Digital meets Culture

Now that the project is finished let's have a look at the most important outcomes

The CULTURA Virtual Research Environment

The Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for the Digital Humanities is the central component of the CULTURA project and it supports users with different levels of experience to use a variety of tools to interact with a number of cultural heritage collections. A number of different cultural collections have been incorporated into the CULTURA Virtual Research Environment, which provides a suite of useful services, integrated into a unified portal. These services are central to enhancing a user’s engagement with an archive and include faceted search tools, annotators, social network visualisation tools, and personalised recommenders. The CULTURA portal is built on top of the Drupal content management system, as it provides numerous services that, while essential to CULTURA, are not core research elements, such as user authentication and system-wide logging.

The Cultural Heritage Collections

The concepts developed within the CULTURA project have been proved through the use of two reference cultural heritage collections: The 1641 Depositions and IPSA. These two collections are particularly relevant for scholars in the humanities, respectively for historians and historians of art, and have been chosen as case studies because they cover different and complementary aspects in the research on cultural heritage. The 1641 Depositions are composed of textual documents that required the development of tools for text processing, while IPSA is mainly a collection of digital images and metadata that required the development of tools for multimedia delivery. Yet the CULTURA approach showed to be effective for both collections, with a number of tools (annotations, visualisations, narratives, personalisation) that proved to be independent on the content and thus easily extensible to additional collections. This was proved when a third collection, 1916 Rising – a set of witness statements collected by the Irish Bureau of Military History – was integrated into CULTURA.

Personalisation

Cultural heritage collections often contain a large amount of resources and support a wide community of users that have varying levels of expertise. It is vital that the various types of users who interact with collections within the CULTURA portal are supported in locating content relevant to their current interests and tasks. Hence, the application of personalisation techniques by CULTURA helps empower experienced researchers, novice researchers and the wider community to discover, interrogate, and analyse cultural heritage resources.

Entity Relationship Extraction

The Entity Relationship Recognition module is a linguistic solution, developed by the IBM team, for extracting key entities from cultural resources and understanding the relationships among them. The process is done through a UIMA pipeline for annotating textual content, using IBM LanguageWare Workbench to create custom dictionaries and parsing rules. The module was applied on the 1641 Depositions to extract persons, locations, dates, and events, as well as the relationships among them and their associated attributes.

Entity Oriented Search

EoS features Entity Relationship Data Discovery model, a data discovery extension to the classical ER conceptual model and a new logical Document Category Sets model used to represent entities and relationships within an enhanced document model. Based on this data modelling, the IBM team developed a novel approach for exploratory search over rich entity-relationship data that utilizes a unique combination of expressive yet intuitive query language, faceted search, and graph navigation.

Text Normalization

In the framework of the CULTURA project, it has been developed and implemented a new general and language independent approach to the noisy text correction problem. This issue has been addressed by designing a novel machine learning technique called REBELS and combining the correction candidates provided by REBELS with respect to their rank and some standard language features and ignores the principle complications.

Network Visualisations in the Drupal Module

The network visualisations in the Drupal module in the CULTURA portal visualise the entities, discovered in digital humanities content – be it the 1641 depositions, the IPSA collection or the 1916 statements collection. The networks take two forms – the Wheel and the Octopus. Both show the same data, but are organised in a different way. The Wheel orders all entities in circular form by grouping them by type and sorting them alphabetically. The Octopus follows an algorithm to reveal the structure of the network and interconnections and is very useful when the networks of multiple items (depositions, statements or works) are visualised at the same time. These interactive network visualisations help users navigate massive amounts of content in a fast and efficient manner. When reviewing the entity network of a single 1641 deposition, the user can easily access the network of a location, crime or a person within this deposition, and see other contexts where these were featured.

Desktop Premapper and Web Premapper

The PreMapper is a custom-built tool for applying social network analysis to digital humanities resources. The desktop version of the software was originally planned as the only tool to edit entities and relations, add new entities, arrange custom maps and export results. The web PreMapper was developed in the second half of 2013 following the second stage user trials of the desktop version. It supports the main functionalities of the desktop application: creating new entities, selecting, editing and merging entities, adding or editing entity relations, filtering.

FAST Annotation Service

The Flexible Annotation Semantic Tool (FAST) service covers many of the uses and applications of annotations ranging from metadata to full content; its flexible and modular architecture makes it suitable for annotating general Web resources as well as digital objects managed by different digital library systems; the annotation themselves can be complex multimedia compound objects, with varying degree of visibility which ranges from private to shared and public annotations and different access rights.

Content Annotation Tool

CAT is a web annotation tool developed with the goal of being able to annotate multiple types of documents and assist collaboration in the field of digital humanities. At present, CAT allows for the annotation of both text and images. The current granularity for annotation of text is at the level of the letter. For image annotations, the granularity is at the level of the pixel. This allows for extremely precise document annotation, which is very relevant to the Digital Humanities domain due to the variety of different assets that prevail.

Equalia

Evaluation is an important task in the context of digital libraries, because it reveals relevant information about the quality of the technology for all stakeholders and decision makers. The main objective of Equalia is to support the systematic and sound evaluation of digital libraries systems in line with the key phases of evaluation. For this reason, its approach is based on an evaluation model, multi-modal data collection, and automatic reports.

For further information visit http://www.cultura-strep.eu/it/outcomes.

Barcelona, 13 May 2014

Next RICHES workshop: “Building the project’s foundation”

The workshop, celebrated on May 13^th at The Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (UIC) Barcelona’s Campus, served as the foundation of the RICHES Project research areas. The workshop outcomes established 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. Project’s partners, international guests and attendees – key figures in developing the field – were invited to participate and contribute to the taxonomy and definitions of the contextual framework of RICHES Project.

Barcelona’s workshop enabled all participants to:

– Elaborate and agree on a Taxonomy of Terms and Definitions which will support the project’s research.

– Share knowledge and enrich debate through the Network of Common Interest and its groups.

– Develop a framework of understanding of copyright and IPR laws as they relate to CH practice in the digital.

The Workshop was addressed to:

• Cultural ministries of member states within and beyond the project partnership;

• Regional, national and state authorities;

• CH organizations;

• AHSS (Arts, Humanities and Social-Sciences) experts, researchers and students;

• Public administrations;

• SMEs working within the digital cultural economy;

• Industrial associations and organizations dealing with creative industries;

• Citizens.

VENUE AND DATE

13 May 2014 from 9:00 AM to 4:30 PM (CEST)

UIC – Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, 22 Carrer Inmaculada, 08017 Barcelona, Spain

WORKSHOP PROGRAMME:

09.00 –09.30 Workshop Registration

09.30–09.45 Welcome & introduction to the event

Artur Serra, Deputy Director at i2Cat Foundation and Dr. Teresa Vallès, Dean at the Faculty of Humanities, Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (UIC)

09.45–10.15 Introduction to RICHES Project

Neil Forbes, Project Coordinator. (Professor of International History at Coventry University, Coventry’s Director of Research)

10.15-10.30 Establishing the RICHES conceptual framework

10.30-11.00 Coffee/Tea break

11.00-13.00 Workshops/discussion areas

1. General/common terms: This global and common field of definitions is basic to identify the existing practices in the domain of ICT for digital CH and boost new research on the consequences of the introduction of new digital practices and their impact/change on issues such as identity, creativity, curatorship, etc.

2. Understanding the context of change for tangible and intangible CH: An agreed set of definitions will further develop the research on the context of change in which analogue CH is held, preserved, curated and accessed digitally. This is particularly relevant when researching how digital practices are transforming the traditional CH practices of cultural institutions.

3. Digital copyrights framework: Copyright law is likely to be a factor in the dissemination and exploitation of many of the project’s research outputs, especially by those working within the digital CH sector. Copyrights laws developed in the analogue era are now causing challenges in the era of the digital. A full understanding of each term is vital to agree on a new route-mapping in this area.

4. Visualization and Interaction, exhibition of digital heritage and digital art. Digital Presentation & Output: 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.

5. Digital Cultural Heritage: Understanding how the various CH institutions (national, public, research, private) are now implementing systems to manage the different types of data (e-books, online catalogues, digital libraries, metadata records) and their means in order to respond to current and new users demands.

6. Role of CH in European Social development: This framework of definitions will help to best understand and explore the impact on the relationship among CH, citizens, civil society, territories and communities. This will contribute to identify further novel directions for digital CH in order to contribute to social cohesion, inclusion and represent multicultural practices.

7. Impact of CH on EU economic development: Defining the many factors and “actors” that constitute the changing context of the CH in the economic field, in order to recognize their impact on employment, new economic strategies and alliances in the EU. This framework of definitions will further help to identify practices, methodologies and structures that can be applied to CH in order to contribute to economic development in Europe.

13.00-14.30 Lunch

14.30-16.00 Community discussion & conclusions

The chairmen / representatives of the discussion sessions shared their agreed definitions for a final discussion open to all participants in order to validate all of them.

16.00-16.30 Closing Remarks

WORKSHOP DISCUSSION SESSIONS

The open-to-all workshops and discussion panels brought together RICHES partners representatives, key researchers, professionals, academics, students from the heritage as well the ICT domain in the state-of-the-art area, set an overall understanding of each themes, contributed to further develop each area of research and helped establishing a larger research community beyond the area.

Participants were asked to register to one of the following 7 proposed discussion sessions according to their field of expertise / practice. Each area of discussion had a designated representative/chairman whose mission was to conduct the discussion, coordinate the session (ensuring that timings are respected), record the contributions and deliver final definitions during the conclusion phase of the workshop’s programme. Each 7 session of research should contribute to determining a route map and future global trends related to each field/terms.

REGISTRATION

RICHES (Renewal, innovation & Change: Heritage and European Society) is a research project about change: about the decentring of culture and cultural heritage away from institutional structures towards the individual and about the questions which the advent of digital technologies is posing in relation to how we understand, collect and make available Europe’s cultural heritage (CH).

Digital technologies now permeate all of society, compelling us to rethink and ask questions such: how can CH institutions renew and remake themselves? How should an increasingly diverse society use our CH? How may the move from analogue to digital represent a shift from traditional hierarchies of CH to more fluid, decentred practices? How, then, can the EU citizen, alone or as part of a community, play a vital co-creative role? What are the limitations of new technologies in representing and promoting CH? How can CH become closer to its audiences of innovators, skilled makers, curators, artists, economic actors? How can CH be a force in the new EU economy?

With this event, i2Cat and The Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (UIC) joined forces to bridge the gap between the world of change in which the CH is reinventing itself, the academic community (professors and researchers) and the alumni (soon to be the next generation of cultural managers worldwide). In addition, the event was a unique opportunity to disseminate and promote RICHES project amongst researchers, educators, scientists, industry professionals and policy makers and the new strategies and fields of research taking place in the European context.

Download the programme

For more information, please visit the Project website

RICHES on Twitter: #richesEU

Varna (Bulgaria), 10 September 2014

Workshop on ICT Technologies for the Multimodal Capture, Semantic Analysis and 3D Representation of Cultural Heritage

The AIMSA conference series has provided a biennial forum for the presentation of AI research and development since 1984. The conference, which is held in Bulgaria, covers the full range of topics in Artificial Intelligence and related disciplines and provides an ideal forum for international scientific exchange between Central/Eastern Europe and the rest of the world. AIMSA 2014 is sponsored by ECCAI, the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence.

The International Conference will host a very interesting full-day workshop that will address the challenges posed for the semantic analysis and representation cultural heritage by the availability of novel ICT technologies for the multimodal capture and semantic analysis of cultural heritage (including tangible and intangible) as well as 3D technologies for the representation and visualization. The workshop will focus on interdisciplinary research on tangible and intangible on Cultural Heritage, including new technologies for the capturing, digitization, analysis, safeguarding and preservation of Cultural Heritage. These technologies will offer new ways to store, use and experience the content and metadata generated, such as novel applications for research, education and tourism. The workshop is meant to be a forum for interaction of ICT and 3D specialists and experts in Cultural Heritage, featuring presentations on the topic by leading experts and concluded by a panel discussion that should lead to a roadmap of future activities for this challenging area of research.

Topics

In the past years, computer vision, semantic analysis of multimedia and 3D technologies has had far-reaching impact in many different application areas (e.g. media, creative industries, games, to name a few) but also in cultural heritage applications. The handling of 3D data and animations captured from the tangible and intangible cultural heritage poses new challenges but also provides new, exciting and innovative opportunities. The goal of this workshop is to present a selection of recent advances/challenges, focused on cultural heritage. That is why the specific topics covered in the workshop include, but are not limited to:

the potential of 3D digitization
3D metadata
3D internet
lessons from the 3D film industry
3D reconstruction of architectural elements
3D shape analysis for archaeology
3D shape analysis for semantic annotation
physical reconstruction, archiving and harvesting of 3D models

Intended Audience

The workshop seeks to attract specialists in computer vision and 3D technologies and bring them together with experts in semantic analysis of multimedia. It aims to facilitate a dialogue between the two groups and will conclude with a panel discussion to identify future activities. We encourage especially students to participate, as they will have opportunity to see the most recent and advanced and latest developments in Cultural Heritage Research.

Workshop Organizers

Marinos Ioannides	–	Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol, Cyprus, Marinos.Ioannides@cut.ac.cy
Ewald Quak	–	Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia, Ewald.Quak@cs.ioc.ee
Nikos Grammalidis	–	Information Technologies Institute, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Thessaloniki, Greece, ngramm@iti.gr
Anastasios D. Doulamis	–	National Technical University of Athens, Greece, adoulam@cs.ntua.gr

Important Dates

Paper submissions due: June 13, 2014
Notification of paper acceptance: June 27 2014
Camera-ready papers due: July 14, 2014
Workshop date: September 10, 2014

Notification of interest: now open, please send e-mails to: Marinos.Ioannides@cut.ac.cy

Proceedings

The papers from the workshop will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Cybernetics and Information Technologies (CIT).

Paper submission details

Papers have to be submitted in PDF format to: Marinos.Ioannides@cut.ac.cy and Ewald.Quak@cs.ioc.ee.

Papers must be written in English, and should not exceed 12 pages with font Times 11pt. For the camera-ready papers, authors are requested to follow the paper formatting style of the Journal of Cybernetics and Information Technologies. Author instructions for the manuscript format can be found at: http://www.cit.iit.bas.bg/cit_inst_authors.html.

Registration: http://www.aimsaconference.org/registration.php

Venue: Golden Sands Resort (18 km north of the city of Varna and 24 km from its airport).
More information here

More information about the Call for Papers here

More information about the AIMSA 2014 Conference here

More information about the Workshop here

RICHES on Twitter: #richesEU

Iasi (Romania) 22 - 28 September 2014

Art, Science and Technology Topic @ IPCAM 10

The 10^th International Conference on Physics of Advanced Materials (ICPAM-10) was held at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania, from 22 to 28 September 2014. ICPAM-10 was intended to be a forum of physicists, chemists, material scientists, physicians, engineers and artists for discussion and exchange of ideas and results, both in fundamental and applied research of advanced materials, and consisted of invited and contributed papers during plenary, oral and poster sessions.

An Art-Science-Technology special session was held during the conference. This session focused on presentations (oral and poster) related to:

NanoArt, Scientific Photography(metallography, bio, medical, space, environmental, etc.), Digital Art, Video Art, Computer Graphics, Computer Animation, Game Design, Interactive Art, Net Art, Fractal Art, Algorithmic Art, Virtual Reality, Math Art.

The Art, Science and Technology topic had 3 events:

Official website of the event: http://artsciencephotography.com/

RICHES on Twitter: #richesEU

Paris, 6-7 October 2014

First ICCA Workshop on Cultural Industries

This Workshop, hosted by the Labex ICCA (an interdisciplinary research centre on the arts, culture and digital markets and their practices), intends to provide a forum that allows the development and the dissemination of researches on a single object (cultural industries) but from different scientific fields (economics, communication sciences, sociology, law, education sciences…). It aims at favouring discussions and connections between various scientific fields and various cultural industries. Professionals and institutional representatives of the cultural sector will also be invited to compare their experience with the researches presented during the workshop, which will be held in English.

Propositions of communication will be selected on the basis of a detailed abstract or a full- paper. These propositions may cover all the above mentioned scientific fields, all the cultural industries (publishing, audiovisual, movie, music, videogame, …) and deal with various topics like (among others): the impact of digitization on cultural industries (disintermediation, redefinition of the authorship, cultural diversity, new modes of distribution and consumption), the assessment of cultural policies, creativity in cultural industries…

Deadline for submitting detailed abstracts or full-papers was June 30, 2014. Authors will be notified on acceptance or rejection by July 11, 2014. There is no submission or registration fee. Monday evening dinner, Tuesday lunch and accommodation expenses (up to two nights) of the conference participants who presented a paper will be covered by the Labex ICCA.

Travel expenses will not be covered.

Local Organization Commitee:

Prof. Françoise Benhamou, University Paris 13

Prof. Bertrand Legendre, University Paris 13

Prof. François Moreau, University Paris 13.

For more information visit http://www.univ-paris13.fr/icca/callworkshop/

Warsaw, December 1-3 2014

Engaging Spaces: Interpretation, Design and Digital Strategies

NODEM 2014 is part of the NODEM Nordic Digital Excellence in Museums conference series under the stewardship of the Digital Heritage Center Sweden AB.

Nodem 2014 theme is: Engaging Spaces – Interpretation, Design and Digital Strategies

The aim of the 2014 conference is to bring together museum and heritage professionals (galleries, archives, libraries and museums), innovation experts (universities, research and technology transfer centres, start-ups) and creative industries to enable discussion on the potential of dialogue and collaborations between architecture, experience design, strategies of interpretation and ICT. The NODEM 2014 Conference intends to reach the following objectives:

To examine a variety of challenges and opportunities that newly built or renovated museums and other culture-historical institutions are facing to stay competitive in engaging today’s visitors.
To explore interaction modes between exhibition spaces, interpretative content and digital strategies in the context of visitor engagement at cultural and heritage institutions.

PRELIMINARY PROGRAMME (PDF, 368 kB)

NODEM (Nordic Digital Excellence in Museum Conferences) was established in 2003 by the research studio Visions for Museums at the Interactive Institute and supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers. Between 2010 and 2011, NODEM is developing to become a larger international conference networking platform called NODEM INTERNATIONAL, which will be acting in Nordic countries and beyond and will be building a digital platform for archiving, collaboration and community building. In the future it intends to connect research and practice in the field of digital cultural heritage in Nordic countries and other international arenas as well.

NODEM is an interdisciplinary conference forum that connects various disciplines and professions related to digital cultural heritage:

interaction design
exhibition design
museum studies

NODEM 2014 ORGANIZERS AND PARTNERS

NODEM Network of Design and Digital Heritage

The Museum Educators Forum, Poland

Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań / The Faculty of Pedagogy and Fine Arts in Kalisz

Digital Heritage Center Sweden AB

Museum of King Jan III’s Palace at Wilanów

The Museum of the History of Polish Jews

NIMOZ – The National Institute for Museums and Public Collections

DISH – Digital Strategies for Heritage

CONFERENCE VENUE

Museum of King Jan III’s Palace at Wilanów / Muzeum Pałacu Króla Jana III w Wilanowie
Stanisława Kostki Potockiego 10/16
02-958 Warszawa
Polska

The Museum of the History of Polish Jews / Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich

Anielewicza 6
00-157 Warszawa
Polska

For more information www.nodem.org/conferences/nodem-2014

Outcomes of the PREFORMA Requirements Workshop

Open Dialogue: towards a joint user model

On March 5th, 2014 PREFORMA project organised a workshop in Brussels targeted to memory institutions to agree on the joint user model for tendering the PREFORMA conformance checker.

This workshop was organised as part of the Open Dialogue between the memory institutions and the technology providers who develop the software. The memory institutions will define the functional requirements of the tender based on the outcome of the Open dialogue.

During the workshop several topics have been discussed: the various use cases to be taken into consideration for the conformance checking, the joint user model, the deployment options for the tools developed by the suppliers, the different formats and standards to be taken into account and the list of requirements for each media type.

The outcomes of this discussion will be soon available on the PREFORMA project website.

The great Europeana Photography exhibition opened with a big launch event in Pisa, 11th April 2014.

All Our Yesterdays… welcome to Pisa!

All Our Yesterdays will be a travelling exhibition all over Europe, hosted by the partners of Europeana Photography. The choice of Pisa for the first run of the exhibition was based on the fact that Pisa is a city suited to the research and the arts, home of a prestigious university, with international dimension, which offers an international airport connected with many destinations in Europe.

Lungarno Galilei in Pisa

The location of the exhibition was Palazzo Lanfranchi, a very prestigious exhibition centre, in an historical palace in the center of Pisa, on the Lungarno Galilei (the embankment of river Arno). Palazzo Lanfranchi hosts the permanent exhibition of Museo della Grafica, and hosted the Europeana Photography exhibition under the patronage of the Municipality of Pisa by the Chancellor of Culture and of the University of Pisa through the Department of Arts. Tuscan Region was also patronizing the event.

Palazzo Lanfranchi

Palazzo Lanfranchi hosted about 120 prints following the fil-rouge of the narrative developed by KU Leuven. Each photograph displayed in Palazzo Lanfranchi is printed with the most advanced printing techniques and on a very pure, cotton-based paper that enhances the photograph at its best. This solution makes the use of covering glass superfluous, and this way it is possible to avoid glares and light effects – which may disturb the beholder. Each print is framed with a wooden, neutral frame and is accompanied by a small panel with caption and credits. In each room there was one or more explicative panels. The panels and captions were in two languages: English and Italian.

The virtual exhibition

All Our Yesterdays is also a virtual exhibition: a virtual gallery where visitors can stroll through 3D technology. The visitor, when entering in the hall of the virtual museum, will find some information panels concerning the partners of the project and also a representative image for each partner. In the same room, there will be a timeline for the first century of the photography history (1839-1939). Around 100 images will be exhibited in the eight rooms of the gallery. The virtual exhibition was a proposal by partner CRDI and it is developed with the same 3D technology applied in video games. It is a step up from currently existing projects like Google Art since in this case the move through different virtual spaces is continuous and uninterrupted. Moreover, the application is ready for access from iPad , as well as from any computer in a web environment. The virtual exhibition is also hosted on All Our Yesterday’s landing page.

The Europeana kiosk

On the first floor of Palazzo Lanfranchi, near the entrance, there was be a space dedicated to Europeana, the great European Digital Library. This space is set up in partnership with Europeana Foundation. It included a desk with a computer to be used by the visitors to browse Europeana portal and dissemination material e.g. Europeana folders, fact sheets, postcards etc. as well as banners to decorate the corner. An Europeana representative was present both to have a short speech at the opening ceremony on 11^th April, as well as to perform dissemination to the visitors on the 12^th April. During the rest of the exhibition, the Europeana corner remained available for consultation by the visitors..

The digitization desk

a digitization desk

In order to attract the citizens to visit the exhibition and to engage the visitors, Collection Days were organized to digitize family photos and albums related to the timeframe of the project. Such photos were professionally digitized on site and in real time: the original photo and the file was immediately given back to the owner, the file is returned on an USB pen or via email. The digitized photographs and their related information (metadata) are collected to be re-used in projects for the enhancement of digital cultural heritage. The same initiative will be replicated also in the other venues where the exhibition will take place.

The exhibition, organized by Promoter, featured a great launch event on the 11th April; the opening ceremony included the presence and the speech of the local Authorities (Municipality of Pisa and Chancellor of Culture), of the University of Pisa (Faculty of Arts), of the Project Coordinator and of a representative of Europeana. All the Europeana Photography partners participated to the event.

KU Leuven coordinated all the partners of Europeana Photography for creating this amazing photographic exhibition.

All Our Yesterdays, story of a narrative

All Our Yesterdays is the great exhibition of Europeana Photography project. It is the collective effort from all the partners of this extraordinary consortium that make the exhibition so important and noteworthy: in facts, during the project, images selected by the content providers are shared and new discoveries discussed within a Content Committee of experts coming from each partner institution; and the exhibition is truly a golden opportunity and an ideal way to highlight the richness of the Europeana Photography collection.

So, in preparation of this exhibition, there was a lot of work to do for the Content Committee, in order to develop an attractive narrative for the exhibition. An important role in the direction of the scientific project behind the exhibition was played by the project coordinator KU Leuven, in charge of coordinating the selection of images together with the content providers, and of developing themes and narrative of the exhibition and the catalogue book.

First proposals for the exhibition content were initially discussed in Paris in November, on the occasion of the Europeana Photography IPR workshop, where the general concept of the exhibition was outlined – stressing vernacular photography, highlighting the city life in Europe, with as theme how photography was a premier witness to our common memory.

All Our Yesterdays, Life Through the lens of Europe’s first photographers (1839-1939) is in facts the opportunity for the European modern citizens to discover the lives that European past citizens lived throughout Europe’s history in the period 1839-1939. The exhibition is organized in different “chapters” and sub-themes, featuring photos of everyday life of people in the streets, outside, in the cities, in the countryside, in the villages, etc.

The photos were selected basing on their testimonial power and photographic value. They are images that inspire empathy and appeal to historical consciousness, and most of all they are images that tell a story. The content providers were extremely responsive and enthusiast of this task, and came up with a very large number of proposed images. A poll was then organized and coordinated by KU Leuven, asking all the partners to vote for their favorite images among the wider selection. These “best of the best” images have been selected for printing and framing.

An overall amount of about 120 photographs are represented in the exhibition, printed and framed, while a Virtual Exhibition and a showreel will include an even larger number of images. The whole exhibition includes photographs from the partners of Europeana Photography consortium and from 2 associate partners (SC Bali from Kiev and CUT from Cyprus).

Grand opening event is taking place in Pisa (Italy) 11^th April – 2^nd June 2014, in the historical setting of Palazzo Lanfranchi, organized by project’s Technical Coordinator Promoter.

Leuven will also host this exhibition in January 2015.

Learn more on www.earlyphotography.eu

Life through the lens of Europe’s first photographers (1839 – 1939).
Pisa, 11 April - 2 June 2014

All Our Yesterdays. Europeana Photography exhibition

In Pisa, at Palazzo Lanfranchi, from 11th April to 2nd June 2014, a great photographic and multimedia exhibition based on the most advanced digitization and printing technologies, telling the stories of our grandfathers.

18 international partners – museums, archives and agencies from all over Europe – joined forces in EuropeanaPhotography project to digitize the best of their collections of early photographs; now they are proud to present the finest, and often unseen, images of the past as witnessed by the pioneers of photography.

Main objective of the Europeana Photography project is in facts to digitize over 430.000 images with historical, artistic and cultural value belonging to the first 100 years of photography, since its birth (1839) till the beginning of WWII.

Now, the project’s exhibition All Our Yesterdays is the great occasion to discover how citizens in Europe lived before Europe was born, in a moment of great change, while the future was approaching and a new medium – the photography – was capturing everyday life within a picture. The exhibition was hosted first by Museo della Grafica, under the patronage of Pisa Municipality, Pisa University and Tuscan Region.

With the camera as a time machine – framing the present, documenting the past and showing a glimpse of the future – men (and women!) have, throughout the history of photography, captured their world from its most beautiful angles as well as in its most dramatic days. Early photography is an important element of our cultural heritage as it is direct and visual witness of the great changes in Europe in between the two centuries. Digital technologies have nowadays a key role in ensuring accessibility, enhancement and preservation of cultural heritage for all the citizens, and in this light the images digitized by Europeana Photography are available online through www.europeana.eu, the great European Digital Library. This way, anybody (students, researchers, experts, professionals in the field and common people) can access these images for many and different purposes: for education, for research, for personal interest. In Palazzo Lanfranchi a corner dedicated to Europeana allowed visitors to discover more and browse the collections.

All Our Yesterdays shows how history of Europe is our story too, and everybody could join, by bringing old family photos in Palazzo Lanfranchi: they were digitized for free and converged into projects for the enhancement of the cultural heritage of the territory, such as MemorySharing and a second exhibition in Pisa organized by cultural association Imago in December 2014.

ALL OUR YESTERDAYS

Pisa, Palazzo Lanfranchi

11 April – 2 June 2014

FREE ENTRANCE

Further info: www.earlyphotography.eu

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