Digital meets Culture

A review journal for digital editions and resources

IDE launches Review Journal for Digital Editions

In the past decades, many digital scholarly edition projects have been published and are available, often for free, online. Most of these editions are arguably the best editions of their documents or texts available, and many of them offer features enhancing research in the respective fields to a considerable degree.

Despite these facts, digital editions are often neglected by the established review institutions. This neglect has a number of consequences: digital editions are somewhat outside the established peer-control process; digital editors in spe cannot rely on criticisms that projects similar to their own have received; the methodology of digital editions not only needs to incorporate traditional issues of textual criticism but also has to be thoughtful of the closely related technical and methodologic issues.

In order to address these issues, the Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE) launched of a new review journal, RIDE, dedicated to digital editions and resources. Partner within the DiXiT network, IDE aims to make digital editions and resources more visible and to provide a forum in which expert peers can evaluate and discuss the efforts of digital editors in order to improve current practices and advance future developments. It will do so by asking its reviewers to pay attention not only to the traditional virtues and vices of any edition, but also to the evolving methodology and its technical implications.

RIDE has been created by a team of young scholars united under the roof of the Institute of Documentology and Scholarly Editing (hence its acronym RIDE: Review Journal of the IDE). The IDE has been an active part of the digital editing community for several years: it has guided and advised editors, organised a number of acclaimed summers schools on digital editing and contributed to the ongoing methodological debate by a series of publications.

You can access all reviews at: http://ride.i-d-e.de

You can find out more about the ideas behind RIDE, methods and intentions, in the Editorial at: http://ride.i-d-e.de/about/editorial/

RIDE is also looking for contributions. Please see: http://ride.i-d-e.de/reviewers/

Analysis of the current situation and of future needs and requirements

Digital Preservation at Cultural Heritage Institutions in Sweden

Digisam is a secretariat for National coordination of digitisation, digital preservation and digital access to cultural heritage, established by Swedish Government to coordinate the continued development work on digitisation issues and organised as a department of the National Archives in Sweden. One of the main tasks of Digisam is connected to a proposal on how coordinated and cost-effective preservation of digital cultural heritage information at Swedish state cultural heritage institutions that collect, preserve, and provide access to cultural heritage material, should be designed.

The objectives of this study is to present the results of the interviews made with some Swedish cultural heritage institutions between April 2013 and March 2014, the conclusions that can be made from the results, and what measures that should be taken in order to facilitate digital preservation in the cultural heritage sector in Sweden.

The new digital resources, in particular the “Web 2.0” and social media, have made it possible for cultural heritage institutions to make their collections available in a new and engaging way. But, in order to do so, the cultural heritage information must also be preserved in a reliable way.

The rapid development of technology decreases the sustainability of computer hardware and software to a few years. Although migration of stored cultural heritage information does not have to be made at the same rate, nevertheless this means that there is a need for continuous observation in order to ensure that measures can be taken in time to secure future access to cultural heritage information.

The amount of information that should be stored/preserved is rapidly growing within the and the institutions are not well prepared for this accumulation of data. The Swedish institutions are less prepared than their European counterparts.

A conclusion is that a roadmap for preservation (like the one that DCH-RP is developing) is of utmost importance for the Swedish CH sector: for defining what institutions should include in the preservation work, for deciding what measures that should be taken for a successful long-term preservation, and for how to proceed in general. Furthermore, common, shared, and preferably centralised resources are needed, both for cost-efficiency and for a higher quality of the information that is stored and preserved.

However, it should not be forgotten that preservation is not the final objective; the real success of the roadmap is fulfilled when citizens, companies, government agencies, scientists and researchers, schools, and developers can easily access and use the digital CHI.

Download here the full report.

Dance as intangible cultural heritage meets digital technologies and the Internet, to be preserved and accessed.

A digital archive about dance: the Siobhan Davies RePlay

Driven by Professor and researcher Sarah Whatley at Coventry University, the digital dance archive of Siobhan Davies was initially funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council resource enhancement programme and launched in 2009; but the initial idea and project began earlier in 2007, with the aim of bringing together all of the materials and documentation associated with Davies’ choreographies into a single collection.

Siobhan Davies is considered one of the leading choreographers in UK for contemporary dance and this is the first online dance archive in the UK. It contains thousands of fully searchable digital records including moving image, still image, audio and text.

Dance represents an important sector of intangible cultural heritage as there is a a close connection between dance and history; for this reason in the digital era it is possible to preserve and make accessible this content and materials via internet for any purpose: research, study, experimentation etc. The first requirement for usability is for the material to be gathered into one place, so that people looking for it can find it easily from anywhere in the world: and a online portal is of course the solution. Issues related to metadata requirements, services, a user-friendly interface were therefore investigated and addressed.

The archive is available at: http://www.siobhandaviesreplay.com/

Many of the objects within the archive collection have been sourced directly from Davies and her collaborators’ personal collections, whilst other items have been kindly lent by institutions and private contributors. Almost all of these objects that would otherwise remain inaccessible and unavailable appear online for the first time, and in many cases represent the first time objects have been viewed by anyone since their original date of creation.

Coventry University is also project coordinator of 2 new projects related to digital cultural heritage: Europeana Space, again with Professor Sarah Whatley, focused on the creative reuse of digital cultural content and including an experimental pilot exactly dedicated to Dance; and RICHES with Professor Neil Forbes, a research project with the aim to investigate on the impact that the digital era has on our culture and evolving society.

Further info:

article about Siobhan Davies’ archive appeared on The Guardian

Europeana Space website: http://www.europeana-space.eu/

RICHES website: http://www.riches-project.eu/

Partner Arbejdermuseet organized a valuable event with expert speakers to discuss about IPR and in particulare about orphan works

Europeana Photography workshop about Orphan Works

Held on 12th June 2014 at the premises of Arbejdermuseet in Copenhagen, this useful workshop saw the participation of many international attendees and was a good moment of discussion about the Orphan Works and related issues.

Arbejdermuseet is one of the partners of Europeana Photography project, providing 25.000 digitized photos that witness the conditions and everyday life of the workers’ and the labour movement’s history.

Valuable experts were invited for discussing different themes and for driving question and answer sessions. The participants were from the project consortium and also from other organizations such as the National Archives and the National Museum of Denmark, the Danish Film Institute and LFF Foundation.

AGENDA

Welcome with Louise Skyggebjerg, director at The Workers Museum, Copenhagen

Europeana Photography presentation, by Antonella Fresa, Technical Coordinator (PDF, 2,8 Mb)

Speaker 1: Anders Kildsgaard

Anders Kildsgaard is partner at Riemann law firm and advises clients in the media and entertainment industry. He teaches law and ethics on the Master Degree in Cross Media Communication at CopenhagenUniversity and is co-author of a number of books on internet law, intellectual property rights and privacy law issues.

Orphan works

In February 2014 the U.S. Copyright Office came out with a Notice of Inquiry regarding the issue of orphan works and in 2013 the EU Commission passed a new directive on the subject. Anders Kildsgaard will formulate some key notes on orphan works based on the discussions in the US and EU. One of the main topics of the discussion are extended collective licensing laws, which are already established in Denmark, and which allow collective management organizations to license all works within a category regardless of whether the copyright owner is a member of the collective management organization or not. This policy is not established in the U.S., though many academics consider the Google Books Settlement, which is on appeal, as similar to the collective licensing laws in force in the Scandinavian countries.

Speaker 2: Mette Sandbye

Mette Sandbye is associate professor in modern culture studies and head of the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at CopenhagenUniversity. She is the editor of the first Danish History of Photography and she has published several books and numerous articles on photography. Her current research is about the family photo album in the 1960s and 70s.

Photography’s Other Histories: Amateur photography between private and collective history. From the Kodak heydays to Web 2.0. – and the implications for academic studies

In the now ‘classical’ disciplines of photography history and theory there has been much focus on emphasizing photography as an art form and as a language of semiotically interpretative signs. But what about all the vernacular forms of photography, that does not necessarily fit into aesthetic theory and history? What can they tell us and how do we analyze them? Recently, fields of visual studies and visual anthropology have offered new ways to challenge the theory and the historiography of photography. The aim of this talk is to discuss methodological approaches to the study of family photography inspired by these currents. Why is it interesting to study amateur family photos from the point of view of the academic scholar?

Speaker 3: Thomas Christensen

Thomas Christensen is M.A. in film studies and since 1998 Curator at the Danish Film Institute. He has supervised several full digital restorations and a series of DVD publications. Since 2003 he has been on the FIAF Technical Commission. He has been closely involved in the EU projects European Film Gateway and EFG1914, as well as the current projects Presto4U and FORWARD. Since 2010 he has been Secretary General for the Association des cinémathèques européennes (ACE).

The EU Orphan Works Directive and how it may help cultural heritage institutions unlock heritage and bring it online.

In October 2014 European Union member states will have implemented the orphan works directive, which has been created to bring legal certainty to the online use by non-profit institutions of works in their collections, where no right holder can be located. The EU project FORWARD has been supported to provide best practice for film heritage institutions in the EU, since 20% of film heritage in Europe is thought to be orphan. This presentation is a pragmatic approach to the directive: What are the limitations of the directive? Which types of heritage will typically be relevant to investigate for orphan status? How can non-profit cultural institutions benefit and follow up on the policy agenda that created the directive?

[Show as slideshow]

Coventry (UK), 26 - 30 June 2014

Decoda Summer Dancing Festival

Decoda is an organisation that has grown from the Summer Dancing festivals, initiated in 2007 at Coventry University by Katye Coe. It is an artist led project based in the West Midlands with an international reach.

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

Coventry University, coordinator of Europeana Space project, promoted the project and the Dance pilot in particular during the event.

This years exciting Summer Programme of workshops and activities took place at the end of June. The biennial festival includes workshops, performances, artists residencies and discussions that brings together established artists from the UK and abroad and provides a platform for new and emerging work.

Click here for more information about the Festival.

Deadline extended until July 11th, 2014

Succeed survey on content/tools licensing and innovative usages

The Succeed project is undertaking a survey on the use of licenses in the field of digitisation and on innovative usages of digitised content.

The survey is available at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1LXEjvbgd6hzpY8blv1PWofGgWTm5HscN12oLhRTHPUA/viewform?usp=mail_form_link .

The aim of this survey is to gather information about current practices for licensing data, metadata and tools and on new trends in the exploitation of digitised content. This information will help the project define recommendations for texts digitisation in Europe and worldwide.

All interested parties are invited to fill in the survey before July 11th, 2014 and provide your e-mail to get an update on the results of this analysis: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1LXEjvbgd6hzpY8blv1PWofGgWTm5HscN12oLhRTHPUA/viewform?usp=mail_form_link .

Succeed (http://succeed-project.eu) is a support action funded by the European Union. It promotes the take up and validation of research results in mass digitisation, with a focus on textual content.

Details on www.preforma-project.eu/tender.html

PREFORMA Call for Tender published on www.preforma-project.eu!

The PREFORMA project informs that the call for tender has been published on www.preforma-project.eu.

Aim of the pre-commercial procurement launched by the project is to establish a set of tools and procedures for gaining full control over the technical properties of digital content intended for long-term preservation by memory institutions.

The should be achieved specifically by:

developing an open-source conformance checker, and
establish a healthy ecosystem around an open source ‘reference’ implementation for specific file formats.

Suppliers who want to prepare a proposal can find all the related information and documents in the TENDER section of the PREFORMA website.

Deadline for submission of the proposals is August 12th, 2014.

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.