Digital meets Culture

CULTURA project is delivering its results, to make historical and cultural heritage more accessible

Adaptive, personalised ICT to make new sense of the past

CULTURA project is approaching its final rush, as the project is ending in February 2014. A brilliant publication recently appeared on the CORDIS website, to disseminate the results, the concept and the objectives of the CULTURA platform.

‘Cultivating understanding and research through adaptivity’ (CULTURA) project has the final aim and benefit to develop tools that will make Europe’s cultural and historical heritage more accessible, especially in relation to research mechanisms and navigation in digital collections and archives.

In facts, navigation may not be very simple when dealing with wide digital collections, and researchers are often forced into a laborious and time-consuming process of decrypting texts and correlating names, concepts and dates to create an understandable overall picture.

Dr Owen Conlan

Dr Owen Conlan, Trinity College’s School of Computer Science and Statistics and CULTURA project coordinator, provides the example of the “1641 Depositions”, a fundamental document for the history of Ireland that includes 8000 witness testimonies of the rebellion by Irish Catholics. The 20.000 pages of texts present repeated references to Phelim O’Neil, that is also known in the depositions under different names and spellings (Sir Felim O’Neill of Kinard, Phelim MacShane O’Neill, Féilim Ó Néill) or referred to simply as ‘the rebel’.

‘When looking at historical material a lot of information is not immediately obvious, there can be many ambiguities and inconsistencies, so what are needed are processes that can dig out that information and find those non-obvious references,’ explains Dr Conlan.

The ICT can do much of this hard work, and the tools available thanks to the CULTURA environment provide language normalization and analyze the connections between entities and relationships within the content, thus helping in placing historical events and figures in context, so that it is easier to visualize and comprehend them.

CULTURA solution is extremely effective also with image based online collections such as the Imaginum Patavinae Scientiae Archivum (IPSA), that is a digital archive of herbalists’ manuscripts and illustrations with Latin language commentaries, currently located at the University of Padua (in facts, one of the partners of the project, with the Department of Informatics Engineering). ‘Using our social-network analysis, we can see, for example, who drew which illustrations, who financed them and what other illustrations they were influenced by’, explains Dr Conlan.

This system is a very powerful resource for research, but it also will make cultural and historical heritage more accessible thanks to user profile personalization process that develops dynamic storylines, generating an easy to follow narrative for any user, which adapts dynamically to the user’s profile and usage history.

‘Historical resources should not only be accessible to university professors and researchers, but to many different types of people, from school and university students to historical societies and interest groups and members of the general public,’ Dr Conlan emphasizes. ‘One of the biggest challenges digital collections face is accessibility and awareness – CULTURA goes a long way towards addressing these issues.’

And he adds: ‘In particular, we want to connect stories to real people in the documents because they’re the most compelling entities, it’s a way to draw users’ interest into otherwise abstract events and put them into a much clearer frame of context.’

There are plans for CULTURA project to expand also to other on line repositories, for example those of the Irish 1916 Easter Uprising, and to look for to commercialization and re-use of different parts of the technology that compose the system.

Read the whole article on CORDIS website.

Speakers from different countries and backgrounds provided their experience and knowledge-exchange

Photography – Museum narratives: a valuable conference

During the recent seminar held in Warsaw (14-15 October 2013), many interesting speeches and presentations analyzed the role of photography in the museums and its development, also in the framework of the digital cultural heritage.

Organized by the Archeology of Photography Foundation, the National Museum in Warsaw and the national Institute of Museology and Collections protection, the seminar included a panel of international speakers.

Jaroslav Anděl, artistic director at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague talked about the creation of photography collections; Tamara Berghmans, curator and researcher at FotoMuseum in Antwerp, described the approach for upcoming redefinition of the museum, basing on what the FoMu is today and what it intends to become. François Cheval, curator-at-large at Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Chalon-sur-Saône, discussed about the path a photograph goes through to become iconic.

Interesting speeches and unusual perspectives were the ones provided by few American speakers: Quentin Bajac, chief curator of Photography Department at MOMA Museum of Modern Art, NY, analyzed the work of John Szarkowski, photographer and for 30 years curator at MOMA; the speech especially focused on his exhibition and acquisition program, and intended also to assess the topicality of his legacy today.

Another remarkable speech was the one by Virginia Heckert, curator of Photography Department at the Getty Museum, LA, who discussed the theme “creating Contexts for photography at the Getty Museum”. It was interesting to learn the contextualization and cooperation opportunities that raise inside the Museum and the Getty Research Institute.

Matthew Witkovsky, head of the Department of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, reviewed the various homes occupied by photographs at the Museum, thus telling the history and expansion of the collection. Mark Robbins, executive director at the International Center of Photography, New York, highlighted the results of the recent triennial exhibition held at ICP, including photography, film, video and new media to variously represent different social and political orders.

Other interesting stories came from different experiences: Danuta Jackiewicz, curator of the Collection of Iconography and Photography at National Museum in Warsaw; Adam Mazur, independent curator and researcher involved in Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź and National Museum in Breslau. Antonella Fresa widely talked about the EuropeanaPhotography project as a best practice example of ancient photography dealing with digital technologies (download the presentation, PDF, 1.35 MB).

Martijn van den Broek, head of the Collections Department at the Netherlands FotoMuseum in Rotterdam, described some peculiarities of the Museum’s collections (e.g. this museum holds the copyright of almost its entire collection) and the attention given to young photographers. He also discussed other interesting issues such as content selection, the role of negatives, the digital-born works.

Moreover, Viktoria Tolpegina, presented RosPhoto, a unique centre of photography in Saint Petersburg, the cultural capital of Russia; Wojciech Nowicki talked about the Photography Museum in Krakow while Ulrich Pohlmann, head of the Photography Department, described the recent history of the Stadtmuseum in Munich.

“Bringing together an array of internationally renowned speakers, the conference provided ample platform for debate and creative comparison”, said Karolina Ziębińska-Lewandowska of Archeology of Photography Foundation, organizer and curator of the event, “The purpose of the session is to review and discuss the history of photography collections and museums which have had a significant impact on photography is defined today in the museum context, how it is collected (and not), what divisions are applied to it, and what changes are occurring in these areas.”

[Show as slideshow]

Seminar in Rome with representatives from policy and institutions

The digital cultural heritage towards Horizon 2020

On 8^th October 2013 in Rome, a valuable seminar was held at the premises of Istituto Luigi Sturzo, to discuss the importance of culture and cultural heritage, and the need to valorize it with an user-centered approach. The seminar was organized by AICI (Italian Cultural Institutions Association), Istituto Sturzo, CNR (Italian National Research Council), EMA (European Museum Academy), and Fondazione Luigi Micheletti.

Central topic of the debate is the importance of designing and sustaining research and policy in order to valorize the potential of digital cultural heritage, also for stimulating a new-born cultural industry that will foster economic growth and occupation. The cultural heritage is the basis of such industry and Italian entrepreneurship, that joins an incomparable cultural richness with advanced digital technologies.

The event was divided in two sessions; the first one was dedicated to the policy, highlighting the decisions by Italian Government and Parliament related to the central role of culture for the economic recovery in Italy, and also in Europe. Important institutional speakers from the Ministries and the Parliament, representatives from industry, research and EC were present and animated a valuable dialogue.

The second session was dedicated to the digital content Aggregators and to the research infrastructures in the sector of SSH (Social Science and Humanities) and cultural heritage, to share objectives and to develop an operative roadmap towards an Extraordinary Plan for Digitization of cultural heritage, in line with the recommendations of the Digital Agenda for Europe and Italy.

While attending this debate, it was a good occasion for dissemination of few EU projects i.e. Linked Heritage, DCH-RP and EuropeanaPhotography, that are all related to such an important topic.

Official Program, Italian language (PDF, 464 Kb)

an international network of high-profile institutions actively involved in the creation and publication of digital scholarly editions.

DiXiT project launched

On 30th September and 1st October in Rome, the kick off meeting of project DiXiT was held at the premises of Sapienza University in Rome.

DiXiT 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.

Digital scholarly editing represents one of the most important branches of Digital Humanities. Theories, concepts and practices designed for editing in a digital environment have deeply influenced the development of Digital Humanities as a discipline. The achievements shown by recent digital scholarly editions demonstrate some of the potential for innovation in the digital medium including their openness and exploratory nature. These projects have developed a very wide range of editorial products.

DiXiT offers a coordinated training and research programme for 12 early stage researchers and 5 experienced researchers in the multi-disciplinary skills, technologies, theories, and methods of digital scholarly editing.

The consortium is composed of important universities as full partners, coordinated by University of Cologne, plus associated partners that provide valuable scientists in charge.

DiXiT is funded under Marie Curie Actions within the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme and runs from September 2013 until August 2017.

Official website: dixit.uni-koeln.de

EuropeanaPhotography disseminated to a professional audience

Archives and libraries to discuss management software

A round table on the theme “OPEN (RE)SOURCE, valorizing e integrating the cultural heritage” has been held in Turin, organized by the heritage agency Promemoria in collaboration with Teatro Regio Torino.

The event saw the participation and speeches by many representatives of archives and libraries such as Simone Solinas (Archivio Storico Teatro Regio), Antonella Lavazza (Archivio Storico Lavazza), Eugenio Pacchioli (Associazione Archivio Storico Olivetti), Maurizio Torchio (Archivio e Centro Storico Fiat), Danilo Craveia (Progetto Centro Rete Biellese Archivi Tessili e Moda), Bruno Chiesa and Maria Luisa Russo (Archivio Paul Kahle Università degli Studi di Torino), Anna Scudellari (Progetto Archivio Storico Camera Penale Vittorio Chiusano).

The round table was the occasion to disseminate EuropeanaPhotography to the participants, all belonging to the cultural heritage sector.

The discussion was started from the presentation of Collective Access, an open source software management system specifically dedicated to museums, libraries, archives. This software is currently in use at important international research centers, university and cultural institutions such as the School of Visual Art of New York, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, Musée Rodin in Paris, the Computerspielemuseum and the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, the Instituut voor Oorlogs-Holocaust-en Genocidestudies in Amsterdam.

During the event it was presented Kollectium, a new content ecommerce site promoting the made in Italy from the most important Italian photographic companies. Each company involved in the portal supply around 20 masterpiece images that can be order and printed remotely on high quality and in an attractive frame. An interesting form of exploitation of digital cultural heritage.

An interesting session on employment at Lu.Be.C.

Creative re-use of digital cultural content and private-public-partnerships

Promoter participated to LuBeC 2013 with a presentation (PDF, italian language) of dr. Antonella Fresa about the creative re-use of digital cultural content and best practice for private-public-partnerships.

The presentation starts from the consideration that the amount of Digital Cultural Heritage is very large and constantly growing, thanks to the digitization programmes that both private and public content holders are carrying on since the last 10 years. The return on investment should be assessed against the impact delivered to society both in terms of the use of digital cultural heritage content and services by researchers, teachers, students and more in general the European citizens, and in terms of its use by the economic actors, most particularly the creative industries.

Creative industries includes a wide range of businesses, from multi-national corporations to small and micro-business. They are a complex sector: although 80% are small and micro enterprises, the total business share of the SMEs is only 18%; while the 1% of large-scale enterprises generates 40% of the annual sector turnover. However, the comprehension and the engagement with creative industries is a key factor since they represent a fundamental ring in the development of the “Cultural Heritage–Technology– Reuse” value chain.

Still, a number of barriers exists that makes difficult to unlock in full the potential that can derive from the re-use of digital cultural heritage, among which: lack of clear licensing of digital public domain works, lack of good discovery mechanisms, lack of awareness amongst cultural institutions about the value of their digital assets.

Increasing the exploitation of the digital cultural content available is therefore possible only by engaging into a close and factual dialogue content holders, creative enterprises and end users with the final aim to create and support new products and to eventually boost opportunities for employment and economic growth.

The speech of Dr. Fresa introduced two best practice projects that see the partnership of Promoter in the role of Technical Coordinator. The two projects are Europeana Photography and Europeana Space (under negotiation expected to start at the beginning of 2014). They are supported by the European Commission in the frame of the Competitiveness and Innovation Programme to contribute to the development of Europeana, the European digital library.

The presentation of Promoter was scheduled in the second session of Focus Employment that took place on the 18^th October, h. 9.30-13.00, featuring discussion on the theme “Cultural heritage and ICT: digital interactivity for the cultural attractors”.

Download the presentation in PDF here

A personalised learning environment consisting of a series of learning objects aimed at key audiences in the cultural heritage sector.

Linked Heritage training programme

In the frame of Linked Heritage, a comprehensive training programme has been designed and developed by the University of Padova with the help and contribution of all the partners.

The Linked Heritage Learning Objects were produced thanks to the support of music composers and performers, multimedia project experts, young geeks, photographers, camera operators, set designers and illustrators who gave the project their talents, availability and work for free.

The following user groups were identified as representative of the specific category of users whom to target the training modules:

cultural institution managers and decision-makers as potential Europeana content providers:
teachers, educators, scholars who could benefit from the exploitation of Europeana content;
Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals, entry-level students and museum, library and archive technicians who need to be constantly up-to-date with the development of digital libraries (self-taught and lifelong learners);
market players from the private sector.

Here below is the full list of the Learning Objects produced in the frame of Linked Heritage:

1. Persistent Identifiers: What if?

This Learning object consists of two parts: on the left of the screen, a dialogue between two owlets introducing PIDs and, on the right of the screen, a video showing the concepts. Each PID functional requirement is represented by a visual metaphor associated with a musical metaphor: uniqueness, persistency, resolvability, reliability, authoritativeness, flexibility, interoperability and cost effectiveness.

Persistent Identifiers: What if? is available in the following languages: English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Sweden and Spanish.

2. Digitisation Life Cycle

This learning object presents the digitisation workflow both in theory and in practice. The first part gives an overview of the entire digitisation workflow based on the digitisation guidelines of the University of Padova Library System provided by the Phaidra working group. The second section focuses on a case study of the University of Padova the “Botanists portrait collection”. The case study is illustrated by two videos showing the preservation of items and digitisation.

Digitisation Life Cycle is available in the following languages: English, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Swedish, Spanish.

3. MINT Services

The Linked Heritage aggregation methodology and the mapping workflow in MINT – the technological platform developed by the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) – is thoroughly described along the learning object. The user can follow step by step the mapping workflow by means of a sequence of screencasts. Furthermore the learning object gives practical tips to technicians dealing with specific mapping activities as for example how to set metadata and digital object rights in MINT. The learning object is enriched by the training materials and further readings.

MINT Services is available in the following languages: English, Spanish and Swedish.

4. Why and how to contribute to Europeana

Why and how to contribute to Europeana describes the motivations for which cultural heritage institutions should contribute to Europeana. It also examines the University of Padova experience. The learning object contains the description of our Atheneum’s main technical steps, the workflow and some administrative information.

Why and how to contribute to Europeana is available in English and Sweden.

5. Persistent Identifiers: Commercial and heritage views

This LO describes a series of case studies on persistent identification presented by Linked Heritage partners led by EDItEUR. These studies point out the differences and similarities between the commercial media and cultural heritage sectors.

Persistent Identifiers: Commercial and heritage views is available in English, Greek and Swedish.

6. Terminology

This tutorial explains the following subjects in a simple and practical way: the notion of terminologies and their importance in enhancing digital content; step by step guidelines on how to improve your vocabulary on the world wide web; an introduction to the terminology management platform (TMP); an introduction to the Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS); an overview of the most recent literature and websites.

Terminology is available in English.

7. Public-Private Partnership with Europeana

This learning object presents an overview of the “state of play” for trade companies wishing to offer their product data to Europeana, with pointers to freely-available tools and documents contributed by EDItEUR to support this process as part of the Linked Heritage.

It describes: what Europeana is and does; why it may be valuable to the commercial sector; any relevant legal questions; technical services available to support collaboration.

Public-Private Partnership with Europeana is available in Bulgarian, English, Spanish and Swedish.

8. Linking cultural heritage information

This Learning object focuses on the current structure of the Linked data Cloud – the best known representation of linked data and on the benefits for the cultural heritage institutions. Thanks to Linked data – especially Linked Open Data – they can enrich knowledge and improve their visibility on the web.

Linking cultural heritage information is available in English.

Click here to access the Linked Heritage Virtual e-Learning Environment.

Click here to see the article published on the Europeana blog.

A technical platform implemented in Linked heritage to input, organize and map terminologies.

Improved search and higher-quality metadata through terminology management

Each cultural institution provides some thousands of object descriptions in its own languages using its own terminologies. These terminologies need to be expressed according to the principles of the Semantic Web in order to enable the user to better understand the content.

There is a rather large gap between the current way to deal with terminologies in cultural institutions, and the skills and means necessary to exploit the potentiality of an effective terminology management.

The implementation of a technical platform for terminology management shall help cultural institutions to input, organise and map their in-house terminologies with other thesauri and consequently it will help them to enrich their metadata records so that they offer the maximum value.

One of the major result of Linked Heritage is the Terminology Management Platform. The demontstrator, which has been developed according to all the requirements and expected functionnalities gathered during the project, offers a set of tools for manipulating any kind of terminology. Even if the TMP is thesaurus-oriented , simple lists of terms or ontologies can be imported within the TMP anf then be mapped to the SKOS model. As the TMP is addressing professionnals from the GLAM sector, many efforts have been given in order to provide an intuitive interface.

The Terminology Management Platform is available at http://www.culture-terminology.org

Furthermore, all the recommendations and guidelines on terminology management and SKOS have been collected in a booklet “Your terminology as a part of the semantic Web, recommendations for design and management” that can be distributed in printed handbook or downloaded online.

A demonstrator developed in the frame of the Linked Heritage Best Practice Network

Linking Cultural Heritage Information

Linked data is seen as the enabling technology of the ‘Semantic Web’. Sir Tim Berners-Lee described this not just:

“… about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data. With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data.”

The Linking Open Data Cloud (2011 version) diagram contains an impressive 311 ‘packages’ (collections of triples) of linked data showing the links between them and the sectors they are coming from. The research conducted by Linked Heritage project in to the details of these packages ‘lifted the lid’ to find a few significant and interesting facts:

Linked data is not always ‘open’ (57.4% of packages were not open licensed for re-use, 69.1% of triple were not open)
Cultural heritage is largely absent for the Cloud (CH packages only represent c5% of the packages)
Most of the links are to limited number of packages (the great majority of links were to DBpedia, GeoNames Semantic Web and Freebase)

All this led to a set of reccommendations that can be summarised as follows:

Any publication of linked data must be accompanied by a licence which makes it clear what uses can be made of the data.
The licence may be standard, e.g. provided by Creative Commons, or one created specifically by the publisher.
Not to create a proprietary format which is only intended to be used for your package;
Use standard format(s) appropriate for the type of data being published.
Consider using a cultural heritage specific format for linked data. Possible candidate formats, ones based on: EDM, CIDOC CRM, and LIDO.
Link to packages, of a general nature, which are often linked to: DBpedia; GeoNames Semantic Web; national sources of terminology (e.g. UK Postcodes);
Link to known packages in the cultural heritage, e.g.: Library of Congress Subject Headings; VIAF: The Virtual International Authority File; and Dewey Decimal Classification);
Provide a SPARQL endpoint to the package.

All this advice Linked Heritage followed in the Linked data demonstrator.

The project was able to publish a limited set of its metadata, initially from the UK Government Art collection and Photo Marburg, and latterly by packages from other partners. In the demonstrator it was possible to enable and illustrate an RDF graph and to enable a search which would not be possible from the original data, for example to carry out a query for artists born in Britain in the UK Government Art Collection (GAC) data. In the GAC data only the name of the artist is given not their country of origin. However by linking to GAC data to DBpedia data it is possible to answer this. Similar queries can also be envisaged, and this is one of the most powerful ‘selling points’ for linked data.

Pisa, 10 - 13 October 2013

Internet Festival 2013 Edition

For the Internet Festival, closed on 13th October, Incubator was the keyword for 2013.

The organizers have already published the first official data of the event:

60 countries directly or virtually represented; more than 23.000 devices connected (smartphones, pc, tablets); more than 20 locations and more than 200 expert speakers in more than 150 events; 62 laboratories, 26 panels; 18 keynote speeches.

More information available here (italian language)

The Festival explored how new information and communication technologies are like a soil capable of creating a fertile landscape for the development and growth of ideas, inventions, opportunities, products, services and start-ups, whilst also easing the current crisis, signalling the way for shared development and representing a sustainable future.
Entrepreneurs, institutions, venture capitalists, universities and research centres met and presented their projects and case histories over four days in around twenty venues across the city of Pisa.

The 2013 intense programme was based around the following subject areas:

I4C – INTERNET FOR CITIZENS

The objective of the citizens’ area is to pin down matters concerning social innovation, understood in terms of improving the quality of everyday life through the innovation of the Net. The topic of Smart Cities is to be considered from citizens’ points of view, who are both the users and the protagonists of the technological innovations changing daily life.

I4M – INTERNET FOR MAKERS

The objective of the Makers’ area was to explore the Net as an incubator for ideas and opportunities relating to work and the economy. It investigated how the web can become a vehicle for updating old business practices (which are traditionally offline) such as publishing, how Big Data can improve both new and old business practices and how the Net can create connections and relationships, which are both efficient and productive.

I4T – INTERNET FOR TELLERS

The objective of the Tellers’ area was to discuss the Net as an incubator for new information flow, generated from the mass of content poured into it. Managing this flow makes it possible to swiftly respond to potential ideas, suggest advertising, identify different target groups and be aware of public opinion and the general sentiment online.

VIDEO: Internet Festival 2013 – The digital revolution continues!

T-TOUR

The 2012 Internet Festival saw the extraordinary success of so-called T-Tours, that is, an educational and formative discovery of the Net for different age groups, competencies and interests.

SMARTUP

This year the Internet Festival introduced a new meeting point for businesses, designed not only to serve as a platform for networking, but to be a real incubator for new business opportunities and a fertile landscape for the germination of ideas.

EBOOKERIA

The book and e-book section was running creative and collective workshops as well as presentations of books and e-books that discuss the web, giving the internet careful thought and interacting with the subject in a variety of different ways.

Internet Festival is an initiative organized by Fondazione Sistema Toscana with the support of many valuable institutions.

Official website: http://www.internetfestival.it/?lang=en

Download the Press release of the Internet Festival here (italian language)

Download the Press release related to the meeting with Italian Ministry On. Carrozza here (italian language)

Download the Press release related to the session on the Smart Cities here (italian language)

Download the Press release related to the Big Data event here (italian language)