Digital meets Culture

Karlsruhe (Germany), 27 - 29 November 2014. Call for paper open until 13th July 2014

Metadata and Semantic Research (MTSR 2014) Special Track for Cultural Collections & Applications

Special Track on Metadata & Semantics for Cultural Collections & Applications

Part of the 8th International Conference on Metadata and Semantic Research (MTSR 2014), 27 – 29 November 2014, Karlsruhe, Germany

Submission deadline: July 13th, 2014

Proceedings will be published in Springer CCIS series

AIM AND SCOPE

Cultural Heritage collections are essential knowledge infrastructures that provide a solid representation of the historical background of human communities. These knowledge infrastructures are constructed from and integrate cultural information derived from diverse memory institutions, mainly museums, archives and libraries. Each individual community has spent a lot of effort in order to develop, support and promote its own metadata as tools for the description and dissemination of cultural information, mainly related to its particular resources and use.

The exposure of cultural information into the Semantic Web makes clear that metadata have to be accurate and deeply interpretable in the semantic level. Conceptual Reference Models could facilitate these procedures since they constitute conceptualizations – according to the specific point of view of a memory institution or its particular community – providing at the same time the context for interpreting the respecting metadata to their domain of discourse. CRMs have also been viewed as global schemata in order to map different metadata specifications. At the same time, there are also inter-domain efforts targeted to semantically align data (research data, educational data, public sector information etc.) to cultural information.

The management of the cultural information provides challenges associated with (i) metadata modeling, specification, standardization, extraction, evaluation, mapping, integration and effective use, (ii) knowledge representation as conceptualization to provide the context for unambiguously interpreting metadata, and (iii) information integration from different contexts for the provision of integrated access and advanced services to the users.

The aim of this Special Track is to maintain a dialogue where researchers and practitioners working on all the aspects of the cultural information will come together and exchange ideas about open issues in all stages of the metadata life cycle. The track also welcomes works for the connection and interlinking of the Cultural Heritage metadata to any other dataset published in the Semantic Web universe.

TOPICS

The papers in this special track should be original and of high quality, addressing issues in areas such as:

Cultural heritage metadata models, standards, interoperability, mappings and integration
Automated metadata extraction
Ontologies and knowledge representation for the cultural heritage domain
Extracting semantics, entities, and patterns from Cultural Heritage collections
Collection models and item – collection relationships representation
Collection – level metadata modeling and management
Linked open data approaches for the cultural heritage domain
Composite content-discovery and management of components and interrelationships
Large volume content management – high resolution image data sets
3D models-indexing, storage and retrieval approaches
Federation of repositories/data infrastructures
Integration of intra or inter disciplinary heterogeneous resources
Infrastructures for sharing content
Digital Curation workflows and models
Preservation metadata for cultural heritage digital objects
Metadata quality metrics
Case studies

More information on submission can be found at the MTSR 2014 call for papers web page.

IMPORTANT DATES

July 13th, 2014: paper submission

August 17th, 2014: acceptance/rejection notification

August 31th, 2014: camera-ready papers due

November 27th – 29th, 2014: MTSR 2014

SPECIAL TRACK CHAIRS

Michalis Sfakakis, Dept. Archives, Library Science and Museology, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece (sfakakis@ionio.gr)
Lina Bountouri, Dept. Archives, Library Science and Museology, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece, and General State Archives, Greece (boudouri@ionio.gr)

How to preserve personal archives in the 21st century

What will be remembered about us?

Above montage of photographs by André Ancona Lopez

Although if you were to ask the majority of the population, it is probable that the answer would be otherwise, what is fundamentally true is that archivists are essentially interested in and committed to the future. We have known, for a long time, that memory is memory more for what one forgets than what one remembers. And we know, too, that in order to ward off this forgetfulness, humanity has created an unbeatable machine: the document.

Documents are the material of memory and they become a tangible guarantee of the durability of our actions and our memories. But, it is true. Documents are fragile, their organisation is complex and it is often a difficult task to distinguish what is incidental from that which is essential. Difficult, too, to convince ourselves that our daily actions,
our many times spent anonymously and seemingly of little relevance, may have interest to those who will come after us.

What will be remembered about us? How to preserve personal and family documents in the 21st Century is the proposal that the Department of Records Management, Archives and Publications (the SGDAP) have put forward to commemorate the International Day of Archives. Its approach has been eminently practical and is intended to highlight the importance of all types of document whatsoever (text, graphic, photographic, audiovisual), the fragility of all media (from parchment to digital) and the significance, personally and collectively, of the information the documents contain.
It has also served to demonstrate once more that the Archive is a public service, open to the entire population and one which works to meet the needs of citizens.

Download here the resource.

B2SHARE: The what, why, and how - a simple solution for your research data

EUDAT News bullettin – May 2014

First, it is our pleasure to invite you to the 3rd EUDAT Conference from 24-25 September 2014 at De Meervaart Conference Centre, Amsterdam, which focuses on bringing data infrastructures to Horizon 2020. This year’s conference is co-located with the fourth Research Data Appliance (RDA) Plenary and is aimed at data-infrastructure providers and the researchers who depend upon them. The conference is an essential event for anyone wishing to learn more about how data challenges can be turned into opportunities. Further information is available in the conference section of the EUDAT website.

In theme with our conference venue, we stay in The Netherlands for the EUDAT roving reporter’s Going Dutch with your data interview with Ton Smeele and Joyce Nijkamp, following their presentation on the Dutch collaborative project U2Connect at the EUDAT User Forum in Prague (23-24 April). Ton, a data-management specialist at Utrecht University, and Joyce, an enterprise architect at the University of Amsterdam, explained how U2Connect helps Dutch researchers manage and use their data more easily, thus making it simpler to collaborate and share data. Find out why they chose EUDAT services to support this pioneering project to create cross-disciplinary data infrastructure in the full interview, available on the EUDAT website.

Amsterdam is also the venue for the RDA Fourth Plenary meeting and RDA Europe is supporting European early career researchers and scientists working on data through a programme offering travel and subsistence expenses to attend the event. For all the application and evaluation criteria and further details visit the RDA website.

One of the key outcomes of the Research data and services workshop at the EGI Community Forum 2014 was the linkage between national ATT (Avoin tiede ja tutkimus – Finnish), European (EUDAT and OpenAire / ZENODO) and global (RDA) aspects in the field of research data. To find out more and download the workshop presentations, visit the RDA Europe website. You can find further comments and images on Twitter, under the hashtag #EGICF14.

B2SHARE: The what, why, and how – a simple solution for your research data B2SHARE, EUDAT’s data-sharing service, is a user-friendly, reliable and trustworthy way for researchers and communities to store and share small-scale research data arising out of diverse contexts. Through its simple web interface, B2SHARE offers a solution to a problem faced by many researchers: finding a simple, convenient and durable way of storing and sharing their data. You can find out more about how to use B2SHARE (b2share.eudat.eu) in the B2SHARE presentation available on Slideshare.

Forthcoming events
Interested in learning more about EUDAT data infrastructure services? We’ll be in Helsinki again in June for the Open Repositories Conference 2014, 9-13 June 2014, Helsinki, Finland where B2SHARE will be presented at IG4E: Interest Group Session 4E (Invenio). For further information, visit Open Repositories 2014 website.

Then off to the other side of the Atlantic for the iRods User Meeting 2014, 18-19 June 2014, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Further information is available on the iRods agenda (pdf link).

Back to Europe, Leipzig, Germany to be precise for ISC (International Supercomputing Conference) 2014, 22-26 June 2014. Visit ISC2014 website further information.

Felicity Kinsella of i-D’s magazine asks what does the future of fashion look like?

Scan it, print it, wear it: the future of fashion is 3D

A year ago there were rumours of a fabric called Quantum Stealth that could bend light around the wearer to portray what was behind them, in front of them – a real-life invisibility cloak! While the fashion world hasn’t yet set eyes on this elusive material (for obvious reasons?! Not to mention it is apparently in the top secret care of the American Army), there are other technology marvels that are developing at full speed, changing the way we see, design, make and buy clothes.

CC Image: Ana Galaviz blog

Models can catwalk through holograms of themselves, T-shirts can hug you and couture is being designed virtually and then printed using a 3D printer – no needle and thread involved. CuteCircuit is the fashion house that is made up of Ryan Genz and ex-Valentino designer, Francesca Rosella, the inventors of the HugShirt. They made hugging a friend on the other side of the world as easy as sending a text. Sensors in the shirt measure the strength of touch, skin temperature and heartbeat of the sender. This information can then be Bluetoothed anywhere in the world and the HugShirt will squeeze you back in the exact same way as your mate would. The questions Francesca usually gets asked are can you wash it? How do you charge it? Is it comfortable? The answers are: Yes, USB, Yes. It was awarded as one of the Best Inventions of the Year by Time magazine and this is what really got people alerted about a wearable technology revolution.

CuteCircuit are also the team behind Katy Perry’s romantic, dream dress at the 2010 Met Ball. Posing on the red carpet, she flicked a switch in her sweetheart neckline and the dress lit up with over 3000 tiny bulbs, a vision all sweetness and light, triggering another 3000 flashes as the paparazzi exploded. The future’s bright! It didn’t look too far off the futuristic Hunger Games idea of Lenny Kravitz as stylist, creating Katniss’ Girl on Fire dress. These creations are like something out of a fairytale, they’re designed to be clever and exciting and these are innovations in fashion but they’re one-off showstoppers. The real phenomenon that’s revolutionising fashion seems to be 3D printing. Iris van Herpen is the 29-year-old Dutch designer who uses 3D printing to make couture that is fantastical, heliacal and 100% symmetrical in every tiny detail. The huge advantage of 3D printing is that there are no complications or limitations in terms of 3-Dimensionality or complexity, everything imaginable is possible she explains. At the moment the main thing holding 3D printing back from taking over the fashion world is that the materials used can only make solid forms. Whilst this is great for 3-dimensionality, you won’t be able to print out a T-shirt at home any time soon, normally a garment is built up from a fabric, so all shape, all 3-dimensionality that you want to add has to be manipulated by seams. So you start 2-dimensional (with the fabric) and you want to end up 3-dimensional (so that a body fits well into it). This transition from 2D to 3D gives a lot of difficulties. With 3D printing you start 3-dimensional; it’s total freedom. I can go as complex, detailed, in all 3-dimensions as I want, without any seams.

Pauline van Dongen 3D Printed High Heels

It is rare to come by a creative university without a 3D printer today and if the future generations are using them, this must be going somewhere. London College of Fashion’s mission is to “Fashion the Future” and they have their own 3D printer – the Makerbot 3D. Using a 3D scanner, students are able to either scan an object or scan themselves to create a digital mannequin and virtually stitch garments together before draping them onto their personalised mannequins to make perfectly fitting clothes. The Digital Bureau in LCF has two 3D printers: one using plaster and another one using plastic called PLA. They are used mainly by MA students: Fashion Footwear and Fashion Artefact. Our printers are good for prototype printing. If the students are aiming to make final products which require very high quality finish, and are robust and wearable, we advise them to use commercial 3D printing services explains Gabriela Daniels, LCF’s Technical Manager – 3D and Science.

I don’t think 3D printing as we know it today will be the future of fashion, but I definitely think that the old methods of building in all creation – whether it is architecture, design, art, fashion – where we often start with a 2-dimensional surface manipulating into 3-dimensional objects will become history. The developments are going fast, research and prototyping in 4D have already started. So I think 3D printing as we know it today will not be the way we make garments in future, but the essence of 3D printing – starting 3D and skipping the phase of 2D, will be it, yes, comments Iris van Herpen

I think the applications for 3D printer now are limitless, I think we’re about five years away from having a domestic version in every household. Very soon I think you’ll be able to buy your Prada shoes online and print them directly from their site. Right now you can print chain mail sheets so being able to print fabric cannot be far behind. It’s not too far-fetched to think that in a few years we could be downloading entire outfits, predicts set design and artist extraordinaire, Gary Card.

In conclusion – what Iris said – everything imaginable is possible.

Read Felicity Kinsella’s full article

For more information visit

https://connect.innovateuk.org/home

Ana Galaviz blog

RICHES on Twitter: #richesEU

RICHES on YouTube: www.youtube.com/richesEU

Issue #3 - May 2014

CHAIN-REDS bi-annual e-Newsletter

The CHAIN-REDS Partnership has just released its third e-Newsletter, which can be downloaded here.

CHAIN-REDS is a FP7 project co-funded by the European Commission (DG CONNECT) aiming at promoting and supporting technological and scientific collaboration across different e-Infrastructures established and operated in various continents, in order to define a path towards a global e-Infrastructures ecosystem that will allow Virtual Research Community (VRCs), research groups and even single researchers to access and efficiently use worldwide distributed resources (i.e., computing, storage, data, services, tools, applications). The CHAIN-REDS project brings 10 partners from different regions and countries, namely Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East, India, China and Latin America.

DEADLINE Sunday 15th June 2014

Europeana Space – Questionnaire for the Pilots (commercialisation and business potential)

Following the Amsterdam pilots meeting which was very productive, CULTURELABEL provided a questionnaire for the pilots to complete, to help them address some of the issues around commercialisation and business potential and provide us with some more background info in this area.

DEADLINE: Sunday 15th June

The results of the questionnaire are useful to feed discussion for the next meeting on June 24 and beyond.

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world’s leading questionnaire tool.

Europeana Space and Europeana Photography projects share common objectives related to the re-use of photographic cultural heritage in digital format

A joint creative workshop about digital photography

In the context of EuropeanaPhotography discussion and planning for future sustainability actions, and in preparation for the Europeana Space pilot on Photography, a brainstorm session was held on May 27th 2014 in Leuven on the topic “non-IPR based business models for high-end photographical heritage“.

Guided by prof. Fred Truyen in his double role of EuropeanaPhotography coordinator and Europeana Space pilot leader, the participants met in the Museum room of the Faculty of Arts, Mgr. Sencie Institute (MSI) of KU Leuven. During this full day dedicated to explore innovative ways of developing creative re-use of digital photographs, the participants exchanged ideas and proposals, in a very productive discussion that allowed once again the public institutions and private enterprises to find a dialogue. The brainstorming itself was facilitated by partner iMinds.

some of the participants: Bruno Vandermeulen (KU Leuven), Frederik Temmermans (iMinds), Roxanne Wyns (LIBIS – KU Leuven), Frank Golomb (United Archives)

The main idea of the session was to explore, now that many of the museal photographical heritage contents are gradually entering a status of “out-of-copyright” , how new, service-oriented business models can generate new income streams that allow for sustaining the care of this cultural heritage. Platforms such as Europeana and social media offer possibilities to engage new target groups, or existing target groups differently. But it is also crucial to explore whether current digitization methods, state-of-the-art visualization technologies (such as using 3D technologies to render 2D objects or multispectral analysis) and new print materials and distribution channels can have promising leads.

brainstorming session

During the brainstorming session, 6 topics where addressed and discussed: 2D and 3D Print; Crowdsourcing; Reuse; Visualization; Services; Interaction. This joint workshop is just a first step in a close cooperation between the two projects, EuropeanaPhotography and Europeana Space, and a concrete action for searching new business opportunities involving digital cultural heritage.

A new free-to-use web resource creates and collects summaries of academic research

King’s College London launches CultureCase

King’s College London

The Cultural Institute at King’s College London is happy to launch CultureCase: a new, free-to-use web resource that aims to put academic research to work in the cultural sector.

CultureCase was created in response to a growing demand from the cultural sector for access to research and it was designed to meet the sector’s questions and challenges. The resource translates academic-standard research into digestible 300-word summaries and makes them available for the first time in one portal. Built in collaboration with the cultural and Higher Education sectors, CultureCase includes a selection of the most relevant and robust research into culture and aims to provide a practical tool to support evidence-based decision making and to help build the case for investment.

CultureCase is an experiment in research communication. It aims to bridge the gap between academic research and its potential users and beneficiaries, by translating academic research into a form that is easily accessible by practitioners and advocates in the cultural sector. It was developed following wide consultation with the cultural and academic sectors. The Cultural Institute has drawn on the expertise of both academic and cultural sector advisers who have steered the creation of the pilot site.

The content on this site is authored and edited by James Doeser, a freelance researcher and writer working with the Cultural Institute, King’s College London. James has a PhD from University College London and spent three years working in the research team at Arts Council England. Through 2014 CultureCase will move to a multi-authored format by developing a cohort of researcher-writers drawn from the Cultural Institute’s Knowledge Exchange Associates.

For more information visit: www.culturecase.org

Barcelona: agreed the initial RICHES taxonomy

Building the project’s foundation

An intense linguistic reflection work

On 13th May i2CAT Foundation, in collaboration with the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (UIC), organised the first RICHES open to all activity in Barcelona.

The workshop brought together representatives of the RICHES project, academics and students from the UIC, representatives of the Network of Common Interest affiliated in the project and several external experts. This activity focused on building the project’s foundation and establishing an initial agreement of basic definitions and frameworks which will delineate RICHES’ fields of research and further study on the context of change and the role of Cultural Heritage (CH) in the economic and social development in Europe.

More than 50 participants had registered to be part in the several discussion sessions proposed in the workshop’s programme in order to discuss the taxonomy that will represent the common ground of understanding and research of the project.

Although it is impossible to capture the full extent of discussions and perspectives, all the Workshop’s presentations and discussions served to analyse in depth all the topics that RICHES is addressing and proved to be extremely insightful and beneficial both to the attendees and the project’s representatives and researchers.

The final discussion

The workshop opened with the welcome speeches of Sergi Fernandez, Head of the Audiovisual Unit of i2CAT, and Teresa Vallès, Dean at the UIC’s Faculty of Humanities; Prof. Neil Forbes of Coventry University, RICHES Coordinator, introduced the project’s framework to the audiences. After a coffee break offered by the University, the participants divided in different groups, each one referring to one of the specific panels that structured the research activity:

Discussion session 1 – General common terms related to Cultural Heritage/Digital Cultural Heritage – chaired by Neil Forbes of Coventry University (UK). This global and common field of definitions provides the basis to identify the existing practices in the domain of ICT for digital CH;
Discussion session 2 – Understanding the context of change for tangible and intangible CH – chaired by Laura Van Broekhoven of Leiden’s National Museum of Ethnology (NL). How digital practices are transforming the traditional CH practices of cultural institutions;
Discussion session 3 – Digital copyrights framework – chaired by Charlotte Waelde of Exeter University (UK). Copyrights laws developed in the analogue era are now causing challenges in the era of the digital;
Discussion session 4 – Visualisation and Interaction.
Digital presentation and output – chaired by Monika Hagedorn-Saupe of the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz (DE). Understanding the new technologies and the changes in the process of distribution, circulation, creation and sharing of CH and the practices in which CH is revaluated and reinvigorated;
Discussion session 5 – Digital Cultural Heritage – chaired by Bahadir Aydinonat of the Turkiye Cumhuryieti ve Turizm Bakanligi (TR). E-books, online catalogues, digital libraries, metadata records and their means in order to respond to current and new users demands;
Discussion session 6 – Role of CH in European social development – chaired by Dick Van Dijk of WAAG Society (NL). New directions for digital CH in order to contribute to social cohesion, inclusion and represent multicultural practices;
Discussion session 7 – Impact of CH on European economic development -chaired by Antonella Fresa of Promoter Srl (IT). Defining the many factors and “actors” that constitute the changing context of CH in the economic field and its impact on employment, new economic strategies and alliances in the EU.

The panel sessions carried on the discussion on the various terms definitions for the all morning. In the afternoon, all the group participants brought back together and the chairmen/chairwomen shared their agreed definitions with the public during a final discussion, in order to validate them.

The audience had a lively participation and made several suggestions that will be taken into consideration in order to further elaborate and agree on a Taxonomy of Terms and Definitions which will support the project’s research in the future.

The RICHES Partners’s social dinner

The analysis of different prospective scenarios on the context of change in which European CH is transmitted, its implications for future CH practices and the frameworks that will be put in place – from cultural, legal, financial, educational, technical perspectives – rendered valuable information for future progress in the design of the roadmap for Cultural Heritage practices in the digital age within the project.

In addition to the workshop’s celebration, the RICHES Consortium Partners joined for internal Plenary Meeting, one day before and after the workshop in order to discuss the work so far undergone, value the workshop’s results and plan their future research and management activities.

For more information visit the RICHES website

RICHES on Twitter: #richesEU

RICHES on YouTube: www.youtube.com/richesEU

over 5.400 visitors enjoyed the masterpieces of early photography selected by the archives of EuropeanaPhotography project

All Our Yesterdays, a huge success for the photographic exhibition!

The EuropeanaPhotography exhibition that was held in Pisa between 11 April and 2 June 2014 was a great success. The format of the exhibition, arranged by responsible partner Promoter at the premises of the Museum of Graphics, captured a genuine interest of the public: over 5.400 visitors came to Palazzo Lanfranchi to enjoy the masterpieces of early photography selected by the archives of EuropeanaPhotography project, and to discover through the lens of the first photographers how life was in Europe before WW1. Next to the photos, original vintage photographic equipment items show how the art of photography and techniques rapidly evolved in a very short period of time.

the Night of the Museums at Palazzo Lanfranchi

The flux of visitors at Palazzo Lanfranchi was more or less continuous since the opening (11^th April), but a boom of visits was registered on the 17^th May during the European Night of the Museums. In this occasion the exhibition was open till midnight and almost 800 visitors crowded the vintage rooms of the palace where the photographs are hosted, in a truly charming environment.

The contemporary twist of the exhibition, which is based on the most advanced technologies of digitization and print, and which features also a free App for a virtual tour of the rooms, enhances the astonishing quality and value (both cultural and artistic) of the photographic masterpieces that the 19 partners of the project chose as “best of their bests”.

During the Night of the Museums, countless visitors with their inseparable smartphones took their own museumselfies, to converge in the European digital event Kaleidoscope: a digital wall showing the selfies of the visitors in the participant Museums all over Europe.

Very young students enjoy the photos of All Our Yesterdays

The Pisa exhibition was also a great moment for education and social inclusion: in facts, students and children have been participating in laboratories and guided tours to discover the Europe of their grand-grandfathers. Moreover, visits of the exhibition was organized by the project “Segni fra le mani” of the University of Pisa. This project involves old people suffering the Alzheimer disease, and utilizes art, music and other creative activities to stimulate communication and help delaying the progress of the disease.

During the exhibition, a digitization station operated by photographic professionals allowed the visitors to digitize their own family photos, in order to contribute to the digital preservation of the memory and local cultural heritage.

A new exhibition will be organized in Pisa in December 2014 to show these photos and share them with the whole citizenship.

The digitization station, operated by Rudy Pessina

At the same time, All Our Yesterdays will be travelling through Europe: after the Pisa event, the exhibition is coming to Belgium, hosted by project coordinator KU Leuven.

For those who cannot visit the exhibition in physical, a virtual exhibition is also available on line (and in the AppStore) in the website www.earlyphotography.eu

[VIDEO: ALL OUR YESTERDAYS – Presentation and Interviews (Italian Language)]