Digital meets Culture

Final report of the Horizon 2020 Expert Group in Cultural Heritage

Getting cultural heritage to work for Europe

Quoting from the report of the Expert Group on Cultural Heritage established under the Horizon 2020 Work Programme 2014 for the Societal Challenge “Climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials”:

«Cultural heritage is a significant force for XXI century Europe. Not only is it at the heart of what it means to be European, it is being discovered by both governments and citizens as a means of improving economic performance, people’s lives and living environments». «Evidence demonstrates that relatively modest investment in cultural heritage can pay substantial dividends. These can be taken economically but also in terms of improving environmental sustainability and social cohesion»

The expert group, chaired by Dr. Philippe Busquin, former Commissioner for Research, Science and Technology and former Member of the European Parliament, comprised nine renowned experts from the private and public sector, including Professor Simon Thurley, CEO of English Heritage, who acted as rapporteur. The group aimed to contribute to further investigating and providing input for fully developing the potential that cultural heritage holds for Europe.

The report Getting cultural heritage to work for Europe provides the rationale for setting a renewed European Research & Innovation policy agenda on cultural heritage. It outlines the general framework about cultural heritage in Europe and the contribution it can make towards smarter, more inclusive and more sustainable development. The report further delineates three priority objectives along the economic, social and environmental side and describes recommendable actions, drawing upon successful cases where cultural heritage has been a positive driver for sustainable development.

Download free the full report here!

Brussels, 26 March 2015: Preforma passed successfully its first review

Excellent evaluation for Preforma!

On 26 March 2015, in Brussels, project Preforma underwent its first review, obtaining an excellent evaluation.

Brussels, Grand Place

The EC reviewers gave the consortium useful recommendations for the project’s continuation, in particular to improve the networking activities and to start the preparation of the datasets to be used to test the prototypes that are being developed by the three suppliers that were selected as a result of the last evaluation:

VeraPDF Consortium (to work on PDF/A)
Easy Innova (to work on TIFF)
MediaArea (to work on MKV/FFV1/LPCM)

The 3 consortia mentioned above will start working from April 14, 2015 to develop an open-source toolset for conformance checking of digital files intended for long-term preservation in memory institutions.

Shortly the Preforma project will launch its Open Source portal, so STAY TUNED on www.preforma-project.eu!

On 9th April at WAAG premises in Amsterdam the adventure of the Europeana Space first hackathon, dedicated to interactive TV, has begun!

Meet the Team pre-event for the EuropeanaTV hackathon was a success

Hacking Culture Bootcamp, the first hackathon of Europeana Space project, took flight on the 9th April, with the pre-event where the hackathonees met the team and learnt practical information about technology, the toolkit and available content for experimenting with EuropeanaTV pilot.

photo by Kelly Mostert, Sound and Vision

The hackathon is challenging game developers, storytellers, interactive designers, and app developers to create new multi-screen experiences with a focus on digitized historical footage.

photo by James Morley (Europeana Foundation)

It is the chance for creatives, entrepreneurs, designers, and professionals to explore and make concrete innovative ideas, together with a team of creative thinkers, expert makers, and innovative developers.

During this Europeana Space Hacking Culture Bootcamp it is possible play and experiment with millions of items from heritage institutions all across Europe via Europeana.eu, Europe’s online cultural hub, that gives access to open data, audio files, photos, paintings, 3D images, historical stories and archival footage. Waag Society will facilitate design processes, provide equipment and technological support in collaboration with Proton Labs. All technology will be provided and supported by Noterik who developed the video application. Cultural heritage experts from RBB, Luce, and Sound and Vision will also be on hand to share their knowledge about the content and creative innovation within the cultural heritage heritage sector.

An interesting Hacking Culture Debate with experts and the public about media strategies and the potential of cross-media, interactive concepts for broadcasters and museum sector is also organized in the framework of the hackathon event, on the evening of May 8th, 2015.

All the information and registration is accessible via the event website: http://www.europeana-space.eu/hackathons/europeana-tv-hackathon/

A cooperation agreement was recently signed between the 2 'creative industry- focused' projects

Europeana Space and CRe-AM

CRe-AM and Europeana Space are two projects which both aim to enhance the creative industry by leveraging on ICT and digital cultural content.

Europeana Space intends to do this by originating concrete scenarios, best practice and tools, and further by offering real business modeling and incubation actions towards innovative creative projects, selected via a series of thematic hackathons. CRe-AM is focused on engaging the stakeholders of the creative industry and ICT in a fruitful dialogue in order to develop new ways of using technologies and tools, new products, services and new business models.

It is no surprise that the two projects want to join forces to bringing together the respective communities and to providing each other with a new targeted audience able to add value to the roadmaps and best practices developed.

Europeana Space is also intending to cooperate to CRe-AM’s sustainability, in particular by developing synergies for the CRe-AM’s Community Space.

http://www.europeana-space.eu/network/cooperation-agreements/cre-am/

http://www.cre-am.eu/

http://communities.cre-am.eu/

A workshop held in Brussels for presenting the project’s Technical Space

E-Space develops a cutting-edge technical framework

The E-Space project’s technical workshop took place in Brussels, on the 23^rd of March 2015, at the iMinds – Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) offices; the event, aimed at presenting E-Space’s architecture and implementation choices for the development of its technical structure, was open to the public and attended by over 50 experts from all over Europe.

The workshop venue

The project’s Technical Space is a framework for storing, accessing and processing contents and metadata. The Technical Space is interoperable with complementary services emerging from the Europeana group of projects. Thanks to it and based upon IPR licensing, curators, scholars, professional users and third party developers will be able to search for and manage resources within a safe space, to use and re-use them for the evolution of knowledge and the development of applications.

The Technical Space’s system and implementation choices consist specifically in:

A Data Infrastructure that includes the retrieval and storage layers for content and metadata from available sources.
A Metadata Processing Unit that integrates available services for the management and manipulation of metadata resources.
Access APIs constituting a set of interfaces that will be made available for the delivery of resources and the creation of applications.

During the workshop, discussion and interaction with the invited stakeholders focused on validating and expanding the specification of functional and non-functional requirements of the Technical Space, in order to fulfil the needs of a wide user base. Representatives from the E-Space Consortium (the Technical Coordinator Promoter, the responsible for the development of the technical infrastructure NTUA and the pilot leaders) attended to collect feedbacks on the following topics:

Content – navigate, access, licensing
Metadata – models, serialisations, delivery protocols, cleaning and enrichment services
Datasets – management, analytics, indexing, transformations
Aggregations – combining your data with Europeana & DPLA, interfaces with open media repositories, preservation and sustainability
Semantic web technologies – linked data repository, reasoning, query answering
APIs – authentication, content, metadata, services
Interoperability – development approaches, polyglot storage, processing engines, integration.

The workshop started in the morning of the 23^rd of March.

After the registration and a nice welcome coffee, E-Space Technical Coordinator Antonella Fresa (Promoter SRL) opened the day with an introduction to the project [download Fresa’s presentation]; it was then the turn of James Morley (Europeana Foundation), who delivered a presentation of the Europeana Labs [download Morley’s presentation].

Nasos Drosopoulos (NTUA – National Technical University of Athens) intervened after the coffee break, concluding the morning with a presentation of the E-Space Technical Infrastructure and protected content space [download Drosopoulos’ presentation].

After the lunch, the second part of the day started, devoted to “Tutorial and practical experiments using the Europeana Labs” – session coordinated by Remy Gardien of the Europeana Foundation [download Gardien’s presentation] – and to “Tutorial and practical experiments using the E-Space Technical Infrastructure and its protected content space” – session coordinated by Nasos Drosopoulos. These last sessions helped in particular to show how the two platforms (Europeana Labs – E-Space Technical Infrastructure and protected content space) work from a technical point of view and which are the APIs and Interfaces that the services of the two platforms are based on.

The last part of the event was finally dedicated to conclusive discussions and remarks.

Thanks to this workshop, the E-Space Consortium was able to collect from the attendees a great many feedbacks and inputs, useful to complete the development of the E-Space’s Technical Space. Furthermore, the event gave evidence of the numerous and fruitful possibilities of integration between the services offered by the Europeana Labs and E-Space’s Technical Space.

The morning of the 24^th of March was reserved to an internal meeting among the E-Space pilots’ representatives, who discussed and exchanged ideas about the use of the services illustrated during the previous day and the planning of the next steps.

For further info visit www.europeana-space.eu

Barcelona & Falmouth, 9 April 2015

ULTRAORBISM by Marcel•lí Antúnez Roca

Performance art is at the heart of my work – Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca writes – Ultraorbism is an interactive distributed action between two networked connected spaces in two cities: Barcelona and Falmouth.

Both spaces are open-plan, with a backdrop of a large main screen in the centre and a subsidiary screen: the main screen acts as the central area for the story and it is there where the consequences of the various interactive processes engaged in by those acting in both venues are shown; the small screen shows the details of these interactions. This is explained to the audience as the interactivity takes place.

A journey is recounted with the overlapping of various levels of images, some of which are produced dynamically during the performance and others come from the image bank: taken together, they make up the iconographic narrative. The music and lighting are also interactive and coincide with the story of the image. The story is a linear interpretation of the first of the two books of True Histories by Lucian of Samosata (a Syrian writer who lived in the second century AD): it is an impossible journey on which everything is invented, with references to the mythology and literature of the era.

#ultraorbism_The sea war

Ultraorbism is a project directed by Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca, based on True Histories by Lucian of Samosata. It is part of the European project SPECIFI and case study of the RICHES European project’s research area. Support is from the Ministry of Culture of the Government of Catalonia, the i2CAT Foundation and live participation by actors and the audience at the University of Falmouth, Cornwall (Great Britain).

Free entrance. All kind of audience.

Concept, drawings and performance: Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca

Live music and performance: Andrea Valle

Text: Julià de Jòdar

Choreography and dancers: Cheap Date Dance Company

Actor: Ciaran Clarke

Video: Joint Effort Studios

Technical direction: Oriol Ibàñez

Programming: Sergi Lario

Animation: David Tangarife, Jesús González and Claudio Marzà

Drawing curtains: Yansy Soler and Wahab Zeghlache

Costumes: Paloma Bomé

Photography: Carles Rodríguez

Researcher: Begoña Egurbide

Sound mix: Paolo Armao and Andrea Valle

Coordination and production in Falmouth: Ian Biscoe and Erik Geelhoed

General coordination and production: Josep Font Sentias and Margherita Bergamo

Assistant: Cristina Llorca

STREAMING

Coordinating technical production, i2CAT Foundation: Sergi Fernández

Technical manager, i2CAT Foundation: Gerard Castillo

Coordinator sociological study, i2CAT Foundation: Marc Aguilar

Documentation and research, i2CAT Foundation: Pau Adelantado

Produced by: Ministry of Culture of the Government of Catalonia and Panspèrmia SL

Organized by: Ministry of Culture of the Government of Catalonia and i2CAT Foundation

With the collaboration of: Falmouth University, Cheap Date Dance Company, Joint Effort Studios, Arts Santa Mònica – Departament de Cultura

Sponsored by: Ministry of Culture of the Government of Catalonia, i2CAT Foundation, SPECIFI Project, RICHES project, European Commission, CIP 2007-2013

SPECIFI is a European project under the CIP program for competitiveness and innovation, that promotes the use of the Internet infrastructures in order to highlight the cultural and creative heritage of the Smart Cities.

RICHES (Renewal, innovation & Change: Heritage and European Society) is a research project about change: 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 (CH).

The RICHES project has selected ULTRAORBISM as a case study: the two audiences will be given a questionnaire to complete and a discussion will take place between them, to examine how a distributed performance is appreciated and received in the case of this kind of real experience.

Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca is an artist internationally renowned for his mechatronic performances and interactive installations. Since the eighties, his work is concerned about the human condition.

Marcel·lí is a founding member of La Fura dels Baus; he was artistic coordinator until 1990. Since then his solo work is based on technology and it has been shown in more than forty countries. He received the Barcelona City Award for Visual Arts in 2014 for the exhibition Systematurgy, shown in Arts Santa Mònica.

Download the press release on ULTRAORBISM in Catalan language

Visit the Ultraorbism Facebook page

Digital curation and quality standards for memory institutions: PREFORMA research project

Article about PREFORMA published in Archival Science

The article “Digital curation and quality standards for memory institutions: PREFORMA research project“, by Antonella Fresa, Claudio Prandoni and Borje Justrell, has just been published in the Special Issue on Digital Curation of the Archive Science Journal and it is available as ‘Online First’ on SpringerLink at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10502-015-9242-8.

Abstract

Memory institutions are facing increasing transfers of electronic documents and other media content for long-term preservation. Preservation models are often inspired by standards, such as the Open Archival Information System reference model, where transfers and preservation are built on information packages containing both data and metadata. Data are normally stored in specific file formats for documents, images, sound, video, etc., that are produced by software from different vendors. Even if the transferred files are in standard formats, the implementation of standards cannot be guaranteed and results may be different depending on the software used. The software implementing standards for the production of the electronic files are not controlled either by the institutions that produce them or by the memory institutions. Conformance tests of transfers are done, but their results cannot be further processed by the memory institution autonomously, unless it contacts the same provider of the conformance test again. This poses problems in curation and preservation. Data objects meant for preservation, passing through an uncontrolled generative process, can jeopardise the whole preservation exercise. The overall intention of PREFORMA project (PREservation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives) is to research critical factors in the quality of standard implementation in order to establish a long-term sustainable ecosystem around a range of practical tools, together with a variety of stakeholder groups. The tools should be innovative and provide a reference implementation of the most common file format standards for the assessment of the collections to be archived and for the correction of the digital archive. PREFORMA will target a wide digital curation and preservation community, by providing specifications and feedback to developers, standard bodies and memory institutions.

The final publication is available at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10502-015-9242-8 and it is fully accessible to all users at libraries and institutions that have purchased a SpringerLink license.

An interactive installation telling of emancipation, self-determination and violence

Ballade of Women for women’s right

Ballade of Women, an interactive installation exploring perspectives on women’s rights, was hosted by Palazzo Sansedoni in Siena, as result of an international collaboration between the University of Siena, Interactive Institute Swedish ICT, Fondazione Monte dei Paschi di Siena and the Eindhoven University of Technology.

from the left: Lucia da Siracusa – Cleopatra – Maria Maddalena

The title, which in full says “Ballade of Women – as woman is not sky, she is earth, flesh of earth that wants no war”, quotes a verse by Edoardo Sanguineti of one of the poems that constitute the soundscape of the installation.
Through the lens of the personal experience of three women, the exhibition offered an interactive narration on three fundamental themes: emancipation, self-determination and violence.
Starting points of the exhibition were three paintings of the private collection of the Fondazione Monte dei Paschi di Siena. They illustrate three historical characters: Cleopatra (by Marco Pino, XVI century) who supports the theme of emancipation, Maria Maddalena (by Rutilio Manetti, XVII century) who embodies the theme of self-determination and Lucia from Siracusa (by Maestro dell’Osservanza, XV century) who recalls the theme of violence.

The installation is a dynamic space constituted by floating and mobile fragments, whose behaviour is influenced by the physical presence of the observer as well as by the virtual presence of online discussion groups debating the themes of the exhibition. The dynamics of the fragments redefines the contours of the three paintings from specific viewpoints in the space.

The experience suggests that each of us can contribute to compose a harmonious picture of the complex and controversial world of women’s rights, by approaching it and by being confronted with points of view of other people, facing the same topics from different perspectives all over the world. Our presence and our ideas can change the world.

Read Patrizia Marti’s article and visit her website

The Mosul Museum collections are in danger and need the support of the GLAM community.

Project Mosul: Protecting Iraq’s Cultural Heritage

by Dr. Marinos Ioannides, Cyprus University of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Informatics, Digital Heritage Research Laboratory

Neville Chamberlain famously said “In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.” Lives are lost, homes and livelihoods are damaged and culture is erased.

In Iraq, a country devastated by invasions and divided by civil war, destruction of cultural artefacts has become common-place. The last few months have seen Islamic State militants burning books from libraries, destroying ancient artefacts housed in the Mosul Museum and more recently bulldozing the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud.

While it has since transpired that many of the Mosul Museum artefacts destroyed were replicas, some of the larger objects were indeed real. This wanton destruction of cultural heritage has resulted in an outcry from the digital heritage community and beyond. The historically important city of Mosul holds artefacts of huge cultural and historical importance and the Mosul Museum is the second largest museum in Iraq after the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad. The museum was first looted during the Iraq war in 2003 and millions of pounds of sculptures and images taken. The Mosul Museum has had a rough ride and needs the support of the GLAM community.

The Lion of Mosul by neshmi
on Sketchfab

Positive action has now been taken by the Initial Training Network for Digital Cultural Heritage (ITN-DCH), a Marie Curie Actions training project that is part of the EC Seventh Framework Programme, through the instigation of a volunteer project. Project Mosul is seeking volunteers to help virtually restore the Mosul Museum. This includes finding photos, processing data, contributing to the website and generally helping out with organising the effort to identify the museum artefacts.

Other EU projects such as the Europeana Space and the 4D-CH-WORLD are joining their forces to help and support this volunteer effort of the young Marie-Curie researchers.

The main volunteer activities that support is needed for are:

Uploading pictures of the artefacts found in the Mosul Museum
Developing the Web platform
Mask images using photoshop
Spreading the word about the project
Get the word out
Processing an artefact using automated photogrammetry to create three-dimensional models

To find out more about how you can support the volunteer activities see the Project Mosul website or join the Google Group.

Some of the artefacts already added to the site.

The project will run so long as it is needed until the destroyed artefacts can be completely reconstructed and re-produced by using latest novel technologies like the 3D printing. All the reconstructed objects will be available under Open Access licenses and will be ‘exhibited virtually’ on the Cloud under the project’s web portal.

Project Mosul is aligned with the scopes of Europeana Space Project. Europeana Space has received funding from the European Union’s ICT Policy Support Programme as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme, under GA n° 621037.

This article has been collected by Marieke Guy from Open Knowledge Foundation, a consultant on the Europeana Space project supporting activities related to open licensing, and it appeared orginally in OKF blog.

Presenting the outcome of Open and Hybrid Publishing Pilot of EuropeanaSpace project

Photomediations: An Open Book

by Kamila Kuc, Goldsmiths

A collaboration between academics from Goldsmiths, University of London, and Coventry University, Photomediations: An Open Book is the outcome of the Open and Hybrid Publishing pilot – which is one of six Europeana Space pilots. The pilot redesigns a coffee-table book as an online experience to produce a creative multi-platform resource that explores the dynamic relationship between photography and other media.

Photomediations: An Open Book uses open content, drawn from Europeana and other online repositories (Wikipedia Commons, Flickr Commons) and tagged with the CC-BY licence and other open licences. In this way, the book showcases the possibility of the creative reuse of image-based digital resources.

Through a comprehensive introduction and four specially commissioned chapters on light, movement, hybridity and networks that include over 200 images, Photomediations: An Open Book tells a unique story about the relationship between photography and other media. These main chapters are followed by three ‘open’ chapters, which will be populated with further content over the next 18 months: an open reader (featuring academic and curatorial texts), a social space and an online exhibition.

Photomediations: An Open Book’s online form allows for easy sharing of its content with educators, students, publishers, museums and galleries, as well as any other interested parties. Promoting the socially significant issues of ‘open scholarship’, ‘open education’ and ‘open access’, the pilot plays an important social and cultural role. It also explores an alternative low-cost publishing business model under the heading of ‘open and hybrid publishing’, as a viable response to the increasingly threatened traditional publishing structures.

http://photomediationsopenbook.net/