Digital meets Culture

Towards a common infrastructure for the digital preservation of cultural data

After the successful workshops and networking sessions jointly organised by DCH-RP and EUDAT (in Manchester at the EGI Community Forum, in Rome during the EUDAT Conference and at ICT 2013 in Vilnius), the two projects decides to formalise their cooperation by signing a Memorandum of Understanding.

Aim of the agreement is to set up a common plan for the establishment of a Virtual Research Community for the Digital Preservation dedicated to the Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) and Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) sectors, to be acknowledged at European level by the world of e-infrastructure.

As a first step in this direction, the two projects dediced to join their efforts and put together the results achieved so far to set up a Proof-of-Concept targeted at demonstrating how e-Infrastructures can be of benefit for the DCH community, in particular for the preservation of digital cultural content. In this pilot the prototypes and the services developed in EUDAT, in particular B2Share and B2Safe services, will be tested by the memory institutions participating to the DCH-RP Proof of Concepts, who will try to use them to safely store, access and preserve their digital cultural data.

The need for novel e-Infrastructure services is increasing in the Cultural Heritage, Social Science and Humanities, involving also the private sector, since they allow for cost reduction by avoiding parallel activities in investing for higher volume/throughput and substituting expensive human workforce by cheap machine processes.

In this context, Virtual Research Environments (VRE) and Virtual Research Communities (VRC) are key new paradigms and practical opportunities for doing research and for handling and preserving huge amount of digital data.

On 9-10 December, launched the new project for transmitting and benefiting from Cultural Heritage in Europe

RICHES was kicked-off in Brussels

On 9-10 December, at the EBN (European Business & Innovation Centre Network) in Brussels, 10 partners from 6 EU countries and Turkey kicked-off RICHES, a new EC funded research project in the field of Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities.

RICHES (Renewal, Innovation & Change: Heritage and European Society) is a project about change: about the change digital technologies are bringing to our society, decentring culture and cultural heritage away from institutional structures towards the individual and so offering to the EU citizens a great opportunity to use their heritage as a drive for social and economic development.

Digital technologies now permeate all of society, compelling us to rethink how we do everything and to ask questions: 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?

RICHES will research answers to these questions through the work of the ten partners, ten groups composed of experts from cultural institutions, public and national administrations, SMEs, humanities and social science academies. This interdisciplinary team will research the context of change in which European CH is transmitted, its implications for future CH practices and the frameworks – cultural, legal, financial, educational, technical – to be put in place for the benefit of all audiences and communities, in the digital age.

RICHES will employ traditional and innovative research methods and tools and a rich dissemination programme including two major international conferences will insure the project has maximum outreach and impact.

The RICHES Consortium

In Brussels, the partners met to start the actualisation of their workplan, exchanging ideas and new cues for the next future. Particular aim of the project is making CH lively, living and most of all lived by the EU citizens; during the meeting it was stressed the importance of involving the citizens, through the support of digital technologies, to co-create CH together with the public and private cultural institutions; of inviting people to play with CH and to feel part of it. For this purpose, three experimental co-creation sessions will be run by the partners next year in the Netherlands. The “participatory CH”, put in place with this kind of experiments, is expected to have a strong societal impact.

Other important point among RICHES goals, highlighted during the meeting, is improving the value of traditional craft skills by inserting them, through the help of digital technologies, in new (industrial) contexts, in order to exploit their high potential for economic development. Through the innovation of digital technologies, traditional CH will be moreover revamped and made more and more captivating. This is expected to bring a great benefit to the heritage institutions and to incentivize cultural tourism, representing another big opportunity for Europe.

Each partner presented to the others his company and his role within the project; during the two working days, there was also occasion for a pleasant visit of Brussels city and for convivial exchanges.

RICHES partners are:

•the University of Coventry, UK – PROJECT COORDINATOR;
•I2Cat (‘Internet & digital Innovation in Catalonia’), Spain;
•Hansestadt Rostock (representing the municipality of the city of Rostock; in particular the Department of Culture and Monument Preservation Rostock and the Museum of Cultural History Rostock will be involved in RICHES), Germany;
•WAAG Society (Institute for art, science and technology) of Amsterdam, The Netherlands;
•the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), Denmark;
•Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz (SPK), Germany. It is a network of German cultural institutions, including the National Museum in Berlin, the State Library, the Secret State Archive, the Ibero-American Institute, the Institute for Music Research;
•the University of Exeter, UK;
•Promoter Srl , Italy – Project’s Dissemination Manager;
•the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism (KYGM), participating in RICHES in particular with the contribution of its General Directorate of Libraries and Publications, Turkey;
•Stichting Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde (NME, the National Museum of Ethnology of Leiden), The Netherlands.

Beyond the RICHES partners, three important guests from the EC took part in the meeting:

Zoltan Krasnai, EC Project Officer, presenting “EU Research and Innovation on Cultural Heritage in Horizon 2020“
Thomas Jaeger, DG Communication Networks, Content & Technology, presenting “Research and Innovation Actions for Creative and Cultural Industries”
Claire-Lyse Chambron, DG-EAC Unit E.1 – Culture Policy and Intercultural Dialogue

and from the MeLa FP7 Project:

Gennaro Postiglione, presenting “MeLa, European Museums in an age of migrations”

Download the Agenda of the meeting (PDF, 250 Kb)

RICHES on Twitter: #richesEU

a big event that EuropeanaPhotography could not miss to attend

Europeana Annual General Meeting 2013

The Europeana Network Annual General Meeting (AGM) is a key event for Europeana and its Network. It provides all partners with the opportunity to share experiences and discuss and develop ideas around specific areas of mutual relevance and interest.

It was recently held on 2 December 2013 in Rotterdam, and beside a strong focus on the Europeana Business Plan 2014 and Horizon2020, it was as usual the perfect occasion for meeting other projects’ representatives, sharing achievements and expertise, discussing possible future strategies and developing new partnerships.

EuropeanaPhotography was of course present in this important event: it was attended by the Technical Coordinator Antonella Fresa, who was also taking part as full member in the Public-Private Partnership task force session, Sofie Taes of KU Leuven and Nacha Van Steen of KMKG.

In the framework of the event, the interesting workshop organized by Europeana Creative “Bridging the gap with Creative Industries” and the DISH conference were also attended by the EuropeanaPhotography team.

Beside these networking and dissemination activities, a poster of EuropeanaPhotography was also displayed at the poster session.

Nominations open until 31 December 2013, voting in January 2014: nominate and vote EAGLE!

DH Awards recognizes excellence in Digital Humanities

Digital Humanities Awards are a new set of annual awards given in recognition of talent and expertise in the digital humanities community and are nominated and voted for entirely by the public. These awards are intended to help put interesting DH resources in the spotlight and engage DH users (and general public) in the work of the community. Awards are not specific to geography, language, conference, organization or field of humanities that they benefit and there is no financial prize associated with these community awards, just the honour of having won and an icon for your website.

DH Awards 2013 is now accepting nominations! You can nominate any Digital Humanities resource you feel deserves to win in any of this year’s categories; nominations will be open until the 31^st of December 2013 (midnight GMT) and voting will take place in January 2014. The nominations must be for projects/resources/sites that were launched/finished/created in 2013.

This year’s categories are:

Best DH tool or suite of tools
Nominations for this category should be for a tool or suite of tools created by members of the DH community, used for enabling, encouraging, and/or accomplishing DH work;
Best DH contribution not in the English language
Nominations for this category should be for DH resources or publications that are not in the English language;
Best use of DH for fun
Nominations for this category should be for projects/resources/sites for DH which are designed to be fun or inherently playful;
Best DH blog post, article, or short publication
Nominations for this category should be for a specific short DH publication (peer-reviewed or not) whether article, blog post, or other publication;
Best DH visualization or infographic
Nominations for this category should be for a graphic, infographic, or visualization created for or by the DH community;
Best DH project for public audiences
Nominations for this category should be for a DH project designed to be used by audiences primarily outside of higher education, including educators, students, enthusiasts, genealogists, engaged citizens, etc;

By its work at making available, with the most advanced digital technologies’ support, the vast majority of the surviving inscriptions from the Greco-Roman world, we think EAGLE can be a valid and qualified competitor for 2013’s edition of DH Awards. To nominate EAGLE visit the nominations page at: http://dhawards.org/dhawards2013/nominations/

The DH Awards 2013 are overseen by an international Nominations Committee consisting of:

James Cummings (Founder/Director) — University of Oxford
Craig Bellamy — University of Melbourne
Sheila Brennan — Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University
Marjorie Burghart — EHESS: École des Haute Études en Sciences Sociales (Lyon)
Kiyonori Nagasaki – International Institute for Digital Humanities 一般財団法人人文情報学研究所 (Tokyo)
Miriam Peña Pimentel — UNAM: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Fellowships available within Marie Curie

DiXiT now open for application

The Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network (DiXiT)* offers 12 fellowships to Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) for a period of 3 years and 5 fellowships to Experienced Researchers (ERs) for a period of 12 to 20 months. Fellowships are now open for applications (except 4 ER fellowships which will start at a later date).

Academic Requirements:
Early‐Stage Researchers must be in the first 4 years of their research careers and not yet have a doctoral degree. This is measured from the date when they obtained the degree which would formally entitle them to embark on a doctorate, irrespective of whether or not a doctorate is envisaged.
Experienced Researchers must be in possession of a doctoral degree or have at least 4 years of full‐time equivalent research experience. At the time of recruitment by the host organisation an experienced researcher must also have less than 5 years of full‐time equivalent research experience.
It should be noted that an individual researcher may not be recruited first as an ESR and subsequently as an ER in the same project.

Marie Curie ITN mobility requirement:
Researchers can be of any nationality. They are required to undertake trans‐national mobility (i.e. move from one country to another) when taking up their appointment. One general rule applies to the appointment of researchers:
At the time of recruitment by the host organisation, researchers must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc) in the country of their host organisation for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately prior to the reference date.
Short stays such as holidays and/or compulsory national service are not taken into account.

Application process:
Please note that applications from any qualified applicants, regardless of gender, ethnicity or country of origin are welcome if they meet the eligibility requirements.
Applicants should send their applications directly to the institution hosting the desired fellowship. Applications for more than one post are welcome – however, multiple applications should be indicated via the obligatory DiXiT application form (which has to be submitted separately from the application documents send to the hosting institution).

Deadline:
The deadline for applications is the 10th December 2013.
Please note that the four remaining ER fellowships will start at a later date and the possibility of application will be announced accordingly.

About DiXiT:
* DiXiT (Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network) is an international network of high‐profile institutions from the public and the private sector that are actively involved in the creation and publication of digital scholarly editions.
DiXiT offers a coordinated training and research programme for early stage researchers and experienced researchers in the multi‐disciplinary skills, technologies, theories, and methods of digital scholarly editing.
DiXiT is funded under Marie Curie Actions within the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme and runs from September 2013 until August 2017.
For more information, visit dixit.uni-koeln.de

Download the call in PDF

event held at the Russian State Library (Moscow, the Russian Federation) in November 2013

EVA Moscow, good dissemination for EuropeanaPhotography

The EVA Moscow event is of course part of the EVA conference series, and the 2013 edition was a real success, with over 500 attendants, all very interested and motivated.

This conference was part of the Russian State Library cultural heritage event’s week held on 19–22 November 2013 the Russian State Library (Moscow, the Russian Federation) hosted the joint scientific and practical conference that included:

19-21 November 2013: 15th Annual international conference «EVA 2013 Moscow, Information society, culture, education». The theme of the conference – «Libraries and museums in digital environment: dialogue and cooperation».

22 November 2013: 12th International scientific and practical conference «Digital century of culture».

EuropeanaPhotography was presented by Andrea de Polo of Fondazione Alinari with a 20 minutes speech (the presentations is available here) and flyers. The presentation included examples on search images and explained the process for ingesting local databases to the Europeana Photography MINT tool that allows transformation in the Europeana Data Model and multilingual enrichment of the metadata, to be ready for ingestion in Europeana portal www.europeana.eu. Moreover, possible cooperation with local Institutions was deeply discussed. Several people asked questions, mainly about how their Institution can join the project and how Russian organizations can be involved.

Website of EVA Moscow 2013: https://eva.rsl.ru/en

Just released a new european study commissioned by the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market

The citizens’ perception of Intellectual Property and its infringements

“European Citizens and Intellectual Property: Perception, Awareness and Behaviour” is the first EU wide study which provides a comprehensive assessment of citizens’ perceptions of Intellectual Property (IP) and its infringements, both from a qualitative and quantitative point of view. The study was commissioned by the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM) acting through the European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights.

As expressed in the document foreword “This survey provides an analysis of how IP is perceived at EU citizen level. It is launched at a time when IP has never been so present in the day-to-day lives of European citizens. Intellectual property rights cover everything from the food people eat, to the clothes they wear, the cars they drive and the music they listen to. And through the explosion in digital content and technology over the past decade, people are now closer to IP than ever before.”

Read a summary on the EuropeanaPhotography IPR Blog, where the full report is also available for download, and the experts can reply any inquiry.

Participation is virtually via live streaming or physically at Trinity college Dublin - 16th January 2014

CULTURA Results Transfer Workshop

Challenges in Digital Humanities Research Environments: the CULTURA Approach

Supporting researchers in exploring and examining digitised artefacts presents many challenges in terms of understanding each researcher’s needs, performing appropriate manipulation of and uplift from content, and in presenting a suite of useful research tools to facilitate exploration.

This workshop will delve into these Digital Humanities challenges by examining the approaches taken in the CULTURA project (cultura-project.eu) to tackle the issues of:

Engaging with End Users through Participatory Design and Evaluation
Maintaining Data Fidelity whilst preparing it for Deep Exploration
Combining a suite of tools into a Holistic Personalised Environment to support researchers

This virtual/physical workshop will use CULTURA as a case study to drive discussion by presenting demonstrations and results from the project. The outputs of this workshop will be captured and placed online.

Date: 16^th January 2014

Time: 13:00 – 16:00 GMT

Participation:

Virtually – via live streaming and audience feedback channels (limited to 100 participants).
Physically – at Trinity College, Dublin (limited to 30 participants).

http://www.cultura-strep.eu/workshop2014

The event was held in Graz, Austria, on November 22, 2013.

Equalia Presentation at the conference “Culturelles Erbe in der Cloud”

The Equalia evaluation service was presented by Alexander Nussbaumer at the conference “Culturelles Erbe in der Cloud” (Cultural Heritage in the Cloud) in Graz, Austria, on November 22, 2013.

This event was organised the Center for Information Modelling in the Humanities of the University of Graz together with Europeana Local Austria.

Equalia was presented as poster in the context of the CULTURA project and its digital libraries 1641 Depositions and IPSA Collection. An explanation of the CULTURA project and Equalia was given to the whole conference audience in a poster presentation session and in conversations with individual participants in the poster exhibition area.

EAGLE joins Pelagios for linking together the ancient places through the documents that refer to them

The Eagle
flies with Pelagios

EAGLE (the Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy) joins Pelagios.

EAGLE is a Best-Practice Network (BPN), co-funded through the ICT-Policy Support Programme of the European Commission and aimed at creating a new online archive for epigraphy in Europe. As part of Europeana’s multi-lingual online collection of millions of digitised items (from European museums, libraries, archives and multi-media collections) EAGLE will link and connect, using Linked Open Data (LOD) best practice, thousands of inscriptions, photos of inscriptions and related contextual items in a single readily-searchable platform. The project will make available the vast majority of surviving inscriptions from the Greco-Roman world, complete with the essential information about them and, for all the most important, one or more translations.

PELAGIOS stands for “Pelagios: Enable Linked Ancient Geodata In Open Systems”. It is a collective of projects connected by a shared vision – most eloquently described in Tom Elliott’s article ‘Digital Geography and Classics’ – of a world in which the geography of the past is every bit as interconnected, interactive and interesting as the present. Its aim is to help introduce Linked Open Data (LOD) goodness into online resources that refer to places in the historic past.

Pelagios also means “of the sea”(and sea was the superhighway of the pre-industrial world): an appropriate metaphor for a digital resource that will connect references to ancient places.

By joining Pelagios, EAGLE will be able to connect with other major online projects about the Ancient World and make its data accessible to other aggregator and LOD projects to increase the quality, usability and accessibility of data provided by the BPN. Moreover, working with the Pelagios team, EAGLE looks forward to taking linked ancient world data one step further in terms of networking and interoperability and to helping facilitate research in all disciplines of the field, digital or otherwise.