Digital meets Culture

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.

CULTURA was one of the examples cited during the prestigious Conference in Dublin

CULTURA at the EU Irish Presidency Conference

An international conference ‘Use, Re-Use and Access’ was held in Dublin Castle on 17 June 2013.

Hosted by the Irish Presidency of the European Union and by the Local Government Management Agency, the conference attracted an international audience of cultural heritage and memory institutions and numerous representatives of Irish local and national memory institutions.

The conference was opened by Irish Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, Fergus O’Dowd, followed by a video message from Mrs. Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission. Among the key-note speakers, the Conference included Javier Hernandez-Ros, the Head of Unit ‘Creativity’ at the Commission, Frederic Bokobza of the French Ministry of Culture and Lord David Puttnam, Digital Ambassador for Ireland.

During the plenary session, Ciaran Clissmann from Pintail Ltd, partner of CULTURA, surveyed recent web and smartphone developments in the mainstream, and how they can offer appealing approaches to solving persistent digitization challenges.

CULTURA was mentioned as one of the projects which is actively contributing to the research in this field. The full presentation is available for download here.

Medelhavsmuseet will digitally place human mummies on a virtual autopsy table and derive 3D models for interactive visualization.

Mummies virtually unwrapped in Sweden

Medelhavsmuseet – the Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm will digitally place human mummies on a virtual autopsy table. The work is taking place in advance of a new exhibition on Egypt, which is due to open in 2014 at Medelhavsmuseet.

Six of the museum’s mummies were x-rayed using the CT scanner at Linköping University Hospital, in the framework of a collaboration with Interactive Institute Swedish ICT, Visualization Center C and CMIV in Norrköping/Linköping.

photo Medelhavsmuseet

The project is based on current research within visualisation and interaction design, and its goal is to connect research and cultural history with the help of the latest technology, in the form of interactive visualisation.

“Using the table we can describe the individual’s health and fate, the mummification process and the ancient Egyptians’ assumptions about the life thereafter.” said Sofia Häggman, Egyptologist at Medelhavsmuseet.

photo Medelhavsmuseet

3D digital models will be generated by compiling data from photos and X-ray scans for the mummies and their associated sarcophagi. By combining the very latest techniques in computed tomography, laser scanning and photogrammetry, the user experience will be upgraded to an incredible level of realism. It will be possible to zoom into very high resolution to see details like carving marks on a sarcophagus, and the true colors of the mummy. The 3D model also allows to “unwrap” a mummy by peeling off virtual layers of the wrapping to explore the mummy itself and the artifacts that were buried with the body.

“We can literately create a virtual copy of the mummy. This version could be shared with other museums, be used for research or be part of an interactive visitor experience,” said Thomas Rydell of the Swedish Interactive Institute. “In this project we are working with mummies, but the same methods could of course be used on large variety of objects, such as natural history objects and other historical artefacts.”

photo Medelhavsmuseet

The museum’s mummies are of great interest to the general public, and are the focus of many visits, by adults and children alike. With the help of the visualisation table, originally developed for healthcare, the museum visitors will be able to discover the mummies in detail, easily and intuitively investigate complex data, which would normally only be available to researchers. It is already planned for the spring of 2014 a permanent exhibition of ancient Egyptian civilization, including the 3D digital models of the mummies.

“The technology will enable our visitors to gain a deeper understanding of the men and women inside the mummy wrappings,” said Elna Nord, producer of the exhibition. “Layer by layer, the visitor can unwrap the mummy and gain knowledge of the individual’s sex, age, living conditions and beliefs. With help from the technology, the mummies become so much stronger mediators of knowledge of our past.”

More:

http://www.varldskulturmuseerna.se/en/medelhavsmuseet/exhibitions/upcoming-exhibitions/egypt-2014/mummies-on-a-virtual-autopsy-table/

http://www.best-news.us/news-4805588-Mummy-3d-models-reveal-his-true-colors-Figure.html

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/Technology/2013/07/01/Swedish-museum-to-let-visitors-virtually-unwrap-mummies/UPI-27241372713494/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23045904