Digital meets Culture

Antonella Fresa will give a talk about RICHES in this important event in Turin

A very prominent conference is taking place in Turin on 25 and 26 september: ITALIA E’ CULTURA (Italy is Culture) organised by AICI (Association of Italian Cultural Institutions).

This conference will see, among its participants, the Italian Minister for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism, along with representatives from the European Commission and from many important Italian Institutions.

The speech about RICHES, by Antonella Fresa, takes place in the afternoon of Day one, during the workshop entitled Culture in EU policies: Horizon 2020, Creative Europe (La Cultura nelle politiche dell’UE: Horizon 2020, Europa Creativa) moderated by AICI’s Secretary-general Carmine Marinucci.

Confirmed speakers of the workshop:

Fabio Donato, Università degli Studi di Ferrara, Italian Representative SC6 in H2020
Antonella Fresa, Promoter, presenting RICHES – Renewal, Innovation and Change: Heritage and European Society
Cristina Loglio, President at the technical table of Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism MIBACT
Leila Nista, presenting the initiatives of MiBACT for the European cultural policies
Luigi Perissich, ConfindustriaSIT, IPOC2 platform

Learn more about the event here: http://www.digitalmeetsculture.net/article/italy-is-culture-cultural-institutes-for-economic-development/

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an important event in Turin hosted Promoter and FST to disseminate E Space

Italia è Cultura – disseminating Europeana Space

Promoter e FST disseminated Europeana Space and announce the project’s Opening Conference in Venice during an important event in Turin: ITALIA E’ CULTURA (Italy is Culture) organised by AICI (Association of Italian Cultural Institutions).

It was a prominent conference featuring the participation of the Italian Minister for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism, along with representatives from the European Commission and from many important Italian Institutions.

Learn more about the event here: http://www.digitalmeetsculture.net/article/italy-is-culture-cultural-institutes-for-economic-development/

IMG_3468 speaker Carmine Marinucci Segretario generale AICI

in this photo, dr. Carmine Marinucci general secretary of AICI

Turin, 25-26 September 2014

Italy is culture: cultural institutes for economic development

On 25-26 September, the national conference “Italy is Culture” organised by AICI (Association of Italian Cultural Institutions) was held in Turin, at Einaudi Campus. The event – where Dario Franceschini, Minister for Heritage and Cultural and Tourism Activities, and representatives from the European Commission and from important Italian Institutions intervened – was part of a series of initiatives taking place on occasion of the Italian Presidency of EU and followed 23-24 September’s assembly of Europe’s Cultural Ministries hosted by Turin’s Venaria Realm.

The conference aimed to give a strong signal about the potential of Italian culture and cultural institutions, which are undergoing a positive process of transformation and renewal: Italian culture has a strong vocation to social and technological innovation, to communicational experimentation, to internationalisation. Objectives to be achieved through synergic and multidisciplinary cooperation between the public and private sector for the benefit of Italian economic development.

Italy is culture presented data and concrete proposals that will merge into a Charter of Culture for European Renaissance, baseline for the growth and identity preservation of Europe.

Event official website: http://italiacultura.aici.it/

Conference Programme

Thursday, 25 September

9.00 – 13.00

Welcome speech by Dean of Turin’s University Gianmaria Ajani;
Round table: New role for Italian private cultural institutes. Relationship with the policy for heritage and policy for university and scientific research. Chaired by AICI’s President Valdo Spini;
Round table: The relationship between public and private bodies with the Cultural institutions and Foundations.

13.00 Lunch

14.30 – 17.30 Parallel professional workshops

Culture in EU policies: Horizon 2020, Creative Europe. Moderated by Carmine Marinucci, AICI’s Secretary-general;
Enterprise, job and culture. Moderated by Sergio Scamuzzi, Turin’s Gramsci Institute;
Integrated cultural systems and digitisation. Museums, archives, academic libraries and libraries of cultural institutes; MAB network. Moderated by Daniele Jalla, Piedmont MAB (Musei Archivi e Biblioteche – Museums Archives Libraries)
The Cultural Institutes between continuity and necessary innovations. Moderated by Giuseppe Sangiorgi, Don Luigi Sturzo Institute.
Participation of the cultural institutes in the Great War’s celebrations. Chaired by Franco Marini, President of the National Committee for the First World War Centenary. Moderated by Andrea Ciampani Coordinator of AICI for the Great War.

19.00 Turin cultural itinerary and social dinner

Friday, 26 September

9.00 – Round table: Job and Innovation in the economy of culture. Chaired by AICI’s past president Franco Salvatori;

10.30 – Round table: Culture funding: what private/public/social mix for innovation? Chaired by Patrizia Asproni, president of Confcultura;

13.00 Conclusions;

14.00 End.

The programme included the presentation of the volume Italia – Europa. Per una nuova politica della cultura (Italy – Europe. For a new culture policy) by Gabriella Nisticò, collecting the proceedings of the last two AICI’s meetings and containing the introduction to a survey on the AICI-affiliated Institutes and Foundations’ activities of the period 2011-2013.

Mario Caligiuri, Councillor for Culture and Cultural Heritage of Calabria Region and President of the Cultural Committee of the State-Regions Conference participated in Turin’s event; read his interview published on AICI’s website!

Download the detailed conference programme (Italian language) here

For more information visit www.aici.it

Award winning Levantes Dance Theatre consists of key practitioners Bethanie Harrison and Eleni Edipidi.

E-Space friends: Levantes Dance Theatre

by Rosemary Cisneros, Coventry University

Levantes Dance Theatre is a Greek/UK company that has supported the Dance E-Space Pilot.

Award winning Levantes Dance Theatre consists of key practitioners Bethanie Harrison and Eleni Edipidi. Since April 2012 Levantes Dance Theatre are Associate Artists of Greenwich Dance based in London,UK.

The company works primarily with Dance Theatre, with a constant enthusiasm for fusing artistic disciplines and indulging in vibrant aesthetics. The work is current, bold and honest. Intrigued by the draw of obscurity, the crux of work visually explores contradictions, blending and sinking into equal measures of the mundane and divine. Both the absurd and familiar are married together with set and costume, which in turn, are inhabited, developed, eaten, destroyed, worn, applicated and distributed within process.

They say: “We have a kitsch admiration for routine and value the body’s capacity to communicate in its most basic form. We wrap our audience in a cocoon of colourful activity striving to cushion their acceptance of an oddness, which in time melts into a viable element of the landscape.”

Learn more: http://www.levantesdancetheatre.org/

Images credit: The Camera Club, London and Foteini Christofilopoulou

Jennifer has supplied the Dance Pilot with digital content and dance videos from J Squared Dance Company

E-Space friends: Jennifer Essex and J Squared Dance Company

by Rosemary Cisneros, Coventry University

Europeana Space’ s Dance Pilot is experimenting new applications with different kinds of content, belonging to both Europeana and other digital collections such as the important archive of Siobhan Davies.

Next to this content, there are many artists supporting the Dance Pilot through offering dance videos.

Artistic Director of J Squared Dance Company, Jennifer Essex has recently contributed to the E-Space Dance Pilot.

Jennifer has supplied the Dance Pilot with content to test the Pilot’s applications and has been incredibly generous and supportive.

Jennifer says “In my work I try to break open the richness of human relationships through an exploration of language and metaphor. Drawing on contemporary iconography – video, film, fashion – my work is informed by a strong visual and theatrical sensibility. My current project, Distance Duet, uses the digital interactions of real couples as the source material to imagine new dance duets.”

More information here: http://distanceduet.tumblr.com/.

Website: www.jenniferessex.com

[Show as slideshow]

Images courtesy of Jennifer Essex and J Squared Dance Company

Connecting generations and sharing memories with digitised contents

MemorySharing tells the History through your stories

MemorySharing is a project which aims to create a new way for increasing the value of a community’s memories and private documents, by combining web technologies, scientific accuracy and creative approach in the multimedia sharing/telling of contents. Main objective is to connect generations, comparing and transferring knowledge, dynamically and funnily strengthening the shared memory, actively engaging aged and young people. Basically, MemorySharing wants to match with History starting from documents and individual and family testimonies, believing that such micro-historical, fragmented and scattered material can constitute (once suitably reconstructed as a puzzle) an unconventional collective heritage, important for retracing the history of communities, cities and nations. The main phases of the project are four:

1) Citizenry mobilisation – through web, institutions, local media, events, meetings: people are invited to share their photos, letters, diaries, super8s and heirlooms. Their material is an important piece of the collective history, to be digitised and used as source of events and tales;

2) Material collection – through web portals, social networks and physical spaces (libraries, schools, associations and local newspapers. The material is collected, digitised and showed via itinerant video-boxes;

3) Material sharing – the material is catalogued and inserted in open web networks (Historypin, Xdams, Europeana…), free and dynamic;

4) Storytelling, exhibitions, events – the collected material is given a narrative and captivating form: documentary-films, multiscreen films, itinerant films, multimedia tours, multimedia exhibitions, photography contests, readings and theatre performances, web-docs (non-linear interactive telling), e-books, paper volumes.

MemorySharing is a project by the cultural association Acquario della Memoria (Aquarium of Memory), whose essential objective is to experiment effective and innovative ways of transmitting the value of past’s memories, in particular to the young generations. According to such view, Acquario della Memoria believes audio-visual and interactive technologies can contribute to keep up, in a modern and engaging way, the ancient oral methods of transferring knowledge and cultural identity. Documents and testimonies collection, creation of an open and dynamic multimedia archive, realisation of educational workshops, films, documentaries, video-installations, exhibitions and interactive museums are the basic activities of the association.

Download MemorySharing’s abstract

Download the article A year of MemorySharing by Lorenzo Garzella, president of Acquario della Memoria (published on a Italian newspaper, Italian language)

For more information visit MemorySharing’s web-page and Acquario della Memoria’s website

The principles produced by Digisam aim to support strategic decisions and to help coordinate digital information efficiently.

Guidelines for digitization and data preservation

Digisam is an organization established by Swedish Government to coordinate the continued development work on digitisation issues, and it is settled as a department of the National Archives in Sweden.

The main task of Digisam is promoting the achievement of the objectives of the Swedish national strategy for digitisation, but among its activities one key focus is on international dissemination. For this reason, an english version of the Digisam’s blog is available and an appropriate work for translating documents and guidelines in English is carried on.

The latest release in English is about guiding principles for working with digital cultural heritage and for enabling effective cooperation regarding digitisation and its related processes.

The principles are available here: http://digisam.se/index.php/hem/entry/digisam-s-guiding-principles-now-translated-into-english

Photo: Young woman steering a yacht under sail. Harold Nossiter/Harold Nossiter Junior. 1920’s/1930’s. Australian National Maritime’s Museum. No known copyright restrictions.

Brussels, 20 - 21 November 2014

Media & Learning 2014 conference

Media & Learning 2014 is dedicated to the latest developments, services and uses of media in education and training. Aimed at both policy makers and practitioners, the purpose of this annual event, organized by the Flemish Ministry of Education, is to identify policies and initiatives that promote digital and media competence at all levels of education and training as well as to promote best-practice in the take-up and application of media in education and training.

Themes of discussion:

the urgency of embedding digital and media literacy skills amongst the European workforce
how best to convince stakeholders about the importance of embedding digital and media skills amongst learning professionals and learners at all levels of education and training

Official website with programme and speakers: http://www.media-and-learning.eu/home

A mobile application discovers the hidden ancient city

The Invisible Serdica under Sofia

By Dr Rosen Petkov
President of the Student Computer Art Society (SCAS)

Invisible Serdica is a mobile app that reveals objects of historical significance in the ancient city of Serdica, situated at the present location of the Bulgarian capital (Sofia). This tool enables you to get a realistic insight into some of the places, now hidden under the ground, emphasises on some of the unknown cultural aspects related to them by granting access to the especially edited multimedia tales and legends, curious stories and bibliographic data to various sources found in the NALIS Union Catalogue (NALIS UC). In this way, the historical significance of the object is revealed together with its relation to emblematic figures and events.

Every object is represented by several sections – History, Legends, Multimedia, From the Books and NALIS catalogue – and by pictures, video, music and 3D models (under Multimedia). The good news is that the app is freely downloadable (from both the App Store and Google Play) and automatically installable. Once you start it, it locates where you are and shows the objects around (either hidden or visible only in part). Besides, you may choose between the English or Bulgarian interface. What makes it different from similar applications is that it directs the user – through library catalogues and namely the NALIS UC – to written sources (books, primary sources, photographs, graphic materials etc.) and shows some of the well-known architectural monuments from a different perspective – the interesting stories behind them.

Even though still in progress (just 8 objects are in) the application is already functioning. So far available are: 1. The Amphitheatre, 2. St. Sofia Basilica, 3. St. George Rotunda and its neighbourhood, 4. The Main Street (Largo), 5. The tombs under the yellow pavement, 6. The tomb under Gurko Street, 7. St. Petka Samardzhijska (of the Saddlers) Church and 8. The Western Gate.

For more information you may check both at the project’s website and its facebook profile. The initiative is sponsored by the America for Bulgaria Foundation and the development itself has been undertaken by the Student Computer Art Society in partnership with the NALIS Foundation. The Museum of Sofia has also contributed with information to some of the digital objects created.

Download Rosen Petkov’s full article – PDF

Visit NALIS’ website and its Catalogue!

Pisa, 4-5 December 2014

RICHES Conference
“CH: Recalibrating Relationships”

On 4-5 December 2014, RICHES’ First International Conference will be held in Pisa, at the Museum of Graphics of Palazzo Lanfranchi. The conference, patronised by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development, Tuscany Region, Municipality of Pisa, University of Pisa and Fondazione Sistema Toscana (Tuscany System Foundation), is organised by Promoter Srl, RICHES’ Italian Partner as well as Communication & Dissemination Manager of the project.

RICHES (Renewal, Innovation and Change: Heritage and European Society) is a “Social-Sciences and the Humanities” research project funded by the EU Commission within the 7^th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development. It is a project about change: about the decentring of culture away from institutional structures towards the individual and about the questions which the advent of digital technologies are posing in relation to how we understand, collect and make available Europe’s cultural heritage (CH).

The project’s main objective is therefore reducing the distance between people and culture, recalibrating the relationship between heritage professionals and heritage users: such recalibration process will maximise cultural creativity and ensure that the whole European community can benefit from the social and business potential of Cultural Heritage.

The topic of Pisa’s International Conference CH: Recalibrating Relationships, as stated by the title, is perfectly inserted in this framework.

During the two-day event, the 10 project’s partners (Coventry University from UK, Hansestadt Rostock from Germany, Stichting Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde from The Netherlands, WAAG Society from The Netherlands, the University of Exeter from UK, Promoter Srl from Italy, Fundacio’ i2CAT from Spain, Syddansk Universitet from Denmark, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz from Germany, Turkiye Cumhuriyeti Kultur ve Turizm Bakanligi from Turkey) will present the project’s outcomes and illustrate the progress and advances made by the research. Well-known experts, from Europe and outside Europe, will intervene as speakers. Among them:

Neil Forbes (Historian – Coventry University, UK)
Xiao Chun Situ (Artist and reporter – Beijing Youth Daily, China)
Bill Thompson (Media and technology expert – BBC, UK)

The participants will be moreover involved in a pleasant socio-cultural activity: a visit to the exhibition devoted to Italian artist and draftsman Tullio Pericoli, organised in the same venue as the conference.

Before the conference beginning, the RICHES consortium will come together for an internal plenary meeting, in order to discuss the work until then carried out and plan the future activities.

Registration to the conference is open! Don’t forget to register within the 2nd of December 2014 by completing the following form:

Event Registration Online for RICHES International Conference 4-5 December 2014 powered by Eventbrite

For more information visit the conference’s website

Download the conference programme – PDF

View the article published by Net4Society for announcing the RICHES conference!

RICHES on Twitter! #richesEU

RICHES on YouTube: www.youtube.com/richesEU