Digital meets Culture

Siena, 26-27 September 2013

Agorà of Polis comes back: Mobility, Cultural Heritage, Sustainable Building

The annual event organized by Polis (Polo di Innovazione delle Tecnologie per la Città Sostenibile – Innovation Pole of the Technologies for a Sustainable City) was held in the Engineering College of Siena’s University on the 26^th – 27^th September 2013.

Two days of debate about the “Smart Specialization Strategy” general topic, structured on the three Polis themes MOBILITY (flow management and planning of the transport processes), CULTURAL HERITAGE (preservation, management and use) and SUSTAINABLE BUILDING (new building materials, energy systems): the talk was focused on technology, tourism, urban logistics, culture, storytelling, agrifood, green cities. The main Tuscan firms, experts and national and international excellences of the field took part in the event.

These were the agenda main sessions:

Thursday, 26^th September 2013/Chora

9.30/10.00 AM – OPENING

10.00 AM/01.30 PM – SMART SPECIALIZATION STRATEGY: research and innovation’s new generation

02.30/05.00 PM – MUSEUM IS TERRITORY, TERRITORY IS MUSEUM: ICT museumification strategies in the storytelling era

Thursday 26^th September 2013/Escathià

11.00 AM/01.30 PM – CULTURAL TOURISM, THE TERRITORY TELLING

02.30/06.30 PM – SUSTAINABLE CITY AND URBAN LOGISTICS: Dorothy project

Friday 27^th September 2013/Chora

9.30 AM/01.30 PM – SPAGHETTI START UP: new enterprises for the territory growth

02.30/06.30 PM – SMART GREEN CITIES

Friday 27^th September 2013/Escathià/Agorà – THE START Ups AFTERNOON

Following: SHINE – The Researchers Night: meeting at “Orto de’ Pecci” with aperitif and much more…

In the frame of the event, the project “Europeana Photography” (European Ancient Photographic Vintage Repositories of Digitized Pictures of Historic Quality) has been represented by Dr. Antonella Fresa of Promoter Srl. (Download the presentation here) EuropeanaPhotography is a digitisation project co-funded by the European Commission and coordinated by the University of Leuven. The project plays a key role in ensuring that digital content related to ancient photography is accessible in Europeana. In fact, Europeana has an impressive mass of images mostly representing cultural objects while photographic images, the early ones in particular, are underrepresented. Europeana Photography will fill this gap by providing photographic masterpieces from 1839 – with the first example of images from Fox Talbot and Daguerre – to the beginning of the Second World War (1939).

For more information:

http://www.polis-toscana.it/index.php/agora-2013.html

Download the full agenda here (italian language)

Download the presentation taken by Antonella Fresa here

Follow the proceedings of the Conference on the Social Network

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/agoradipolis

Twitter: @polistoscana #Agorà2013

Warsaw, 14-15 October 2013

International seminar Photography – Museum Narratives

On 14-15 October 2013 the National Museum in Warsaw hosted the international seminar Photography – Museum Narratives. The seminar was organized by the Archaeology of Photography Foundation, in collaboration with the National Museum in Warsaw and National Institute of Museology and Collections Protection.

The aim of the conference was to investigate the position of photography within contemporary museum institutions and to determine the function and premises of photography museums. This event bring forth an opportunity to become acquainted with histories of photographic collections and acquiring strategies of institutions such as: Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Getty Museum (LA), Art Institute of Chicago, Musée Nicéphore Niépce (Chalon-sur-Saône) , Musée de l’Élysée (Lausanne), and Rosphoto (St. Petersburg).

Below, a list of topics addressed:

Museum of Photography and its History — different models of developing photography museums.

Museum of Photography Today — does the museum of photography today have its raison d’être if so, what should be its shape, and if not, what consequences does this fact have for existing collections.

Photography on Permanent Display — past and current ways of constructing the narratives of permanent exhibitions of photography, as well as the ways in which photography is included in the permanent displays.

Historical Narratives of Temporary Exhibitions — analysis of select landmark exhibitions and their impact on the history of photography and acquisition strategies, such as The Family of Man.

Photography in the Collection of a Museum of Art — historical and contemporary perspectives on and strategies of collecting photography.

Photography as the Object of a Legal Transaction — copyrights, making the collections available to the public, official records, digitization, etc.; including photographing in museums: the rights of the visitors in the face of the duty to protect the heritage.

Photography has been present in museums ever since its invention, however, the ways it was collected and its status within the museum collections changed drastically over the course of the last 170 years. The museum institutions and curators played an important role in shaping the history of photography and are responsible for the fact that it is still very often seen from the perspective of the medium. Nonetheless, both collecting — that is acquisition strategies — and making available to the public — that is temporary and permanent displays — have defined photography as either closer to a technique, art, or to a document. These different statuses are still at play, though various museums adopt diverse methods of dealing with such pluralism. In some cases, photographs from all departments — library, iconography, art, and prints — are to be found in a single department of photography, which is responsible for the strategy of acquisitions and all photography-related projects. Another model involves keeping the photographs in their original locations in the collection; yet another focuses on challenging the media-based division and including the photographs in the general collection.

Participating speakers:

Jaroslav Anděl (artistic director at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague)
Quentin Bajac (chief curator of Photography Department, Museum of Modern Art, NY)
Tamara Berghmans (curator and researcher at FotoMuseum Antwerp)
Martijn van den Broek (head of the Collections Department at the Netherlands FotoMuseum in Rotterdam)
François Cheval (curator-at-large at Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Chalon-sur-Saône)
Antonella Fresa (technical coordinator at Europeana Photography); download the presentation in PDF (1,35 Mb)
Virginia Heckert (curator of Photography Department at the Getty Museum, LA)
Danuta Jackiewicz (curator of the Collection of Iconography and Photography at the NationalMuseum in Warsaw)
Adam Mazur (independent curator and researcher; paper on the photo collections at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź and National Museum in Breslau)
Wojciech Nowicki (freelance photographer, curator, and journalist; paper on Photography Museum in Cracow)
Ulrich Pohlmann (head of the Photography Department at the Stadtmuseum, Munich)
Mark Robbins (executive director at the International Center of Photography, New York)
Viktoria Tolpegina (international project manager, RosPhoto, Sankt Petersburg)
Matthew Witkovsky (head of the Department of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago)

Executive Organizer: Archaeology of Photography Foundation, Warsaw

Concept: Karolina Ziębińska-Lewandowska

Project financed by the National Centre for Culture within the framework of the Culture – Interventions programme

More information about the proceedings of the meeting here.

Partners:

Media partnership:

Download the full seminar nota (PDF, 473 Kb)

Information for press:

Anna Micińska anna.micinska@gmail.com,

Tel. +48 605 937 627

Developed in the frame of the INDICATE Project, the document details the future priorities of Digital Cultural Heritage in the coming years

The Paris Declaration for the progress of the Digital Cultural Heritage

INDICATE Strategy and future plan workshop, which was held in Paris on 7th of June 2012, gave the opportunity to exchange on good practices and collaborations between the digital culture heritage sector and einfrastructures, and to give common trails for further cooperation.

This workshop highlighted that digital cultural heritage sector and e-infrastructures have common interests in working closely together, in Europe and beyond. It generates positive impacts:

for e-infrastructures: the adoption of the e-Infrastructures by the digital cultural heritage community will open new scenarios of use and exploitation
for the DCH community: cultural managers will access services provided by e-infrastructures such as storage, preservation, access services for the cultural institutions, etc.
for the research community: they will benefit from new advanced services and application
for other related sectors: digital cultural content will become more usable and re-usable for education, cultural tourism, long-life learning, non-professional cultural interests, creative industry, etc.

The Paris workshop pointed out the importance of fostering international cooperation between digital cultural heritage and e-infrastructures, and with other networks in target regions: the Mediterranean region (Egypt, Turkey and Jordan), China and South America.

One of the main results of this work is the preparation and signature by all partners of the Paris Declaration, developed in cooperation with DC-NET and Linked Heritage projects.

Conceived during the Strategy and future plans workshop and amended during the final INDICATE Conference in Ankara (15th-16th October 2012), this document is a shared vision of the INDICATE network of interest for the progress of Digital Cultural Heritage in future years. It is a legacy of the project, where the partners commit to support collaboration between cultural heritage, ICT and einfrastructures stakeholders, and it details the future priorities and commitments of the network beyond the lifetime of INDICATE.

The shared vision of the INDICATE network is that in ten years’ time, access and use of digital cultural heritage will be available to all and that collaboration with the e-Infrastructures community will facilitate realisation of this vision.

Download the full text of the Paris Declaration.

Sign the Paris Declaration.

Jerusalem, 12-13 November 2013

Xth Annual International Event for Professionals in Cultural Heritage and Advanced Technologies

On the 12-13 November 2013, at the Jerusalem’s Van Leer Institute, was held the Xth EVA/MINERVA Annual International Event for Professionals in Cultural Heritage and Advanced Technologies, focused on advanced technologies and the preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage through education and training in information and communication technologies (ICT). Scholars from all-over-the-world were invited to share their latest projects with the colleagues with a seven-minutes spot-light.

Present in the Steering Commitee: the National Library of Israel Jerusalem, the Israel State Archive, the Israel Antiquites Authority, the Ministry of Culture and Sports Directorate for Culture, the Department for Museums and Visual Arts, the Department of Public Libraries Israel Film Archive, the Yad Vashem – Holocaust Remembrance Authority, the Council for Public Libraries, the Ministry of Education Israel National Commission for UNESCO, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Division for Scientific and Cultural Agreements, the Forum for Preservation of Multimedia Heritage in Israel, ICOM Israel – the International Council of Museums, MALMAD – Israel Center for Digital Information Services, MEITAL – the Israel Universities Center for Learning Technologies, the Jewish Agency for Israel, Pais Council for Arts and Culture, the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.

EAGLE, the Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy, was presented at the conference by the Project Coordinator Silvia Orlandi from DigiLab, the newly formed Centre for Research on Digital Arts and Humanities of Rome’s Sapienza University.

EAGLE is a Best Practice Network, co-funded by the European Commission, that brings together the most prominent European institutions and archives in the field of Classical Latin and Greek epigraphy, in order to provide Europeana with a comprehensive collection of unique historical sources which constitute a veritable pillar of European culture. EAGLE’s important target is developing a single user-friendly portal to the inscriptions of the Ancient World, a massive resource for both the curious and the scholarly.

For more information:

http://www.digital-heritage.org.il/

http://www.digital-heritage.org.il/about.html

Eagle Project Official Website

Eagle Showcase on Digitalmeetsculture

Download an abstract about Eagle project here

In september, big events at LAM in Vilnius (Lithuania)

Lithuanian Art Museum, conference and exhibition about photography

LAM is a national museum based in Vilnius, originally founded in 1933; it is distinguished for its rich fine arts collection that totals about 230.000 items representing historic and contemporary master paintings, sculpture, prints and drawings, applied and folk art as well rare amber stone and jewellery specimens and other museum objects.

The museum takes an active role in regularly organizing exhibitions and cultural events.

On September 10th 2013 at the Chodkeviciai Palace took place the opening of a travelling exhibition of old Lithuanian photographs, that also featured a press conference and the participation of the EuropeanaPhotography team partners. In facts, LAM is a project partner of digitization and Europeana feeder project EuropeanaPhotography, and within this project it is going to digitize and make available for all European citizen over 20.000 ancient Lithuanian photographs – including portraits, art, cityscape, anthropology, history of Lithuanian cities, ethnography, collections of old photo ateliers.

For this reason, LAM was chosen to host the third plenary meeting of EuropeanaPhotography project, that took place on 9 and 10 September.

In connection with the opening of the photo exhibition, there was also a cultural matinee in the LAM venue of the Vytautas Kasiulis Art Museum, on the 11th, featuring an international conference about “Photographic memory and digitization” with speeches of professor Frederik Truyen (KU Leuven), John Balean (TopFoto and CEPIC committee member), Danutė Mukienė (LAM), Antonella Fresa (Promoter) and many other interesting Lithuanian and international speakers. Here below the full programme:

Conference “Photographic memory and digitisation”

Date: 11th September 2013

Venue: LAM, Arsenalo st. 3A

9:30 – 10:00 Registration

10:00 – 10:15 Introduction (LAM)

10:15 – 10:35 Frederik Truyen (KU Leuven) “Images, memories and representations in the EuropeanaPhotography collection. The curated digital image as a premier witness to our shared history”.

10:35 – 10:55 Emanuela Sesti (Alinari) “Photoarchive: Photography, Memory and creative impulse for Art”.

11:00 – 11:20 John Balean (TopFoto) “History, created and rediscovered by Press Photography 1842-1939”.

11:20 – 11:40 Danutė Mukienė (LAM) “The value of collections of old photographs at Lithuanian museums in the process of documention of restoration of Lithuanian Statehood”

12:00 – 12.20 Margarita Matulytė (LAM) “Writing the history of Lithuanian photography”

12:20 – 12.40 Stanislovas Žvirgždas (Lithuania) “The old Lithuanian photographic publications and albums”

12.40 – 13.30 lunch break

13:30 – 13.50 Anna Grusková (Theatre Institute of Bratislava) “The Secret of Theatre to be Discovered in Old Photographs”.

13:50 – 14.10 Antonella Fresa (Promoter) “The creative re-use of digital cultural content”

14:10 – 14.30 Discussions, questions

15.30 Trip to Kernavė for speakers and foreign guests

Download the conference note (English language): PDF, 226 Kb

Conference presentation: English language here; Lithuanian language here.

Indianapolis (USA), 27 September 2013

Science Gateway Institute Workshop at IEEE Cluster 2013 Conference

Sciencegateway.org organised a Science Gateway Institute workshop co-located with IEEE Cluster 2013 conference held in September 27, 2013 in Indianapolis, IN, USA.

Papers will be co-publishing in a special issue of Concurrency and Computation, Practice and Experience (http://www.cc-pe.net/journalinfo/) together with selected papers presented at the International Workshop on Science Gateways 2013 (http://www.amiando.com/iwsg2013.html).

Science Gateways

A Science Gateway is a community-developed set of tools, applications, and data collections that are integrated through a web portal or a suite of applications. Gateways can provide access to many things – a highly-tuned parallel application running on a supercomputer, a remote instrument like a telescope or electron microscope, a curated data collection, tools to create workflows and visualizations linking these different resources and collaborative venues to discuss results, share curricula and presentations and more. Gateways enable not only researchers with a common scientific goal but also students and members of the community more generally by providing access to top-tier resources.

As cyberinfrastructure becomes increasingly complex and the most difficult scientific problems depend on advanced digital resources, researchers are turning to gateways to improve their efficiency. Gateway developers typically have few venues for exchanging experiences. While there is much that is common in gateway development across domains, often work is done in many different vacuums, where one group does not benefit from developments in another.

Europe needs a e-Infrastructure Commons for knowledge, science and innovation.

e-IRG’s White Paper 2013 published

A 2012 e-IRG Roadmap outlined a vision for the future of e-Infrastructures in Europe. Now, the e-IRG has published its 2013 White Paper, which takes the discussion one step further and proposes specific next steps.

The main focus of the 2013 White Paper is the integration of services for research communities and interoperability and coordination of e-Infrastructures. Follow-up aspects are Open Science, data management, big data, cloud computing and legal issues that arise from the commercial use of e-Infrastructures.

To meet the challenges of implementing the 2020 Strategy, Europe needs an “e-Infrastructure Commons” for knowledge, science and innovation. It should be open and accessible, and continuously adapting to the changing requirements of research and to new technological opportunities.

Available e-Infrastructure resources as well as the conditions for access vary strongly between countries. This limits the ability of universities and research institutes to collaborate with each other and with commercial researchers. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a European “e-Infrastructure Commons”: a flexible and dynamic ecosystem, providing integrated services through interoperable infrastructures.

A centrally managed e-Infrastructure is not a solution. Instead, there is a need for a joint strategic effort involving users, providers, and funding agencies, leading to a high degree of coordination without stifling innovation. The e-IRG White Paper 2013 outlines a number of steps towards this objective. These steps focus mainly on changes in organisation, governance and funding; an important element is the empowerment of end-users through changes in funding mechanisms.

Download the final e-IRG White Paper 2013.

Additional information, including the long version of the White Paper and the comments is available at: http://www.e-irg.eu/publications/white-papers.html

An article about the project has just been published on the Italian magazine Archeomatica

Linked Heritage, dissemination goes on

Archeomatica is an Italian magazine focused on technologies applied in the field of cultural heritage, and beside a very lively website, it features a tri-monthly paper newsletter, also available on line.

Archeomatica aims to publish papers of significant and lasting value written by scientists, conservators and archaeologists, and to disseminate information about new methodologies and experimental results.

The best up-to-date scientific applications and the exchange of ideas and findings are highlighted in this magazine, that is written in Italian but also hosts English, French and Spanish articles.

The issue n. 21 (March 2013) includes as “guest paper” a wide overview about Linked Heritage.

The article, in English language, was written by dr. Antonella Fresa and dr. Claudio Prandoni, the Technical Coordination of the project.

The article is available here on OJS platform: http://www.mediageo.it/ojs/index.php/archeomatica/article/view/151/240

Download the article (PDF, 271 Kb)

Read the full newsletter on-line at http://www.mediageo.it/ojs/index.php/archeomatica/issue/view/26/showToc

More information at www.archeomatica.it

The Knowledge Management Institute (KMI) is involved in the CULTURA project

Technology University of Graz disseminating CULTURA

Graz University of Technology in Austria pursues top teaching and research and many of its branches are involved in EU projects. It also co-operates with partner universities and extra-university facilities within the framework of international networks.

The Knowledge Management Institute (KMI), which is involved in the CULTURA project under the acronym TUG, is one of in total eight institutes of the Faculty of Computer Science.

The main interests of TUG in CULTURA are centred on evaluation and adaptivity. Regarding evaluation a main task of TUG is the elaboration and refinement of a sound methodological framework for the evaluation of the CULTURA core intelligent services and adaptive user community environment for the realisation of adaptive cultural experiences. This includes methodologies of user-centred evaluation as well as the investigation of the scientific soundness of the theoretical approaches underlying adaptivity in CULTURA (Social Network Analysis, Natural Language Processing).

Beside the core-activity related to project progress and achievements, the TUG team is doing a very important work of dissemination. Very recently, in particular, CULTURA was represented in 2 very valuable workshops (German language) related to humanities.

First event was the interdisciplinary symposium ‘Bairisch-österreichische Dialektkulturen vor 1800‘, which was organised by the Dialect Cultures project in conjunction with the ‘Humanities Day’ at the University of Graz, 20-21 June 2013. In this occasion Alexander Nussbaumer discussed about CULTURA as an example research environment for digital cultural heritage collections. During the symposium, the attention was focused on dialect culture, with reference to potential further development and evaluation of the Dialect Cultures database.

Shortly after this event, there was another valuable lecture at the University, in cooperation with the Center for Information Modelling in the Humanities, on 25 June 2013; CULTURA was presented during in an introductory lecture on basics of information technology for humanities. The two digital collections used in CULTURA (1641 Depositions and IPSA collection) were introduced and both instances of the CULTURA environment were demonstrated as a showcase for information modeling in the humanities.

On 18th and 19th of July 2013, Linked Heritage will be presented at the 67th edition of the Festival

Linked Heritage presented at the Festival of Avignon

On 18th and 19th of July 2013, Linked Heritage will be presented at the European encounters organised in the framework of the Festival d’Avignon, one of the major European events in the field of artistic creation which brings together a lot of professionals and cultural operators from all cultural and artistic fields.

Individual dissemination meetings will be organised with key actors of non heritage fields, Universities and High Schools in order to present the project results and to ask them to disseminate its results.

Activities will include:

Individual Meetings: Director of the cluster for cultural industries and heritage of PACA Region, Director of the Ecole d’Avignon, French Regional Agencies for Culture.
Networking Activities: clustering with local authorities, professional European networks, regional agencies for culture, representatives of national authorities, etc.
Dissemination of Linked Heritage communication material during the events (debates, professional meetings, info points, “Maison des professionnel”, etc.)

For more information about the Festival visit http://www.festival-avignon.com.