Digital meets Culture

RICHES’ Associate Net7 develops linked data tools for academic research in the Humanities

The open source semantic annotation tool Pundit is Net7’s main product for the Digital Humanities. The main idea behind semantic annotation is to enable users not only to comment, bookmark or tag web pages, but also to semantically create structured data while annotating. The ability to express semantically typed relations among resources, relying on ontologies and specific vocabularies, not only enables users to express unambiguous and precise semantics, but also, more interestingly, fosters the reuse of such knowledge within other web applications.

Pundit allows annotators to include machine-readable semantics in their annotations, by setting up links to the web of data and by collaboratively building a knowledge graph that connects and contextualizes (unstructured) web content.

Pundit enables this structured knowledge to emerge in online communities so that a variety of applications can exploit it by, for example, providing a powerful semantic search, building innovative ad-hoc data visualizations or improving the way scholars explore the web.

Pundit in action: a web page from the British Library’s “Medieval manuscripts blog” is being annotated using the “Annomatic” functionality. Annomatic enables automatic entity recognition, while matched entities can be confirmed or rejected before being saved as annotations.

Pundit aims to be part of an advanced research ecosystem, of which semantic enrichment and data curation are fundamental steps. Thus, the goal of the StoM project is to create a software-as-a-service platform named PunditBrain. PunditBrain is aimed mainly 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.

It will be a web-based service, which will allow users to apply semantic annotations on web documents. Using the Pundit technology as its foundation stone, PunditBrain will focus on usability. Annotating will be similar to highlighting text in documents: for example highlighting with different colors could be used to add different specific semantics to the text.

Net7 develops advanced tools for academic research in the Cultural Heritage and the Digital Humanities domain. In fact the company is based in Pisa, Tuscany, at the heart of a region with a high density of excellent research institutions including the Italian National Research Council, the University of Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna.

Since its founding in 2002, Net7 has developed web applications based on open source software and Semantic Web / Linked data standards aimed at digital humanists. Net7 has participated as a technical partner in 20 international research projects: HyperNietzsche (2003-2004), PRINHyperSchopenhauer (2006-2008) COST A32 OPen Scholarly Communities on the Web (2006-2009), eContentplusDISCOVERY (2006-2009), WEBSICOLA (2006-2010), ERC-2007-StGAFDMATS – Anton Francesco Doni Multimedia Archive Texts and Sources (2008-2011), FP7 Research for SMESEMLIB (2010-2012), CIP-ICT-PSPAGORA (2011-2013), Marie Curie ITN -DiXit (2014-2017), FIRB -GramsciSource (2013-2016).

At present, Net7 is a partner in two European-related projects (DM2E and Europeana Sounds), three ERC-funded projects (EUROCORR and ERC AdG 2011 – LookingAtWords) and in a Dissemination project (StoM – SemLib to Market). Since 2014 Net7 is also associate partner of the RICHES project.

Visit Pundit’s website!

For more information about Net7’s digital humanities activities and products, please visit Net7 website and Net7’s facebook page!

Neelie Kroes: «Culture feeds the soul, but it is also a business opportunity»

Europe’s cultural treasures online: opportunities ahead

On 2 October 2014, the European Commission published two reports, coinciding with the international conference The reuse of digital cultural content in education, tourism and leisure: an opportunity for cultural institutions and creative industries, an investment for the future, held in Rome, at the National Central Library, on occasion of the Italian Presidency of the EU. The conference aimed at urging cultural institutions in Europe to put more cultural heritage online, with the government support.

One report looks at how to digitise, make accessible and preserve culture online, the second report explains how European film heritage can be rescued from rotting cans. Digitised cultural material is a great common and free resource for developing cultural and educational content, documentaries, tourism applications, games, animations and design tools. This can help creative industries to grow beyond their current share of 4% of EU’s GDP.

Europeana, the EU’s digital museum, library and archive already includes 33 million objects from hundreds of Europe’s best museums and libraries, making it the largest and most significant digital cultural collection in the world. Most recently, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid agreed to make their masterpieces accessible through Europeana.

European Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes said: «Culture feeds the soul, but it is also a business opportunity. Just look at the Rijksmuseum example: its RijksStudio application lets you play around with 150,000 masterpieces with no restrictions. Beautiful things happen when you combine culture and digital technology.

Or take Europeana – the best cultural collection that no-one has heard of. It could be 10 times bigger, have better partners, and be marketed globally as a symbol of what makes Europe great. This is the digital cultural challenge and opportunity.»

The international conference in Rome also focused on the reuse of the digitised material.

The first report shows that digitisation remains a challenge, with only a fraction of Europe’s collections digitised so far (around 12% on average for libraries and less than 3% for films). The second identifies barriers to film digitisation and online access, such as lack of funding (for every €97 invested by the public sector in the creation of new films, only €3 go to the preservation and digitisation of these films) and the high cost and complexity of copyright clearance.

Good examples in the digital culture field include:

the Polish National Audiovisual Institute, which operates a multimedia portal for sharing cultural resources and producing new content from them
the Finnish National Gallery, which offers and app-developer support tool
in the Netherlands, Koninklijke Bibliotheek‘s and University Library‘s database, which permits free reuse of digital books including for commercial purposes
the Danish Film Institute, which offers an open film streaming platform. Within the first two months after its launch, it attracted almost 200,000 users
the Sound Collection partnership between the French BNF, Believe Digital and Memnon Archiving Services, which offers 200.000 records in the Médiathèque Numérique
innovative sharing and reuse models for digital heritage, such as the Monuments of Poland app;
Digisam, which coordinates the digitisation of the many heritage institutions in Sweden.

The Commission will continue to monitor progress in this area through periodic reports and by chairing the Member States Expert Group on digitisation and digital preservation and the EU Expert Group on Film Heritage. It will also monitor correct transposition of the Orphan Works Directive (transposition deadline 29/10/2014) to bring online books, press articles, films that are still protected by copyright but whose authors or other right holders are not known or cannot be located or contacted.

The Commission encourages a more widespread and systematic use of the European Structural and Investment Funds to co-finance digitisation activities as part of projects having an impact on the regional economy.

The newly published document on Film heritage is the fourth report on implementation of the 2005 Recommendation on film heritage and the competitiveness of related industrial activities. It is based on replies of the Member States to a Commission questionnaire circulated in September 2013. The analysis shows how European film heritage risks missing the digital train.

In November 2013, the Commission also adopted revised criteria for assessing member states’ support schemes in favour of films and other audio visual works (Cinema Communication on State Aid). Since then, the Commission is asking Member States to provide information on the deposit of financed films and on mechanisms that facilitate their use for public interest by film heritage institutions every time that a new State aid scheme is notified.

For further info visit:

http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/creativity

http://www.iccu.sbn.it/opencms/opencms/en/archivionovita/2014/novita_0001.html

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-14-1076_en.htm

Digital AV Archiving Workflows; Digitisation, Ingest, Preservation, Conversion, and Delivery

PREFORMA at PRESTO4U WORKSHOP

PREFORMA project has been presented by Erwin Verbruggen (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision) at the PRESTO4U workshop Digital AV Archiving Workflows; Digitisation, Ingest, Preservation, Conversion, and Delivery.

The workshop, which was held on 22 and 23 September 2014 in Copenhagen, did bring together a group of experts involved with digital AV masters, their creation, storage and delivery. Through presentations of real cases, the workshop gave an opportunity to learn about the technical and practical details of AV preservation and engage with experts in the field. Emphasis were given to the complex workflows required in digital master management and the practical implementation of storage and delivery solutions.

The workshop did focus on digital film and AV master handling and management, and therefore predominantly addresses the issues of the Presto 4U Film Collections and Filmmakers community. The workshop were also of relevance to the Presto 4U communities of video and post production, broadcasters and footage sale archives.

Download the presentation of PREFORMA: “Separate pasts, common futures: Digital film preservation in a broadcast environment“.

For more information about the event visit the event page.

London (UK), 20 October 2014

Sharing Images of Global Cultural Heritage

The International Image Interoperability Framework community is hosting a one day information sharing event at the British Library on Monday 20^th October 2014 about the use of images in and across Cultural Heritage institutions.

The day will focus on how museums, galleries, libraries and archives, or any online image service, can take advantage of a powerful technical framework for interoperability between image repositories. This event will be valuable for organizational decision makers, repository and collection managers, software engineers, and anyone interested in exploring the wide range of use cases that are seamlessly enabled by the framework.

Attendance is free, and widespread dissemination of the event is encouraged. To register, just go to: http://bit.ly/iiiflondon2014

There will be many opportunities for discussion, questions and networking throughout the day with new and existing partners including multiple national libraries, top tier research institutions, commercial providers and major aggregators.

Official website: http://iiif.io/

Paris, 29-30 September and 1 October 2014

PREFORMA at the EAGLE International Conference

A poster of PREFORMA has been presented at the International Conference on Information Technologies for Epigraphy and Digital Cultural Heritage in the Ancient World organised by the EAGLE project (Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy).

The Conference , organised with the support of Collège de France Chaire Religion, institutions et société de la Rome antique and École Normale Supérieure, included several presentations around the topics of Harmonization of Content and Geographical information, Translations and Linked Open Data, Intellectual Property Rights, User Engagement, Cultural Heritage and the Social Web, Digital approaches to cross-disciplinary studies of inscriptions. It saw the participation of over 150 attendees from all Europe and beyond.

The PREFORMA poster is also showcased in the Digital Exhibition web page associated to the Conference.

For further details about the event please visit this article.

Decoda creates spaces for conversation, practice and community, offers residencies and curates workshop series, festivals and performance events.

E-Space friends: Decoda, artist led dance organisation

by Rosemary Cisneros, Coventry University

Decoda is an artist led dance organisation that has grown from the Summer Dancing festivals, initiated in 2007 at Coventry University by Katye Coe. Decoda creates spaces for conversation, practice and community, offers residencies and curates workshop series, festivals and performance events. As well as supporting students and graduates through volunteering opportunities, graduate intensives and mentoring schemes. Decoda is based in the West Midlands and has an international reach.

[Show as slideshow]

Decoda has supported the Dance E-Space Pilot since Summer 2014 by including us in the Summer Dancing Festival 2014. They have been instrumental in connecting the Pilot partners with various freelance artists, practitioners, teachers, learners and researchers. Decoda has played a crucial role in finding a range of content which the Pilot is now using to test its applications. Among those artists that have contributed to the Pilot are Gaby Agis, Faye Green, Detta Howe, Fiona Millward, Bettina Neuhaus, Florence Peake, Mary Pearson, Cai Tomos and Amy Voris.

Official website: http://www.decoda-uk.org/

photo credits: Christian Kipp and Summer Dancing/Decoda

"Digital Cultural Content Re-imagined: New Avenues for the Economy and Society" is the opening event of Europeana Space project.

An important conference about creativity and digital cultural heritage

On 16-17th October, Venice was the venue for culture and knowledge exchange, with focus on digital technologies applied to cultural heritage: the Auditorium Santa Margherita hosted an exciting conference entitled: Digital Cultural Content Re-imagined: New Avenues for the Economy and Society. This conference included important representatives of European cultural institutions together with experts and researchers in the digital cultural heritage domain. The speeches focused on the possibilities of creative re-use for the available cultural data in new applications, and the implicit business potential that lies in this.

The conference is the opening event of EU-funded project Europeana Space, and it is organized by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice – Department of Management, together with Promoter S.r.l. an agency with strong reputation and expertise in the ICT and cultural heritage. www.digitalmeetsculture.net is the official media partner of the conference.

The event started of 16^th October at 2.00 pm with the welcome message of Michele Bugliesi, the Rector of Ca’ Foscari University; followed by speeches of Sarah Whatley, project’s coordinator and professor of Dance at Coventry University, Piero Attanasio of AIE the Italian association of Editors, Harry Verwayen of Europeana Foundation, Antonella Fresa of Promoter S.r.l. and other interesting international speakers. The conference explored the potential of digital cultural heritage, to be used in the development of new creative products and services that will boost the creative industry, generating innovation and economic growth.

During the conference, new applications under experimentation were presented on different themes (Dance, Photography, Interactive TV, Games, Museums, Open and Hybrid Publishing), and it was possible to meet the most brilliant actors that operate in these fields in Europe. The following day 17^th, the conference took place in the morning (9.30 -12.30 am), while in the afternoon it was possible for the group of registered participants to visit the Venice incubator H-Farm.

Conference website: http://veniceconference2014.europeana-space.eu.

More info:

Europeana Space (www.europeana-space.eu), led by Coventry University and including 29 partners from all over Europe, is an EU-funded project that aims to unlock the business potential of digital cultural heritage through the creative reuse of available cultural data. It encompasses 6 themed pilots where experimentation and new business models are developed. The Europeana Space project is developed in cooperation with Europeana, the European portal for Cultural Heritage.

The Department of Management of Ca’ Foscari University carried out a detailed market analysis of the business potential in the 6 key markets addressed by the project. Coordinator of this activity at Ca’ Foscari is Leonardo Buzzavo, professor of Strategy, who declared: “You can certainly derive economic growth from culture: by identifying effective business models. This is an un-missable challenge for Italy”

Promoter S.r.l. (www.promoter.it) is Technical Coordinator of Europeana Space, and the responsible partner for communication and dissemination, thus supporting Ca’ Foscari University in the organization of the conference. Antonella Fresa, the director, says: “This is a golden opportunity for the creative industries, for the cultural institutions, for students and researchers, for anybody interested in the new scenario of digital cultural heritage. This is the occasion to learn what is happening in this sector: join us, follow us on our blog, website and social networks!”

Girona (Spain), 1 - 3 October 2014

Jornades APP, mobile applications for cultural and natural heritage and tourism

The Jornades APP, organized by The Generalitat de Catalunya – Departament de Cultura (GENCAT), i2Cat and Kònic thtr, will be held during the 1st, 2nd and 3rd of October at the headquarters of the CaixaForum in Girona city (Catalonia).

For three days, the Jornades APP will present the opportunities that mobile applications and technology of Augmented Reality offers to cultural and natural heritage and tourism. Experts in these fields will present the state of the art and the potential offered by these technologies for the cultural tourism sector. This tree-day event will host conferences, roundtables and demonstrations of augmented reality applications and also include video mapping projections on Girona’s city emblematic buildings.

The Jornades APP are part of the activities under the International Augmented Med (IAM) project, an European project in the framework of the ENPI-CBCMED programme, cross-border cooperation in the Mediterranean, which aims to establish a self-sustaining cross-sector system (IT-Tourism) that provides innovative services for heritage enhancement.

More information about the events and programme here: http://www.jornadesapp.cat/

Registration (for free) here

Engineering and EGI worked together in a Proof of Concepts to deploy HAPPI on the EGI federated Cloud infrastructure

Cooperation Agreement bewteen DCH-RP and SCIDIP-ES

The Cooperation Agreement that has been signed between SCIDIP-ES and DCH-RP mainly concernes the collaboration and exchange of tools and services for digital preservation of – in this case – cultural assets.

Although the respective Agreement was signed in September 2014, the actual work already began in July 2014. Engineering International Ltd. and EGI.eu prepared for deploying and testing the SCIDIP-ES HAPPI service on the EGI Federated Cloud infrastructure.

The planned outcome of this experiment was two-fold: Firstly, the DCH community was interested in the service itself as it implements a number of required capabilities in the DCH community, such as authenticity and provenance records for a given preserved data set. The community was also interested in how well the HAPPI service could be integrated with other services in the digital preservation community.

Secondly, in the context of the emerging “Preservation as a Service” approach to the digital preservation needs in the CH sector, EGI as an e-Infrastructure provider and Engineering Italy (coming from the SCIDIP-ES project) were interested in how well HAPPI would be suited to be deployed in a virtualized infrastructure, i.e. packaged into readily instantiatable Virtual Machine images.

To that purpose, Engineering and EGI worked together in a Proof of Concepts to deploy HAPPI on the EGI federated Cloud infrastructure.

A call for volunteer gamers was launched to help recreating the British Museum's building and the response was really enthusiastic.

The British Museum recreates itself in the digital universe of the game Minecraft

Considered as one of the best games ever developed, Minecraft is a video game about breaking and placing blocks, where players, both privately and on multiplayer mode, create buildings and explore virtual worlds. The creations in Minecraft are either structures of fantasy and virtual reconstructions of real buildings.

the building blocks of Minecraft can recreate anything

Given the great appeal that the game has, especially among the young people, many real-life organisations have created their maps in the Minecraft universe; now the British Museum intends to join in and digitally reconstruct in Minecraft both its structures and its collections.

A call for volunteer gamers was launched to help recreating the British Museum’s building, and the response was really enthusiastic. The project is currently in its early stage but it seems to be a very appreciated and interesting idea, and follows other institutions such as the Danish Goverment which are already virtually present in Minecraft.

Ed Barton, an analyst of company Ovum, told the BBC that the British Museum’s move to Minecraft would help it be “perceived as something fun”, and would potentially become an effective educational tool among a younger public.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29281051

Photo: source Internet

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