Digital meets Culture

A mobile application discovers the hidden ancient city

By Dr Rosen Petkov
President of the Student Computer Art Society (SCAS)

Invisible Serdica is a mobile app that reveals objects of historical significance in the ancient city of Serdica, situated at the present location of the Bulgarian capital (Sofia). This tool enables you to get a realistic insight into some of the places, now hidden under the ground, emphasises on some of the unknown cultural aspects related to them by granting access to the especially edited multimedia tales and legends, curious stories and bibliographic data to various sources found in the NALIS Union Catalogue (NALIS UC). In this way, the historical significance of the object is revealed together with its relation to emblematic figures and events.

Every object is represented by several sections – History, Legends, Multimedia, From the Books and NALIS catalogue – and by pictures, video, music and 3D models (under Multimedia). The good news is that the app is freely downloadable (from both the App Store and Google Play) and automatically installable. Once you start it, it locates where you are and shows the objects around (either hidden or visible only in part). Besides, you may choose between the English or Bulgarian interface. What makes it different from similar applications is that it directs the user – through library catalogues and namely the NALIS UC – to written sources (books, primary sources, photographs, graphic materials etc.) and shows some of the well-known architectural monuments from a different perspective – the interesting stories behind them.

Even though still in progress (just 8 objects are in) the application is already functioning. So far available are: 1. The Amphitheatre, 2. St. Sofia Basilica, 3. St. George Rotunda and its neighbourhood, 4. The Main Street (Largo), 5. The tombs under the yellow pavement, 6. The tomb under Gurko Street, 7. St. Petka Samardzhijska (of the Saddlers) Church and 8. The Western Gate.

For more information you may check both at the project’s website and its facebook profile. The initiative is sponsored by the America for Bulgaria Foundation and the development itself has been undertaken by the Student Computer Art Society in partnership with the NALIS Foundation. The Museum of Sofia has also contributed with information to some of the digital objects created.

Download Rosen Petkov’s full article – PDF

Visit NALIS’ website and its Catalogue!

Pisa, 4-5 December 2014

RICHES Conference
“CH: Recalibrating Relationships”

On 4-5 December 2014, RICHES’ First International Conference will be held in Pisa, at the Museum of Graphics of Palazzo Lanfranchi. The conference, patronised by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development, Tuscany Region, Municipality of Pisa, University of Pisa and Fondazione Sistema Toscana (Tuscany System Foundation), is organised by Promoter Srl, RICHES’ Italian Partner as well as Communication & Dissemination Manager of the project.

RICHES (Renewal, Innovation and Change: Heritage and European Society) is a “Social-Sciences and the Humanities” research project funded by the EU Commission within the 7^th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development. It is a project about change: about the decentring of culture away from institutional structures towards the individual and about the questions which the advent of digital technologies are posing in relation to how we understand, collect and make available Europe’s cultural heritage (CH).

The project’s main objective is therefore reducing the distance between people and culture, recalibrating the relationship between heritage professionals and heritage users: such recalibration process will maximise cultural creativity and ensure that the whole European community can benefit from the social and business potential of Cultural Heritage.

The topic of Pisa’s International Conference CH: Recalibrating Relationships, as stated by the title, is perfectly inserted in this framework.

During the two-day event, the 10 project’s partners (Coventry University from UK, Hansestadt Rostock from Germany, Stichting Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde from The Netherlands, WAAG Society from The Netherlands, the University of Exeter from UK, Promoter Srl from Italy, Fundacio’ i2CAT from Spain, Syddansk Universitet from Denmark, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz from Germany, Turkiye Cumhuriyeti Kultur ve Turizm Bakanligi from Turkey) will present the project’s outcomes and illustrate the progress and advances made by the research. Well-known experts, from Europe and outside Europe, will intervene as speakers. Among them:

Neil Forbes (Historian – Coventry University, UK)
Xiao Chun Situ (Artist and reporter – Beijing Youth Daily, China)
Bill Thompson (Media and technology expert – BBC, UK)

The participants will be moreover involved in a pleasant socio-cultural activity: a visit to the exhibition devoted to Italian artist and draftsman Tullio Pericoli, organised in the same venue as the conference.

Before the conference beginning, the RICHES consortium will come together for an internal plenary meeting, in order to discuss the work until then carried out and plan the future activities.

Registration to the conference is open! Don’t forget to register within the 2nd of December 2014 by completing the following form:

Event Registration Online for RICHES International Conference 4-5 December 2014 powered by Eventbrite

For more information visit the conference’s website

Download the conference programme – PDF

View the article published by Net4Society for announcing the RICHES conference!

RICHES on Twitter! #richesEU

RICHES on YouTube: www.youtube.com/richesEU

Creative, Digital and IT Open Studios 2014

Wired Sussex at #BDF14

For the last (full) week of September, 22^nd – 26^th, at Brighton Digital Festival, Wired Sussex will be coordinating Creative, Digital & IT Open Studios, an event which provides an opportunity for local businesses to lift the curtain on what goes on behind the scenes in the sector.

There lots of benefits to getting involved. As well as being a unique chance for the public, students, graduates and peers to see your business, the week provides:

an amazing source of exposure and advertisement (not only will you be on Wired Sussex’ website, but also Brighton Digital Festival’s website, all of Wired Sussex’ printed media and shared via Wired Sussex’ social media)

a great way to make contacts within the creative industry, to share knowledge and ideas

an opportunity to collaborate with others

a way to meet new friends in the sector

Events can range from intimate to large-scale and can have any objective you’d like.

Last year they had some fantastic events take place, with 25 companies taking part and around 300 attendees.

Wired Sussex is a Brighton-based membership organisation for companies and freelancers operating in the digital, media and technology sector in Sussex, UK. Its goal is to support the (2500+) members in their quest to deliver innovation, creativity and growth and to enhance the reputation of this fast-growing regional cluster on the international stage.

Wired Sussex IT Open Studios

Brighton Digital Festival is a community-driven grassroots festival celebrating digital arts and culture. Held throughout September (1^st – 28^th) in Brighton UK, BDF supports an expansive and diverse programme of events, exhibitions and conferences that are developed independently by organisers. It provides an exciting platform for a community led programme produced by a network of organisations from the arts and digital communities, alongside individuals who are passionate about digital culture.

Such open programme model has allowed the Brighton Digital Festival to showcase the richness and variety of what goes on across the City and beyond. The model also enables the festival programme to exist at a scale that would be otherwise impossible.

In 2013, the Brighton Digital Festival drew an audience of over 41,000 people to 175 events held throughout September. The organisers are set to deliver another great festival programme for 2014 and are keen to continue growing the BDF community.

For more information visit BDF’s website and Wired Sussex’ website

If you’d like to get involved or you have any questions, please email events@wiredsussex.com

For the long-term preservation of audiovisual content.

MoU between PREFORMA and DAVID

A Memorandum of Understanding has been signed between PREFORMA and DAVID projects for the promotion and presentation of the respective results and for the organisation of joint events and other activities, focusing in particular on the long term preservation of audiovisual content.

PREFORMA (www.preforma-project.eu) is a Pre-Commercial Procurement project co-funded by the European Commission within the framework of the FP7 ICT Programme with the aim to address the challenge of implementing good quality standardised file formats for preserving data content in the long term and to give memory institutions full control of the process of the conformity tests of files to be ingested into archives.

DAVID (www.david-preservation.eu) is a Specific Targeted Research Project co-funded by the European Commission within the framework of the FP7 ICT Programme (Grant Agreement 600827) with the aim to research how to keep audiovisual content (video) usable in the face of adversity: format obsolescence, media degradation, and failures in the very people, processes and systems designed to keep digital video content safe. DAVID analyzes the origin of potential damage and its consequences on the usability of video content; it detects and restores existing damage and develops strategies for avoiding future damage in a way that balances long-term costs, risks of loss, and content quality.

Look at the impact digital technology is having in the classroom

How technology is reshaping learning and teaching?

iPads in the classroom – Photo by John Lewis

Once there were notebooks, pens and colouring pencils; now books and pencils are joined – and often replaced – by laptops and tablets. Nowadays the children entering school are fully fledged digital natives.

According to Ofcom’s recent researches, six-year-olds have the same understanding of communications technology as 45-year-olds and 14- and 15-year-olds are the most tech-savvy in the UK; over four in 10 households now have a tablet, meaning that children are becoming computer-literate before (in many cases long before: we think about techno-babies, who are able to handle iPads and smartphones before they are able to speek) they’ve even started primary school.

Unsurprisingly, technology is playing an increasingly central role in the classroom.

Technology reporter at the Daily Telegraph Sophie Curtis, who recently took part in an interactive experiment run by Argos and Intel (which involved sitting through two English lessons: one held the old way, without any kind of technology, and the second with all the latest digital gadgets), writes:

the first involved reading a scene from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, listening to the teacher talk through the themes and then writing my own analysis with pen and paper. The second involved watching a series of video clips depicting differing interpretations of the balcony scene from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, using the internet to research the themes and then typing my own interpretation on a laptop.

While the first lesson required intense and sustained concentration, the second was undeniably more compelling. I’m not sure I learnt any more about Romeo and Juliet than I did about Macbeth, but at no point during the second lesson did I find my mind wandering, which is half the battle teachers fight every day.

John Lewis conducted a similar experiment, using iPads and an interactive smartboard to teach a maths lesson. A series of web-enabled apps were used to teach the class about the area and volume of shapes, allowing them to rotate digital 3D models on their screens and divide them into blocks.

As a pupil, I was also able to take part in quizzes and submit my answers digitally. The teacher was then able to pull up individual pupils’ answers on the smartboard and show them to the rest of the class.

Anyone who has been through a more traditional education system may find these techniques gimmicky, but many teachers now claim that flashy multimedia lessons are the only way to engage children whose ability to absorb information has been shaped by continuous exposure to technology from a young age.

Using technology in an educational environment not only better reflects children’s life outside the classroom, but also allows them to hone their digital skills in a way that will continue to be valuable throughout their adult life.

“The use of mobile digital technologies in the classroom might be largely unfamiliar to parents, but the benefits can be huge,” said Drew Buddie, senior vice chair at Naace, the association for the UK’s education technology community.

“It’s not about just shifting traditional lessons onto screens; it’s about allowing pupils to make use of their devices to truly enhance their learning while giving teachers better ways to track individual achievement and personalise lessons.”

Read Sophie Curtis’ article on The Telegraph

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/