed for commercialisation are based upon a previous research programme successfully conducted in the SemLib project. The aim is to apply semantic annotation and semantic recommendation solutions in two platforms: EventPlace and PunditBrain.

EventPlace makes events an engaging experience for everyone. Event managers can organise content, presentations, video recordings, documents of the event, amplify it with user-generated content (e.g. photos from participants sharing event moments and impressions) and put content-marketing at work for making their event unique.

PunditBrain will allow users to apply semantic annotations on web documents. It is aimed at scholars, journalists and students but will also perfectly fit into corporate environments where document collection and consumption lie at the heart of their work.
Implemented as a web-based service, PunditBrain will focus on usability: performing an annotation will be as easy as highlighting text in documents.

Download the StoM press release – PDF

For further info visit http://www.stom-project.eu

Coventry (UK), 20 November 2014

Open Education: Condition Critical

Thursday November 20th 4:30-6:30pm, at Coventry University, a panel exploring opportunities to critically and creatively experiment with different ideas of what the university and education can be.

Open Education: Condition Critical

What for decades could only be dreamt of is now almost within reach: the widespread provision of free online education, regardless of a student’s geographic location, financial status or ability to access conventional institutions of learning. Yet for all the hype-cycle that has been entered into over MOOCs, many experiments with Open Education (OE) do not appear to be designed to challenge the becoming business of the university or alter Higher Education in any really fundamental way. If anything, they seem more likely to lead to a two-tier system, in which those who can’t afford to pay (so much) to attend a traditional university, or belong to those groups who prefer not to move away from home (e.g. lower-income families), have to make do with a poor, online, second-rate alternative education produced by a global corporation.

Panellists:

Sean Dockray (The Public School) – via Skype
Richard Hall (De Montfort University Leicester)
Shaun Hides (Coventry University)
Sharon Irish (University of Illinois/FemTechNet) – via Skype
Pauline van Mourik Broekman (Mute)

Open Education: Condition Critical will examine some of the opportunities that exist for experimenting, critically and creatively, with very different ideas of what the university and education can be in the 21st century.

Free entrance

Please register at: http://criticalopeneducation.eventbrite.co.uk

The event is organized by the Centre of Disruptive Media of Coventry University, focused, among other topics, on open publishing and currently working on 2 open books: Open Education: A study in disruption (the editing team included Prof. Gary Hall and Dr. Jonathan Shaw) and Photomediation: an open book, created in collaboration with Goldsmiths University of London in the framework of the Open and Hybrid Publishing pilot of Eu project Europeana Space.

Aura vs. digital: the concept and structure of theatrical world

TEATRÁLNY SVET / THE THEATRICAL WORLD 1839-1939 – exhibition in Bratislava

Even in the smallest town or village on the territory of today’s Slovakia we can find Romeos and Juliets, Kubos and Aničkas. But it was not only on stages that performances took place. Theatrical features such as prescribed text, costumes or elaborate set design were predominant in urban festivities in the past, as well as in rituals and festivities in villages. Slovaks from abroad brought their fondness for drama to their new homes, and documented it through photography.

The medium of photography enables us to look back into times when, rather than gazing at screens and displays, people posed with props in front of the lenses of those who captured for us their moving, theatrical world. The collection exhibited is the result of the Digitization project, and thus the majority of it consists of Digitized images. The specific features of a digital image are noticeable only when compared with the original. Thus, we enable visitors to this representative collection of original photographs to experience their aura.

The exhibition was originally inspired by a presentation of the results of the Slovak partnership in the international project Europeana Photography (European Ancient Photographic Vintage Repositories of Digitized Pictures of Historical Quality) and includes a selection of the images that were digitized in the framework of this EU-funded project.

The exhibition is part of The Slovak Month of Photography 2014.

This exhibition was produced by The Theatre Institute of Bratislava / Divadelny Ustav in collaboration with The Slovak National Museum.

Exhibition poster (Jpeg 440 Kb)

organized by project CRe-AM, it takes place on 3 - 7 November 2014

creJAM week – online debate about technology and creative industry

From the 3rd to the 7^th of November, the CRe-AM project will host an online debate with its community of technology developers and creative practitioners.

Each day during the #creJAM week, we will launch a challenge or ask a question concerning the relation between technology and the creative industries, and upload information to feed the debate. Become visible in the CRe-AM community by participating and debating with other participants. Each day the best answers and most active users will be announced as winners and featured on CRe-AM website and social media.

The rules are simple:

One question or challenge per day
You can join the debate on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIN
Use the #creJAM hashtag and identify your sector of activity by its initials

Sectors:

Architecture
Art
Design
e-Publishing
Games
Media
Music
Technology

Learn more: http://www.cre-am.eu/crejam-cross-technology-creative-industries/

The Annual General Meeting of Europeana took place in Madrid at the end of October 2014

Europeana Photography at Europeana AGM in Madrid

Madrid hosted the Europeana AGM 2014, in the wonderful premises of the Museo del Prado, with the support of the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, on 30-31 October. Europeana Photography could not miss this event, to disseminate and describe the experience of the partners who embarked on the journey to digitize over 400.000 early photographs for Europeana: at that time, only few of them had realized that their very concept of the photograph would change forever.

In the AGM 2014, Europeana Photography was presented by the project coordinator Fred Truyen (KU Leuven) during an Ignite Talk on the morning of 31st October.

The title of the talk was “All our memories: sharing photographic heritage through Europeana”.

photo courtesy of Parisienne de Photographie

While sifting through often unseen and unpublished photos from Europe’s top collections, a fascination grew among the collaborators of the involved musea, archives and photo-agencies for what was captured on these dusty glass negatives, daguerreotype plates and albumen prints ranging from 1839 to 1939.

What was there was not only revealed through the digitization, but urrevocably reframed into an new visual experience. Questions about the very nature of what in the end the elusive “photo as object” is, and its ramifications for archival practices, became unavoidable.

Moreover, looking through the lenses of old photographers who were priviliged wittnesses of Europe’s history, big reflections came out about different aspects from a Digital Humanities perspective and on the transformational role of Europeana.

More information about Europeana AGM 2014:

http://www.pro.europeana.eu/web/agm2014