Digital meets Culture

The Netherlands, 27 September – 15 November 2014

Pisa is approaching and…we start co-creating!

How cultural institutions can renew themselves, finding new active forms of interaction with their audiences? How can heritage professionals create the conditions for the visitors to leave the role of observers and instead be active contributors to the development of heritage? How can the consumers become producers of cultural heritage? How can cultural heritage be co-created?

RICHES is trying to answer these questions through a series of co-creation sessions: experimental activities aimed at demonstrating how the public can be creator – and so co-creator, together with the heritage professionals – as well as user of cultural contents. The outcomes of these initiatives will be presented during 5 December’s afternoon programme of the First RICHES International Conference, being held in Pisa, at the Museum of Graphics of Palazzo Lanfranchi (4-5 December 2014).

From the 27^th of September to the 15^th of November 2014, three co-creation sessions are being held in the Netherlands, jointly organised by the RICHES partners Waag Society (Amsterdam) and Stichting Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde (RMV, in Leiden)

On September 27, the first session took place in De Waag, Amsterdam. Waag Society hosted 15 youngsters and three employees from the Museum of World Cultures.

One question will remain central during Waag and RMV’s co-creation workshops: how can museums (in the context of a changing European society) remain relevant to today’s youth? Goal of these sessions is to design two or more “interventions” for how this group of people deals with cultural heritage. That means: what do they think is important within a museum collection? Which stories would they like to see in these collections? And what is the most suitable interactive form for relating these particular stories?

Organisers and participants will explore the different possibilities together.

Youngsters mapping ideas and visions during the first co-creation sessions by Waag Society.

Youngsters mapping ideas and visions during the first co-creation session by Waag Society.

One of the foreseen co-creation sessions, on the basis of the work carried on in 2014 by Waag Society in collaboration with the Dutch Association of Botanical Gardens, will focus on the external environment.

During this year, Waag Society and the Dutch Association of Botanical Gardens have already conducted several co-creation sessions, with both existing and potential new visitors, as part of a strategic renewal programme in which they jointly explore and design a new innovative public programme. The learnings of these co-creation sessions will be, by the way, part of the upcoming RICHES publication on “good practices and methods for co-creation”.

The 20plus gardens constitute important Dutch heritage sites, with a living collection. The central concept of the Botanical Garden (stemming from the encyclopaedic tradition of the Renaissance) that all knowledge is collectible, as well as the form of a beautiful and lush garden – often in the inner city – and the collections themselves (both “natural” and cultured species) are a representation of historic and contemporary society. The gardens are very diverse, some are academic, some are connected to large park areas, some are connected to zoos, etc. Their collections and stories are relevant in a large number of current topics (such as our relationship with our food, reconnecting to nature, circular economy, etc.), but they have a hard time to renew their audience and connect to younger and/or multicultural groups. The potential of the gardens is very well explained by this video of the BGCI (Botanical Garden Conservation International).

The co-creation sessions brought together staff from the botanic gardens, designers and developers of technological applications and members of the public (the gardens’ current audiences and targeted new audiences). The aim of these sessions was to find new ways to connect the knowledge about plants and biodiversity to the needs of diverse audiences. The session involved running six weekly design sessions focused on different topics. Participants of these sessions explored which stories from the botanic gardens are important and relevant to the public, identify who our current visitors and new target audiences are and design new storytelling methods that can be used to reach these new audiences.

In addition the participants explore what technology might be interesting and what infrastructure (in terms of collaboration and technology, national and international) is future proof. The added value of media/ICT in the context of the gardens is to open up their processes: to linked open data initiatives, opening up their collections to others, but also incorporating crowdsourced materials (“citizen science”); to creative re-use of materials (connecting to DIY and maker movements); to new locations and channels outside their own physical and geographical location.

The participants prepared for the sessions with a set activities from a “sensitizing toolkit” that makes them look at their own garden with different eyes (image 2): “where’s the hidden treasure in my garden”, “what does my public enjoy least?”, “what type of behavior does my audience have”?

Image 2

Image 3

The first session started with each garden sharing those findings and was followed by an activity in the garden with a set of “ambiguous prototypes”, designed to let them imagine what these objects could do in their garden, just a free format explorative activity, which gets the participants in a specific mindset and also lets them get to know each other better (image 3).

Image 4

Towards the end of the six week activities they designed a number of specific interaction scenarios and prototypes, including a Physical Storytelling tool for grandparents and grandchildren, a Talking Tree and an Urban Gardeners programme, that will be developed further (image 4).

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Limassol, 3-8 November 2014

RICHES at EuroMed 2014

On 3 November 2014 in Limassol, Cyprus, RICHES particpated in the V International Euro-Mediterranean Conference (EuroMed 2014), held on 3-8 November.

EuroMed brings together researchers, policy makers, professionals and practitioners to explore some of the more pressing issues concerning cultural heritage today. In particular, this year the conference focused on interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary research on tangible and intangible CH, on the use of cutting-edge technologies for protection, restoration, preservation, massive digitisation, documentation and presentation of the CH content.

RICHES Coordinator Neil Forbes of Coventry University (UK) presented the project, its objectives and its first outcomes within a workshop, entitled The Digitisation Age: Mass Culture is Quality Culture. Challenges for Cultural Heritage and Society. The workshop, organised by Promoter Srl, brought together various EU projects, organisations and professionals for disseminating the latest achievements of the digital cultural heritage sector and providing an analysis about the impact of digital cultural heritage on the European society at large. The workshop’s themes are contained in a paper, entitled as the workshop and submitted to the conference Committee, presenting RICHES as one of the most important projects currently active in the digital cultural heritage domain.

Download the Workshop Programme

For more information visit the Conference website

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Karlsruhe, 14 November 2014

Symposium on Digital Society and Cultural Memory

“Die Digitale Gesellschaft”, by CODIGT

While in many cases the question of which digitalia should be designated as cultural heritage worthy of archiving can only be answered with difficulty, short-term research projects have been seeking methodological solutions in science and culture, without yet having installed lasting and systematically established processes.
This symposium was devoted to the goal of raising societal awareness about the benefits of archives and archiving in the digital domain. Politicians, the public and society at large should be made aware that archiving will remain a general task in which each person can play a role. Against the backdrop of primarily economic debates, the already conspicuous consequences of the lack of digital archiving of the cultural heritage are often ignored.

“Willkommen am KIT!”

Since the founding of early states in antiquity, keeping records of historical events was a state affair. Over the centuries, the preservation of both administrative documents and works of art joined the ranks of historiography as tasks of the state. The digital media revolution of the 20th and 21st centuries has led to the restructuring of state institutions’ monopolies on archives – the relatively recent laws related to archives are a legal indication of this restructuring. In addition to this, the homogenisation of archival material through conversion into binary code has accelerated these processes. The diffusion of digital technologies within archiving practice and the rapidly growing scope of digital archives are forcing both leaders and public into action.
This symposium, organised by the Center of Digital Tradition (CODIGT) at the ZAK Centre for Cultural and General Studies of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), aimed to expound and promote digital archiving in particular as a cultural technology. The ZAK hopes to raise public awareness about the significance of digital archiving as a necessary precondition for the future accessibility of knowledge.

The ZAK would like to contribute to the general awareness of archiving processes and stimulate reflection on new concepts such as “crowd archiving”. The symposium provided representatives from the domains of cultural and archival work, technology, politics and science with an opportunity for interdisciplinary exchange for the purpose of developing strategies together with the public.

Themes:

– Museums, archives and the public
– Political programmes for archiving under public participation
– Digital cultural heritage and the public
– Legal guidelines for public archiving projects

About CODIGT:

The research group CODIGT (Center for Digital Tradition) is a collaborative research and
service institution located at ZAK, the Centre for Cultural and General Studies under the direction of Prof. Caroline Y. Robertson-von Trotha. Cooperation partners are Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), ZKM – The Karlsruhe Centre for Arts and Media- and the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG).
CODIGT is dedicated to the task of contributing to the preservation of digital cultural heritage and various types of science and research data. CODIGT develops and answers questions about digitizing culture and the contextualization of digital objects within the framework of projectoriented basic research and transdisciplinary knowledge transfer. It aims to tackle issues of digital preservation (DP) as well as access to these archived objects.

Further information and contact:
Dr. Ralf Schneider
schneider@kit.edu
Website: http://www.zak.kit.edu/codigt_tagung

Antalaya, Turkey, 24-26 November 2104

IMCW2014 calls for workshop and tutorial proposals!

The 5th International Symposium on Information Management in a Changing World took place in Antalya, Turkey, from 24 to 26 November 2014. To commemorate the 2014 Turkish-German Science Year, IMCW2014 was organised in cooperation with Hacettepe University and the Goethe-Institutes in Turkey.

IMCW2014 was held jointly with the 10th International Conference on Knowledge Management (ICKM2014) at the same venue so participants could attend both events.

Miracle Hotel, venue of IMCW2014

Research and innovation (R&I) is the lifeblood of development. Digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) offer tremendous opportunities to set up a truly global e-science infrastructure to foster research and innovation and facilitate sharing not only the research outputs but also the research data. The EU countries will spend some 71 billion euro for research under the Horizon 2020 program. An enourmous amount of research data gets created, collected, processed and analyzed during the research process and it has to be managed effectively. As the life of research data is far longer than the research projects themselves, preservation of, access to and reuse of research data is of great importance. Effective management of research data requires infrastructure and data repositories as well as policies and standards for metadata, interoperability, knowledge discovery and reuse. It is estimated that the effective management of research data and opening up “big data” will save Europe about 150-300 billion euro annually.

Main topics of the Symposium included:

• Research Data

• Research Data Infrastructure

• Research Data Management

• Open Access to Research Data

• Knowledge Discovery in Research Data

• Education for Research Data Management

Research Data Management and Knowledge Discovery being the main theme of the Symposium, IMCW2014 aimed to bring together researchers, data scientists, computer engineers, data repository managers, information scientists and information professionals, data librarians and archivists to discuss the issues pertinent to research data management and open data repositories and to contemplate on how to design and develop innovative and collaborative knowledge discovery and mining services over the research data. This was an opportune time for IMCW2014 to tackle the challenges of research data management and knowledge discovery, ranging from research data infrastructure to metadata standards, from current research information systems to open source data management systems, from research data journals to metrics and from knowledge discovery techniques to semantic enrichment of research data.

The Organising Committee of IMCW2014 invited interested individuals, research teams, societies and project groups to submit proposals for workshops and tutorials to be organised within the conference.

To encourage participation, IMCW2014 did not charge additional fees for participants registered in the conference to attend workshops/tutorials and proposers of accompanying events with at least four registered speakers/participants had their Symposium fee waived.

Download the Call for Workshop and Tutorial Proposals here

Keynote speakers of IMCW2014 will be:

• Kevin Ashley, Director of the UK Digital Curation Centre

Mr. Ashley has been responsible to increase the enabling capacity and capability of DCC amongst the research community in matters of digital curation, as the DCC was set up by JISC in 2004 to give practical advice and guidance to colleges and universities on digital preservation, curation and information management. His specialties are digital curation, digital preservation training, electronic record management and hybrid archives.

Earlier, Mr. Ashley worked as the Head of Digital Archives at the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC) for 13 years, during which time his multi-disciplinary group has provided services related to the preservation and reusability of digital resources on behalf of other organisations, as well as conducting research, development and training. At ULCC, Dr Ashley’s group operated the National Digital Archive of Datasets (NDAD) for The National Archives of the UK for over twelve years, capturing, preserving, describing and releasing government data.

Mr Ashley was chair of the JISC Repositories and Preservation Advisory Group and is currently a member of JISC’s Infrastructure and Resources committee. He is on the steering committee for the Archives Hub at MIMAS and the policy working group of the DL.ORG project. He was part of the task force that developed the RLG/NARA audit checklist for trusted digital repositories, and was a member of the NSF-DELOS Working Group on Digital Archiving and Preservation which produced the report “Invest To Save”.

Mr. Ashley holds a BSc degree in Mathematics from University College London.

• Professor Michael Seadle

Director of the Berlin School for Library and Information Science

Dean of the Faculty of Arts I, Humboldt University

Chair of the ISchools Caucus, Germany

Professor Seadle holds a PhD degree in Sociology from the University of Chicago and an MS degree in Information Science from the University of Michigan. He is currently Dean of the Faculty of Arts I as well as the Director of the Berlin School of Library and Information Science (Institut für Bibliotheks- und Informationswissenschaft) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and serves as the chair of ISchools Caucus comprising more than 50 ISchools around the world. Prior to his current position, Professor Seadle served in various administrative capacities at the University of Chicago and Cornell University, among others, and carried out sponsored projects (LC, NSF, IMLS, DFG). He is the editor of the peer-reviewed journal “Library Hi Tech” published by Emerald. He has written more than 100 papers and authored books on long term digital archiving, computing management and copyright.

Important Dates

 Last date to send all types of extended abstracts and proposals: 31 March 2014

 Last date to send workshop and tutorial proposals: 10 April 2014

 Authors notification: 16 May 2014

 Submission of extended abstracts in final form: 16 June 2014

 Submission of full papers (if desired): 16 July 2014

 Notification of acceptance of full papers: 16 August 2014

 Submission of full papers in final form: 16 September 2014

 Registration (Early Bird): 16 Feburary 2014 – 31 July 2014

 Registration (Regular): 1 August 2014 – 3 November 2014

 Registration (Late / Onsite): 4 November 2014 – 26 November 2014

 Symposium: 24-26 November 2014

For more information visit: http://imcw2014.bilgiyonetimi.net/scope/

View the article we published on Digitalmeetsculture.net to announce the event

RICHES on Twitter: #richesEU

in Paris, a very important event of the Europeana feeder project EAGLE included a poster session where the E-Space poster was displayed

Poster dissemination at EAGLE International Conference

The brand new poster of Europeana Space debuted in the poster session of 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) on 29-30 September and 1 October 2014.

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

It was an important event on the very specialistic field of digital technologies applied to ancient inscriptions. It saw the participation of over 150 attendees from all Europe and beyond, and offered interesting speeches and presentations related to 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.

The Conference was organised with the support of Collège de France Chaire Religion, institutions et société de la Rome antique and École Normale Supérieure.

For further details about the event please read this article.

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

Pundit for Digital Humanities, by Net7

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.