Digital meets Culture

Exploring data infrastructures for Horizon2020 and beyond

EUDAT News bullettin – July & August 2014

Exploring data infrastructures for Horizon2020 and beyond: book your place at the third EUDAT conference

Places are fast being booked up for the third EUDAT conference, taking place on 24-25 September in Amsterdam. Highlights of the conference programme, whose theme is Bringing data infrastructures to Horizon2020, include David Rosenthal of the LOCKSS programme at Stanford University discussing the implications of digital preservation and a workshop hosted by the European Ontology Network. Attendees will have the chance to find out about how the exis ting suite of EUDAT services can meet their requirements for data preservation and sharing, as well as learning about new services under development. We’ll also be discussing how to meet sustainability challenges for data and related infrastructure with different research communities. Insight on the European Commission’s plans for data infrastructures in Horizon2020 will be given by Carl-Christian Buhr, Member of the Cabinet of Ms Neelie Kroes, Vice-President for Digital Agenda, European Commission, Digital Agenda.

In a recent interview with International Science Grid This Week, Per Oster, Director of Research Infrastructures at the IT Center for Science (CSC) in Finland, the EUDAT project coordinator, highlights: “These events are vital for building a community and establishing trust with and between stakeholders. It’s at these events that we can meet researchers and find out what their needs are. This is, of course, vital in enabling us to create services that really support researchers in the most efficient way possible.”

Co-located with the RDA 4th Plenary, the EUDAT conference offers the ideal opportunity to show your work in data infrastructures to an active, interested audience of professionals in the field. The networking cocktail on the evening of 24 September will welcome participants from all the other RDA Plenary co-located events taking place in Amsterdam, offering an audience of over 350 data practitioners. Can you afford not to be present? Submit your poster proposal via the EUDAT website today.

Don’t miss out – secure your place by registering on the EUDAT website now!

EUDAT data-infrastructure training at ISC Big Data 2014

On 30 September 2014, EUDAT is running a training course in the beautiful town of Heidelberg, co-located with ISC Big Data 2014. The course will introduce some of the fundamentals of data infrastructures, including best practices for data sharing, as well as the technologies, techniques and tools that can be used to make the most of your data and that of others. We will then cover EUDAT’s services in greater detail, describing what they do, w ho they are for and how they can be used. Among other things, we will discuss persistent identifiers, metadata, moving data, data access and integration and what you need to know both to make your data reusable and to reuse other people’s data. Attendance at ISC Big Data 2014 is not required in order to participate in this training session, but EUDAT has a limited number of reduced-rate passes available for anyone wishing to attend the conference. For further information, and to book your place, visit the EUDAT website.

An autumn of open data and supercomputing

EUDAT is also going to be present at some of the key events on the open data and high-performance computing calendar in autumn, so don’t miss your chance to come and discuss EUDAT services with us. First up is the Digital Preservation Sustainability on the EU Policy Level workshop at the Digital Libraries 2014 conference in London on 8 September. Next, Kimmo Koski, Managing Director at EUDAT coordinator CSC- IT Center for Sc ience Ltd, will present the project at Open Finland 2014 in Helsinki on 15 September. And finally, we’ll be showcasing the project at SC14, the annual supercomputing conference, which this year takes place in New Orleans from 16-21 November. We look forward to seeing you there!

Rome, 1-2 September 2014

CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES project starts

On the first two days of September, the premises of the Ministero dello Sviluppo Economico will host the CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES Kick-off Meeting, which brought together 12 cultural institutions and archives, universities, research centres and innovative SMEs from all over Europe.

The CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES project is about the participation of citizens in research on cultural heritage and humanities. The project will last 16 months and it has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration.

The project aims to develop and validate a Roadmap for the use of e-Infrastructures to support the participation of European citizens in research on cultural heritage and digital humanities. Critically, the Roadmap will offer support for improved social cohesion arising from the sharing of knowledge and understanding of Europe’s citizens common and individual cultures.

The project, started on August 2014, is coordinating by Mauro Fazio for the Italian Ministry for the Economic Development while the Technical Coordinator is Antonella Fresa, Director of PROMOTER.

More information for the project are available on the project official website: www.civic-epistemologies.eu.

More information about the kick-off meeting are available here.

Amsterdam, 24-26 September 2014

EGI Conference on Challenges and Solutions for Big Data Processing on Cloud

This year the aim of the EGI Autumn conference will focus on the open issues related to the efficient processing of big data towards the realization of the EGI vision of the Open Science Commons, and will feature user-orientated sessions, as well as a rich track on Cloud including:

the joint EGI-GÉANT two-days Symposium on Federated Community Cloud Services for e-Science on the requirements, opportunities and next steps for the implementation of a publicly funded community cloud for the European Research Area;
the CloudWatch plugfest and workshop on Cloud standards profiles that will see implementations of a number of Cloud related standards tested against each other for interoperability, and a closing workshop where participants will elicit use cases, supporting implementations and hosting standards developement organisations for specific profiles on existing standards, where needed.

On the 24th of September after the EGI conference, the participants are warmly invited to join at the EUDAT networking cocktail from 17:30 until 19:30 in the foyer area of the RDA conference venue. It will be an excellent opportunity to network and share a drink together. EUDAT will host a poster session for organisations, initiatives and projects to showcase their data related activities and results and EGI participants are welcome to submit an application for a poster to be displayed during the networking cocktail. For more information see the EUDAT networking cocktail session details.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND THE CONFERENCE

User communities with cloud service requirements: the conference will gather expert researcher, cloud technologists and cloud providers to discuss scientific use cases and requirements for big data management, analysis and re-use on cloud;
Community and commercial cloud providers: the conference will provide networking opportunities for cloud providers to discuss technology roadmaps and challenges related to operating a cloud federation;
Cloud technologists: the conference will offer opportunities to increase the user adoption of community cloud service solutions and new collect requirements.

REGISTRATION
While the programme is being finalized, we encourage you to register online – no registration fee is required, but capacity offered by the conference venue is limited.

MORE INFORMATION

For more information please visit the Conference website at https://indico.egi.eu/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2160.

dissemination of Europeana Space at a AHRC-funded workshop organised by the Winchester School of Art and Goldsmiths

Image Research and its Futures, workshop in London

Image Research and its Futures is a AHRC-funded workshop, in the framework of the project Looking at Images: A Researcher’s Guide, organised by the Winchester School of Art and Goldsmiths on 19 June 2014.

The workshop covered a diverse range of image-related research projects and methodologies. Plenty of time was given to discussion for consideration of institutional, ethical, intellectual and practical matters when devising, conducting and disseminating image-based work.

Among the speakers, Joanna Zylinska from Goldsmiths was invited for a presentation, where she also illustrated about the Open & Hybrid Publishing pilot and more in general about Europeana Space.

Further information of the workshop: http://blog.soton.ac.uk/wsapgr/workshop-2/

in the Summer 2014 issue an extensive article appeared about Europeana Space

Innovate: the applied research magazine from Coventry University

From futuristic car design to helping children with dyslexia, Innovate magazine showcases the diverse range of applied research activities taking place at Coventry University.

Coventry University’s approach is in facts “Research Excellence with Impact” and in the years the University has earned a strong reputation for enterprise and innovation, which helped to secure the Times Higher Education “Entrepreneurial University of the Year” award in 2011 and the status as “Modern University of the Year” in 2014.

The Summer 2014 issue of the Innovate magazine features a 2-page article about Europeana Space, developed by the Project’s Coordinator Sarah Whatley and by Marion Doyen, Business Development Manager at Coventry University.

The article explains the purpose of Europeana Space, as well as its structure and objectives, and states the ultimate aim of our project: to stimulate jobs and growth in and across the creative industries, through the creative reuse of digital cultural content.

Download the full article here (PDF, 248 Kb)

Download current and past issues of Innovate here: http://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/research-excellence/innovate-magazine/

hosted at the National and University Library in Zagreb, an important conference was the occasion to disseminate the project to a valuable audience

Europeana Space disseminated in Croatia

An important conference hosted at the National and University Library in Zagreb saw the participation of Marinos Ioannides from the Cyprus University of Technology CUT with a speech in the session dedicated to Availability of Information and Documentation.

Marinos Ioannides

Although the topic of the speech was focused on the importance of e-documentation and on the current initiatives in the digital documentation/preservation in Cultural Heritage, the event was an important gathering of experts and professionals in the domain of cultural heritage preservation.

So, it was also a valuable occasion to disseminate Europeana Space to a audience of Scientific Community (higher education or research) and Industry representatives, as well as Policy Makers and Medias from various EU nationalities.

The conference title was “Protection of Cultural Heritage from Natural and Man-made Disasters” and it was held on 8-10 May 2014. This conference is part of a three-year project aimed at the development of guidelines for a strategic plan for the protection of cultural heritage from disasters and the formulation of a proposal for introducing amendments to the existing legislation, as well as at the determining of the key institutions and individuals which will be involved in the development and implementation of this strategic plan.

There was also a long discussion at the end of the invited presentation by Marinos Ioannides related to Europeana Space project objectives and pilot cases. Moreover, a leaflet indicating the current activities of CUT (including the participation to Europeana Space project) was distributed during the event.

The programme of the event is available here: http://chp.nsk.hr/en/programme/ along with the speakers’ presentations.

'All About Imaging: Transactions' symposium was organised by the Faculty of Media, Arts and Design of the University of Westminster

Open & Hybrid Publishing pilot @ Transactions event

Joanna Zylinska

Joanna Zylinska from Goldsmiths, University of London and Jonathan Shaw from Coventry University were invited speakers at the ‘All About Imaging: Transactions’ symposium, organised by the Faculty of Media, Arts and Design of the University of Westminster, London, with the co-operation of the Imaging Science Group of The Royal Photographic Society, on 22-23 May 2014.

They gave two presentations about open access projects, also discussing the Europeana Space pilot on Open & Hybrid Publishing at length.

Jonathan Shaw

The audience was a mixture of academics, professionals and amateurs interested in photography and image science, and was intended to create opportunities for knowledge exchange, demonstration and discussion and to traverse discursive boundaries between disciplines, to build shared vocabularies, mutual understanding and new synergies.

Learn more about the event here: http://www.rps.org/news/2014/april/transactions

Download the relevant slides of the presentations about the Open & Hybrid Publishing pilot (PDF, 573 Kb)

The Coordinator Fred Truyen will be keynote speaker at the congress organized by the University of Sheffield

Europeana Photography @ Digital Humanities Congress

Europeana Photography will participate in this important conference, organized every 2 years in Sheffield, with the keynote speech of the coordinator Fred Truyen (KU Leuven). The purpose of the congress is to promote the sharing of knowledge, ideas and techniques within the digital humanities.

Digital humanities is understood by Sheffield University to mean the use of technology within arts, heritage and humanities research as both a method of inquiry and a means of dissemination. As such, Europeana Photography is a very concrete example of the use of technologies to enhance cultural heritage.

The speech by professor Truyen is:

“All Our Yesterdays”: Europeana and the Phenomenology of Photographic Experience through the Framing of Digitization

When the partners in EuropeanaPhotography embarked on the journey to digitize over 400.000 early photographs for Europeana, few would realize that their very concept of the photograph would change forever.

While sifting through often unseen and unpublished photos from Europe’s top collections, a fascination grew among the collaborators of the involved musea, archives and photo-agencies for what was captured on these dusty glass negatives, daguerreotype plates and albumen prints ranging from 1839 to 1939.

What was there was not only revealed through the digitization, but urrevocably reframed into an new visual experience. Questions about the very nature of what in the end the elusive “photo as object” is, and its ramifications for archival practices, became unavoidable. In this talk, looking through the lenses of old photographers who were priviliged wittnesses of Europe’s history, we will zoom in on different aspects from a Digital Humanities perspective: curation, digitization, metadata provision, rendering and digital preservation.

The conference takes place on 4-6 September 2014.

Registration and more information here: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/hri/dhc

DEADLINE Monday 16th June

Europeana Space – Questionnaire for the Pilots (technical requirements)

On the 3rd November, a valuable workshop including several EU projects was the occasion to disseminate Europeana Space

Europeana Space at Euromed Congress 2014

Project Coordinator Professor Sarah Whatley spoke about Europeana Space project during a focused workshop, dedicated to analyse the stategies for cultural heritage in the new digital age, held during the important congress Euromed in Cyprus (3-8 November 2014).

Marinos Ioannides, Sarah Whatley and Antonella Fresa

Europeana Space was presented to the congress’ wide audience of international cultural institutions as the new Best Practice Network of allied partners who intend to explore new ways for the creative re-use of digital cultural heritage. The final aim of Europeana Space is to pave the way for unlocking the business potential of cultural heritage for both cultural Institutions and creative industries.

The audience at Euromed 2014 congress

The workshop is organized by Promoter, who is the Technical Coordinator of Europeana Space, and included representatives of several important projects in the domain of digital cultural heritage.

The title of the workshop is “The Digitization Age: Mass Culture is Quality Culture. Challenges for cultural heritage and society” and took place on 3rd November at 4 pm.

Download the workshop’s agenda (PDF, 438 Kb)

Visit the Euromed 2014 Congress website: http://www.culturalheritage2014.eu/