Digital meets Culture

A report on scientific and research impacts to the European Commission and IMPACT-EV

Unit B6 “Reflective Societies” of DG Research & Innovation of the European Commission (EC) is currently working with the project IMPACT-EV (Evaluating the Impacts and Outcomes of EU SSH research) on a report entitled “The ex-post evaluation of SSH projects funded under the FP7 Cooperation Programme (2007-2013)”. Aim of the report is to monitor and evaluate the social, political and scientific impacts of Social Science and Humanities (SSH) research from a SSH perspective, in order to illustrate the relevance and importance of SSH research in our societies.

RICHES, ongoing project 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», recently gave its contribution to the survey by delivering to the EC and the IMPACT-EV consortium a review of its scientific and research activities:

six publications, among which a book, on the topic “cultural heritage in a changing world”, being released at the end of the project, and three policy briefs (1_Digital Copyright Framework. The move from analogue to digital and new forms of IPR – describing how European policy-makers and European cultural heritage institutions should develop European copyright policies and strategies for the cultural heritage sector using the rights to culture and cultural rights as guiding principles; 2_RICHES Taxonomy of cultural heritage definitions – presenting evidence and recommendations arising from the research undertaken to develop the RICHES Taxonomy of terms, concepts and definitions, referred to the new emerging meanings of the digital era; 3_Co-creation strategies: from incidental to transformative – giving a short overview of the potential benefits of co-creative methods in the cultural heritage sector and a number of suggestions to further stimulate co-creation in cultural heritage on a strategic level) soon available on the project’s website;
participation in many conferences around Europe and outside (by invitation or submission), to present the project, disseminate its key messages and its underway activities and to establish new collaborations and synergies with SSH-sector experts and professionals;
organisation of two workshops (1_Building the project’s foundation – brainstorming and crowdsourcing session devoted to the development of the RICHES Taxonomy; 2_The context of change and the move from analogue to digital – exploring how the ways cultural heritage is made, held, collected, curated, exhibited or simply exists have completely changed in the 21st century), three co-creation sessions, one international conference (Cultural Heritage: Recalibrating Relationships – attended by over 150 people from all over the world and aimed at presenting the initial project results), one seminar on “The Romani Community in Coventry: Digital Practices, Cultural Identity and Cultural Change” and one international meeting on “Food and Cultural Heritage in the Digital Urban Age. A workshop to explore the role of local food-based social movements in constructing European cultural heritage and identity”;
underway international collaborations with 4 other projects (Civic Epistemologies, E-Space, MeMoLa and EMEE) and with 22 research/culture organisations;
launch of a national e-learning project, for a networked school in digital cultural heritage arts and humanities, arisen from the RICHES collaborations;
employment of 37 researchers (out of them 16 junior researchers) within the project.

Such so far the main outcomes of RICHES, which next year is concluding its lifetime with the objective to trigger a process of political developments and social improvements…Stay tuned!

Visit impact-ev.eu

Your institution could be one of the pioneer institutions to test and implement the new open source tools developed in PREFORMA!

Join us in testing and improving the conformance checkers

PREFORMA project works on one of the main challenges that memory institutions (archives, museums, libraries, etc.) are facing nowadays: the long-term preservation of digital data. In particular, the project will offer memory institutions an open source conformance checker that controls if a file complies with standard specifications and with the acceptance criteria of the memory institution, thus giving them full control of the process of conformity testing of files to be created, migrated and ingested into archives.

This software development is carried out in a collaborative environment with memory institutions and experts. We would like to invite you to participate in this process.

How can I participate?

Your memory institution can be involved in the testing phase of the software under development, by checking the process of the conformity tests with your own files and by considering your requirements for the technical iterations.

What would we need from you?

We won’t need much of your time. We need to receive some test files as example of the media files to be checked. PREFORMA is working on conformance checkers for electronic documents, still images and audio-visual records. So you can provide test files in one or more of the following categories and standards:

electronic documents (PDF/A),
still images (Uncompressed TIFF),
audio-visual records (MKV container format, FFV1 video and moving image codecs and LPCM uncompressed audio).

The test files will be treated as confidential and will not be distributed outside the PREFORMA Consortium. A selection of files will be also required as demonstration files to be released and distributed to the wider public for the purposes of demonstrating the PREFORMA conformance checkers. If you can make your files publicly available as demonstrators, do please let us know.

Would you like to be involved in defining the policies to be checked?

Welcome on board! We’re involving memory institutions from many countries that are contributing to the refinement of our open source tools with their expertise, use cases and specific requirements. We would like to hear your opinion on aspects such as:

Does your institution have any defined process/protocol/methodology in validating preservation file formats?
Does your institution have any defined policy with further restrictions and technical specifications regarding the standards of the mentioned file formats?
Which are the problematic cases that you are facing or that you may envisage while checking the correctness and standard compliance of the files that are stored in your archives?

You’ll find further information at the project website: http://www.preforma-project.eu/

It will be a pleasure to count on your cooperation with the PREFORMA Project. Your participation will be highlighted on the project website, and your institution could be one of the pioneer institutions to test and implement the new open source tools.

Are you interested in participating in this process?

The PREFORMA team is available to solve any question you should have and help you with this cooperation.

Please contact Claudio Prandoni (prandoni@promoter.it), Erwin Verbruggen (everbruggen@beeldengeluid.nl) and Magnus Geber (Magnus.Geber@riksarkivet.se) to confirm your participation.

We’ll be glad to contact you and fix an appointment to facilitate the process.

Participate to this survey conducted by Heather Ryan from University of Denver's Morgridge College of Education

File formats factors, notification and recommendation

Heather Ryan, PhD, an Assistant Professor in the Library and Information Science Program in the University of Denver’s Morgridge College of Education, launched a survey designed to collect information on file format evaluation factors, and perceptions of trust and usefulness of a semi-automatic file format warning and recommendation system.

Results will be used to inform the development of a file format endangerment index, and to inform the development of a semi-automated file format endangerment warning and recommendation system. Data collected for this study will be examined for identifying information and de-identified data will be shared via a data repository for use in future research.

Heather Ryan can be reached at heather.m.ryan@du.edu.

Please follow this link to complete the survey: https://udenver.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_eR8z8ShRM5EjUMd

Copenhagen, 6-8 May 2015

PREFORMA presented at Nordiske Arkivdage 2015

Magnus Geber from Riksarkivet (National Archives of Sweden) visited the Nordic Archival Conference “Nordiske Arkivdage 2015” which was held in Copenhagen on 6-8 June 2015. PREFORMA featured with a poster and a small booth where hand out information material (booklets and factsheets) were available.

Before the conference there was a small separate meeting with IT-archivist from the National Archives of the Nordic countries. There Magnus Geber delivered a short presentation of PREFORMA, informing the attendees about the status of the project and the latest achievements. During the meeting there was also a presentation of E-ARK, sister project of PREFORMA.

For further information on the Nordic Archival Conference visit the Conference website.

In Africa, a growing form of art that utilises digital technology to assemble images and stories

African digital collages of past and present

Nkiru Oparah, Precursor to a dream, 2014. Photograph: Nkiru Oparah

Jepchumba of Africandigitalart.com presents us the digital collage, in Africa a growing form of art that utilises technology to produce a range of artworks, incorporating digital video, animation, photography, animated gif’s and digital photo manipulation.
Digital culture – Jepchumba observes – has permeated the daily lives of thousands of Africans, connecting them to regions, histories and people inaccessible otherwise. This digital world is a playground for artists not only to experiment with digital technology but also to investigate the spaces between past and present, analogue and digital, Africa and beyond. African digital collage is all of this.
Through digital new stories of Africa emerge, alternative representations of this large and diverse continent. «Internet has invited Africa to participate in redefining Africa’s visual aesthetic – Jepchumba writes. «Africa is utilising the digital space to repost, remix, recreate and share new images and visual representations of Africa».

Nkiru Oparah. Photograph: Nkiru Oparah

While the African digital arena expands at a frenzied pace, African digital collagists have taken to the past, using ethnographic images often found online to recreate and remix images of Africa, creating new and often critical narratives. Websites such as the Nigerian Nostalgia Project have become popular online resources for collagists to find historical materials, photographs, videos, sound clips and graphic art works.
African digital collage works often recreate ethnographic images of Africa from the pre and post colonial era. Setting an alternative narration against the image of Africa we think to know.

Folasade Adeoso, The ocean is a woman, 2013. Photograph: Folasade Adeoso

Folasade Adeoso is known for her digital collages, which mix archival and contemporary images into Dalí-esque visions. «Research is key – Folasade says. «I spend endless amounts of time looking for old scans and reading online articles».

Folasade Adeoso, Motherhood, 2013. Photograph: Folasade Adeoso

Nkiru Oparah’s love for collage is based on the idea of transformation. Art allows her to recreate her own visual notions of Africa. «Online, the whole world opens up. The more people use it, the more access I have to societal, cultural, and personal images – Oparah says. «It’s the flux of the internet, in combination with an evolving African identity, that opened up to me this graphic way of image making».
Oparah finds images in a variety of ways, often using Google, Tumblr and her own photography mixed with magazine clippings or still images from films and videos.

African Digital Art is an online collective, a creative space where digital artists, enthusiasts and professionals can seek inspiration, showcase their artistry and connect.

Sources: Africandigitalart.com, TheGuardian.com. Read Jepchumba’s article.

Madrid, 13-17 July 2015. Sponsored by DiXiT

Digital Humanities Summer School @ LINHD UNED

Objective of the course is to provide students with digital skills specific for academic digital editing. The course will focus on text processing through XML languages and particularly on TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), labelling system specifically designed for digital humanities.
The various programme sessions aim to complete the participants’ training, in order for them to become familiar with text transformation via different languages (HTML, CSS, XSLT) and formats (ePub). The competences acquired will enable the students to know the whole digital editing process and to generate several kind editions (scientific, didactic).

The course can be attended both physically and virtually (completely online).

Programme

•13 July

16.00 – 18.00
From philological to digital editing – Elena González-Blanco García and Mª Gimena del Río Riande

18.00 – 20.00
The digital editing of poetry. A case study – José Luis Rodríguez Gómez, Elena González-Blanco García, María Dolores Martos Pérez, Mª Gimena del Río Riande, Clara Isabel Martínez Cantón

•14 July

10.00 – 12.00
Introduction to XML – Roberto Centeno Sánchez

12.00 – 14.00
Introduction to TEI – Susanna Allés Torrent

16.00 – 18.00
Language processing and language engineering – Ricardo Mairal Usón, Nuria Bel, Rafael Martínez Tomás, Ana García Serrano, Concepción Polo

•15 July

10.00 – 12.00
Labelled with advanced TEI: poetry, theatre and manuscripts – Alejandro Bia Platas

12.00 – 14.00
Advanced XML processing with XML-databases and XQuery – Alexander Czmiel

•16 July

10.00 – 12.00
TEI and XSLT, XPATH transformations I – Alejandro Bia Platas

12.00 – 14.00
TEI and XSLT, XPATH transformations II – Alejandro Bia Platas

16.00 – 18.00
Digital editing and image processing – Alicia Fornes Bisquerra

•17 July

10.00 – 12.00
From parchment to eBook – José Luis Fernández Vindel, Víctor Fresno Fernández

12.00 – 14.00
“Hands-on”: tools for digital editing without programming – Mª Gimena del Río Riande, Juan José Escribano

For further info and registration go to linhd.uned.es

Creatives from various fields unite to become ultra-technologists, for expanding art (and human relationships) through digital technology

About teamLab, Tokyo-based digital artist collaborative

teamLab, founded in 2001, is a collaborative, interdisciplinary creative group that brings together professionals from various fields of practice in the digital society: artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, architects, web and print graphic designers and editors. Referring to themselves as “ultra-technologists” their aim is to achieve a balance between art, science, technology and creativity.

teamLab believes that digital technology can expand art and that digital art can create new relationships between people. «Digital technology – the ultra-technologists say – releases expression from substance and creates an existence with the possibility for transformation».
For example, digital technology enables more freedom for change and complex detail. Before people started accepting the concept of digital technology, information had to be embodied in some physical form for it to exist. The same applies to artworks. Creative expression has existed through static mediums for many years, often mediated by the use of physical objects such as canvas and paint, giving rise to the familiar adage of a painting coming to life. The advent of digital technology allowed human expression to become free from all these physical constraints, enabling it to exist independently and change freely.

Expansion and Space Adaptability

«No longer tied down to physical specificity – teamLab ultra-technologists go on – digital technology has made it possible to expand artworks, an example being the use of projection mapping to create extensive art installations. Digital technology has also allowed to develop space adaptability, which provides us with a greater degree of autonomy within the space where the artwork is to be installed. Artists are now able to manipulate and use much larger amounts of space, allowing viewers to experience artworks more directly».

Digital technology has allowed us to express change in itself

«The ability of digital technology to enable change allows us to express much more than we were able to express before the arrival of the digital age. For example, digital technology enables artworks to express change in itself much more freely and also much more precisely. Artworks themselves can now show how one person is able to instigate perpetual change and how the viewers, as well as the environment where the artwork is installed, can also affect change on the artwork. By creating an interactive relationship between the viewers and the artworks, viewers become an intrinsic part of the artworks themselves».

Changing toward a relationship between artworks and groups in order to influence the relationship between viewers

«With interactive art works the viewer’s actions and behaviour can decide the artwork at any particular moment. The border line between the artwork and the viewer has become more ambiguous. The viewer has become a part of the artwork itself. A particular moment in an artwork is determined by the presence and behaviour of the viewers, blurring the boundary between viewers and artworks. The artwork becomes an artwork by incorporating its viewers. For instance, in paintings before the digital era, artworks stand independently of the viewers, with a clearly defined boundary between the viewers and the objects being viewed. The viewer, as an independent person, is always facing against the artwork. Painting on the whole always remains the same, whether someone has seen it 5 minutes before or someone were to be standing right next to you at the same time.
How does each viewer feel after seeing a painting? What do they think? These are important questions. An artwork comes to life based on its relationship with an individual. However, the incorporation of the viewer causes the viewer and the artwork to become more like a single entity, changing the relationship between the artwork and an individual into the relationship between the artwork and a group of people. Then the important questions become: Was there another viewer there 5 minutes ago? How is the person next to you behaving? At the very least, even when you are looking at the painting, you will start to wonder about the person standing next to you. In other words, the change in the relationship between artworks and people, the impact on the relationship between viewers has more potential to influence the relationship among viewers themselves than before».

Through collaborative creation, we learn the experience of co-creation

«In the information society, everything is connected by networks and society is changing more and more rapidly.
Creativity is far more important than memorising historical dates or being good at doing calculations. Meanwhile current education is no more than extensive memorisation and practicing questions with one correct answer, where all other answers are wrong. An answer that had never existed until now may be the right answer.
In the current education system, from a young age and without exception, the focus is on homogeneous development of individual ability, so that each individual has no weak points. Homework is done individually, tests are taken individually and entrance examinations are individually evaluated. In other words, working solo is completely drilled into students.
Furthermore, many kids today are obsessed with their smartphones. Their brains might be connected with others through the smartphone, but physically they are engaged in completely individual activity.
But in society, it is increasingly required to be able to achieve creative results as part of a team. Collaborative and creative experience, in other words “co-creative” experience, that is what we believe children may need now more than anything else. Using the latest digital technology, we want children to enjoy moving their bodies about freely in a shared space, interacting with each other, collaboratively creating in a “co-creative” experience. And we want them to become the kind of people who can enjoy creative collaboration. From this wish was born, “Learn and Play! teamLab Future Park”, an experimental project focused on the different relationships amongst people with digital art». Interactive digital installation Story of the Time when Gods were Everywhere is part of such project.

In Story of the Time when Gods were Everywhere, when children touch the characters the world contained in those characters opens up and the story begins. The objects that are born from the characters influence each other and are influenced by children`s actions. Children using their bodies and changing the world together can create a story.

Go to the teamLab website

http://www.digitalmeetsculture.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/RICHES_Co-creation.pdf

RICHES CO-CREATION FLYER

We present to you the largest online archive of African poetry accessible via mobile phone in the world

Badilisha Poetry: African poetry goes mobile digital

Badilisha Poetry X-Change is both an online audio archive and Pan-African poetry show delivered in radio format. Now the largest online collective of African poets on the planet, Badilisha has showcased and archived over 350 Pan-African poets from 24 different countries. It reflects the myriad of rhythms and rhymes, voices, perspectives and aspirations from all corners of the globe.

Africans have limited access to the vast poetic work of both historical and contemporary African poets. There has never been an archive of these poets’ work that is both expansive and easily accessible. It means that many Africans are not inspired and influenced by their own writers and poets and this negatively impacts their personal growth, identity, development and sense of place.

In comparison to their counterparts on other continents, African poets receive little exposure for their work and few viable career opportunities. Both factors are imperative to their development as artists. For instance, of all the published books in the world, the works of African authors comprise only two percent. This imbalance exists for a myriad of reasons, but can to a large extent be attributed to the reality that both within Africa and beyond, reading and listening to African voices is not prioritised.

Badilisha was initiated in 2008 as an annual, large-scale international poetry festival. It produced festivals for three years, as well as a series of related poetry interventions in the form of seminars, workshops and training programmes. The project as of 2012 evolved into an audio archive and radio show, aiming to address two key issues: the absence of any readily accessible archive of Pan-African poets and the need for a new stage in which Pan-African poetry could reach a global audience.

Badilisha Poetry X-Change has archived over 350 African poets from 24 different countries from both the continent and the global African Diaspora. Each week, two new poets are featured on the website and via podcasts. These poets represent a broad range of voices, genres and language, thereby reflecting contemporary trends and evolutions in the medium along with some of the historic giants of African poetry.

Badilisha’s extensive network of Pan-African poets and poetry organisations enables to create much-needed exposure and viable opportunities for Africa’s poets.

Poetry in Pictures feat Mbali Vilazaki

Badilisha Poetry is a project of the Africa Centre. The Africa Centre is a physical entity as well as an ongoing philosophical journey that explores how Pan-African cultural practice can be a catalyst for social change. The Africa Centre was established in 2005 as an international centre for creativity, artistic excellence and intellectual engagement. Based in Cape Town, South Africa, the Africa Centre’s social innovations extend across the African continent.

Source: badilishapoetry.com

Budapest, 10 July 2015

Workshop about Innovation Policies for Cultural Heritage Institutions

The CIVIC ESPISTEMOLOGIES project’s has the task to design a Roadmap for broadening e-Infrastructure deployment to support citizen researchers in digital culture. A first draft version of the Roadmap has been presented at the Workshop on the Roadmap in Leuven (20 February 2015). The Consortium received a lot of feedback from external experts, and this Workshop will be the occasion to present an advanced version of the Roadmap, in order to obtain other inputs from different stakeholders before finalizing the Roadmap.

The project deals also with the role of the Cultural Heritage Institutions (CHIs). Our task is to define which are the policies that should apply to cultural institutions in order to be ready to cooperate with citizens and their organisations in research on cultural heritage, and how to assure the quality of the result. This task is also exploring how the availability of infrastructure services can support this process of innovation and which are the conditions for cultural heritage institutions to be ready for this, such are training, equipment, new workflow, IPR management, etc…

This Workshop will be the occasion to discuss with European Cultural Heritage organisations about the role that can be played in this innovation process by the participation of citizens and the use of e-Infrastructures. We have already collected feedbacks of CHIs about involving citizens for services digital cultural heritage.

Invited are partners, associate partners and experts from museums, libraries and archives, researchers and a few representatives from civil associates beyond the consortium.

PROGRAMME (download the pdf file here)

More information are available here: http://www.civic-epistemologies.eu/workshop-about-innovation-policies-for-cultural-heritage-istitutions/

Register here: http://www.civic-epistemologies.eu/workshop-about-innovation-policies-for-cultural-heritage-istitutions/#REGISTER

Venue:

National Széchényi Library (NATIONAL LIBRARY)

BUDAPEST, Szent György tér 4-5-6., H-1014

‘F’ Building of Buda Castle