Digital meets Culture

Dr. Irene Pivetti (Chairmain of Only Italia) with Prof.Vito Cappellini (Florence University) (c) Promoter srl archive

The Foremost European Electronic Imaging Events in the Visual Arts

Electronic Imaging & the Visual Arts (EVA) @ Florence 2013

Electronic Imaging & the Visual Arts
‘The Foremost European Electronic Imaging Events in the Visual Arts’

The Electronic Information, the Visual Arts and Beyond (EVA Conferences) are a series of international interdisciplinary conferences mainly in Europe, but also elsewhere in the world, for people interested in the application of information technology to the cultural and especially the visual arts field.

The first EVA Conference was held at Imperial College, London in 1990, organized by the founders James Hemsley, Kirk Martinez and Anthony Hamber. Events have been held in Athens, Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, California, Cambridge [both UK & USA], Dallas, Delhi, Edinburgh, Florence, Gifu [Japan], Glasgow, Harvard, Jerusalem, Kiev, Laval, London, Madrid, Montreal, Moscow, New York, Paris, Prague, Thessaloniki, Warsaw … .

There are now regular conferences in London (UK), Berlin (Germany), Florence (Italy), Moscow (Russia), Vienna (Austria) and other major cities.

Dr. Irene Pivetti (Chairmain of Only Italia) with Prof.Vito Cappellini (Florence University) – photo (c) Promoter srl archive

The 2013 Florence conference was opened by chairmen Vito Cappellini (Florence University) and James Hemsley (EVA conferences international) and during the opening sponsors and supporters of Italian institutions welcomed the participants.

Session 1 about strategic issues with chairman Paolo Blasi (Florence University) was extremely interesting by discussing projects related to digital archives technologies, 3D technologies for museums, and futuristic projects for access and dissemination of culture and art supported by technology. Among the speakers, dr. Takayuki Morioka from Hitachi, prof. Shinji Shimojo from Osaka University, dr. Andreas Bienert from National Museum in Berlin.

Dr. Antonio Davide Madonna (ICCU) – photo by Leonardo Bianchi

Session 2, moderated by chairman Franco Niccolucci, gave an overview of EC projects and related networks and initiatives. Among the speakers, dr. Valentina Bachi, Andrea de Polo and Antonio Davide Madonna for EuropeanaPhotography, dr. Christine Schoene from Technische Universitat of Dresden, Professor Jurgen Siek from University of Applied Sciences in Berlin; also CENDARI and MARCOPOLO projects were presented.

On day 2, an international forum in the morning about culture and technology was followed by afternoon sessions to discuss about 2D-3D technologies and applications, virtual galleries, museums and related initiatives, access to the culture information.

In this event the users, suppliers and scientific research communities have the possibility to meet and exchange experiences, ideas and plans in the wide area of Culture & Technology. The event was supported by a series of workshops on international cooperation, innovation and enterprises, creative industries and cultural tourism.

EVA Florence 2013 official website: http://www.evaflorence.it/

Download the full programme here

[Show as slideshow]

It will allow users to consult all collections at once with the use of keywords in their own language.

Europeana Photography multilingual vocabulary, released and disseminated

According to the plans of the project, the EuropeanaPhotography multilingual vocabulary was timely released and it starts now to be disseminated in the community of digitization and Europeana-feeder projects.

The vocabulary defined within EuropeanaPhotography is a key element of the semantic enrichment of the partners’ metadata. While not strictly necessary for the digitization of photography or delivery to Europeana, this vocabulary ensures that themes can be traced throughout the different collections. It provides translations for the keywords associated with photographic subjects and techniques, and allows better and more complete search results when searching Europeana for photographic content, providing a tool for research for multiple interested parties.

The vocabulary has been completed in no less than 12 languages – English (as the pivotal language), French, Dutch, German, Italian, Polish, Danish, Bulgarian, Slovak, Lithuanian, Catalan and Spanish – and consists of over 500 concepts in three facets –photographic technique, photographic practice and keywords – that are structured in a multifaceted, hierarchical way.

The vocabulary will be used in the annotation, translation and semantically enrichment process taking place at the time of mapping local source metadata schema’s to the LIDO metadata schema used for the EuropeanaPhotography project. It will allow users to consult all collections at once with the use of keywords in their own language, and will unify the content from the different partners among thematic lines.

Discussions are on-going with other projects, in particular Linked Heritage, for improvement and further development of the EuropeanaPhotography Vocabulary, that can be a starting point for other valuable multilingual tools to enrich digitization activities (both for photography and for other cultural heritage).

In particular, Linked Heritage is developing a Terminology Management Platform (TMP) that will build a network of multilingual cross-domain thesauri and controlled vocabularies in a collaborative way. It is under discussion the integration of the TMP with EuropeanaPhotography Vocabulary.

During a very interesting seminar organized by Linked Heritage project, focused on Multilingualism and Terminology, Nacha Van Steen from KMKG was invited to publicly talk about the vocabulary (presentation here).

Institut national d'histoire de l'art (INHA) in Paris hosted a very focused seminar

Linked Heritage: Seminar on Multilingualism and Terminology

Multilingualism is crucial especially in a European context. Cultural institutions are dealing with thousands and thousands of digital content. European initiatives are developed in order to provide and promote the access to this digital cultural heritage which implicitely suggest a multilingual access to these collections. Cultural institutions are often using their own controlled vocabularies, thesaurus, classifications, ontologies or any kind of terminology. If European projects and initiatives are a way to bring together these different terminologiest, technologies of the Semantic Web with interoperable format such as SKOS (Simplified Knowledge Organisation System) are a way to enable multlingualism and a first step towards Linked Data.

The purpose of this seminar was to present national and European projects where the question of terminology and multilingualism is dealt with. Some projects create multilingual terminologies on very specific subjects, some others focus on the implementation of tools to create, manage and reuse these terminologies.

The seminar has presented one of the achievement of the Linked Heritage Work Package 3 with the Terminology Management Platform (TMP) and brought together other European and national initiatives creating and developping multilingual terminology resources or tools for managing or reusing them.

This is the programme (with all the presentations) of the seminar (PARIS, April 18th 2013):

9h30 – 9h45
Welcome, Claire Lamboley (Head of the Service for the Coordination of Cultural Policies and Innovation, MCC)

Session on MULTILINGUALISM AND TERMINOLOGY: A EUROPEAN CHALLENGE

9h45 – 10h
Multilighualism in European projects, Rossella Caffo (MIBAC) (PDF, 603 kb)

10h – 10h20
Multilingual terminology mapping in Europeana, Vivien Petras (Humboldt University of Berlin) (PDF, 3873 kb)

10h20 – 10h40
Recommendations and Guidelines for terminology (ATHENA and Linked Heritage projects), Marie-Véronique Leroi (MCC) and Eva Coudyzer (KMKG) (PDF, 2116 kb)

Session on TOOLS FOR CREATION, HARMONISATION AND MANAGEMENT OF MULTILINGUAL TERMINOLOGIES

11h10- 11h30

Terminology Management Platform (TMP) (Linked Heritage), Marie-Véronique Leroi (MCC) and Florent André (Université de Savoie) (PDF, 803 kb)

(see all the videos here)

11h30-11h50
SIERA: a multilingual knowledge sharing project, Christophe Roche (Universidade Nova de Lisboa – Faculdade de Ciencias Sociais e Humanas) (PDF, 1800 kb)

11h50-12h15 Questions & discussion

14h-14h20
GINCO: an open tool for vocabulary conception, Katell Briatte (MCC)

14h20 – 14h40
The publication and exploitation of knowledge structures with OpenSKOS,
Mark Linderman (Picturae Database publishing) (PDF, 2510 Kb)

Session on THESAURUS, CLASSIFICATIONS AND OTHER SPECIALISED AND MULTILINGUAL TERMINOLOGY RESOURCES

14h40 –15h
Multilingual thesaurus on Photography (Europeana Photography), Nacha Van Steen (KMKG) (PDF, 176 kb)

(see all the videos here)

15h – 15h20
Multilingual thesaurus on music instruments (MIMO), Rodolphe Bailly (Cité de la musique) (PDF, 2230 kb)

15h20 – 15h40
PARTAGE PLUS: Controlled vocabulary for the enrichment of international metadata enabling Art nouveau in Europeana, Christiane Pagel (Fotomarburg) (PDF, 1866 kb)

Session on LINKED DATA : REUSE AND APPLICATIONS

16h10-16h30

SemanticPédia: Cultural and semantic issues around the web data, Thibaut Grouas (MCC) (PDF, 382 kb)

16h30 –16h50
Using VIAF in data.bnf.fr: creating links to import information, Romain Wenz (Bnf) (PDF, 1709 kb)

16h50 -17h30 : Questions, Open discussion and conclusion of the day

Click here for the full report of the Seminar

Click here for all the videos of the event

Click here for the full version of the programme

Click here for the French version of the full programme

Dublin, 18 June 2013

Linked Heritage plenary meeting in Dublin

The Linked Heritage project (a 30 months Best Practice Network project founded by the EC) now draws to the end of its life and in Dublin the partners will have the possibility to discuss the latest commitments in view of the expiration (September 2013). The consortium includes representatives of all the key stakeholder groups from 20 EU countries, together with Israel and Russia. These include ministries and responsible government agencies, content providers and aggregators, leading research centres, publishers and SMEs.

On the June 17th there was the International EU Presidency Conference at Dublin Castle on “Access, Use, Re-use – Unlocking the potential of online cultural content”.

This international conference focused on developing new access to online cultural content to support education, cultural tourism, creative industries and to provide creative new ways for people to participate in their cultural heritage. Speakers were drawn from leading international companies in the digital field and from leading experts in the EU research and cultural heritage area. All 27 member states were represented through their Ministries of Culture or national authorities for libraries, museums and archives with additional attendance from key European institutions and associations and all of the main cultural institutions in Ireland, north and south. The conference was funded by the EU Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme Linked Heritage project.

On the June 18th it is planned the Linked Heritage Plenary meeting, which will be the last meeting before the end of the project.

Linked Heritage meeting in Dublin:

Date: 17th – 18th June 2013

Venue: Local Government House & National Museum, Dublin

Agenda

Tuesday 18^th June

09:30-17:30: Linked Heritage Plenary Meeting at Local Government House, Ushers Quay, Dublin

Evening: Walking tour of Dublin

The Agenda of the Linked Heritage Plenary is downloadable here.

Registration, accomodations and more information available here

an interesting workshop was hosted at the Paul Scherrer Institute

5th Federated identity management for research communities (FIM4R) Meeting

Federated identity management (FIM) in general and federated identity management for research communities (FIM4R) is an arrangement that can be made among multiple organisations that lets subscribers use the same identification data to obtain access to the secured resources of all organisations in the group. Specifically in the various research communities there is an increased interest in a common approach to FIM as there is obviously a large potential for synergies.

This workshop in the fivth in a series that started in summer 2011 to investigate Federated Identity Management for Research (FIM4R) collaborations.

The workshop was hosted at the Paul Scherrer Institute (see the picture), located in Villigen, a municipality in the canton of Aargau (Switzerland). The Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), is the largest research centre for natural and engineering sciences within Switzerland.

The first workshop was held at CERN in June 2011 (https://indico.cern.ch/event/129364), the second at RAL in November 2011 (https://indico.cern.ch/event/157486) and the third at ISGC in February 2012 (https://indico.cern.ch/event/177418). The last workshop of this series has been held in Nymegen (http://www.clarin.eu/events/3501). Through these workshops, several research communities have converged on a common vision for FIM, enumerated a set of requirements and proposed a number of recommendations for ensuring a roadmap for the uptake of FIM is achieved. These points have been documented in a paper (https://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1442597) for which comments are welcome (https://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1442597/comments).

One objective of this workshop was finalizing the work on a common FIM4R paper and to discuss related papers. Another major topic was to go from theory to practice and to present and discuss several FIM prototypes currently in development. Third, as the term ‘federated’ already indicates, it will not be possible to find a ‘one size fits all’-solution to all requirements. In addition, there are, especially in the commercial sector, already various existing identity management tools, which would be interesting to connect. Therefore, solutions are thought of, which provide links between different systems. These developments are just in the beginning.

For further information please go to the meeting website:

http://indico.psi.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2230

DCH-RP project was invited to attend the event in representance of the humanistic domains and to support and promote of Identity Federations.

Download the report “Federated Identity Management for Research Collaborations”

Download the “The DCH-RP project: Digital Cultural Heritage – Roadmap for Preservation requirements and implementations of federated access to digital cultural heritage contents (by Maria Laura Mantovani, GARR)”

Download the 5th FIM4R: Summary 20-21 March 2013

DCH-RP Workshop the creation of a Virtual Research Community dedicated to the cultural heritage and the humanities

EGI Community Forum 2013 in Manchester

Between 8th and 12th of April 2013, EGI.eu and UK NGI, a partnership between GridPP and the National e-Infrastructure Service (NES), hosted the Community Forum 2013.

The event, which was hold in Manchester in conjunction with the 3rd EMI Technical Conference, was very successful and provided a great opportunity to reflect upon the growing diversification in usage of the European Grid Infrastructure from across all research disciplines as well as the widening international collaboration that is taking place.

DCH-RP project has been invited to attend the meeting, organizing a workshop, on “Digital Cultural Heritage: state of the art and future developments”. The workshop brought together projects and initiatives working world-wide in the domain of the digital cultural heritage, digital arts, digital performances and digital humanities in order to find synergies and to discuss opportunities for cooperation, in particular around the theme of the use of the e-infrastructures for DCH, thus avoiding to duplicate efforts to reach the same goals.

Antonella Fresa from Promoter Srl introduced the workshop presenting the meeting and DCH-RP (PDF, 960 Kb).

Shirley Crompton from STFC presented the SCIDIP-ES initiative (PDF, 2,5 Mb). Nicolas Larousse from TGE-ADONIS introduced the DARIAH project (PDF, 900 Kb). Roberto Barbera from INFN gave on overview of CHAIN-REDS (PDF, 2,5 Mb). Martin Philipp Hellmich from CERN introduced the EUDAT project (PDF, 3 Mb). Faridah Mohd Noor from University of Malaya spoke about Mah Meri Masks Project, an example of Virtual Storytelling and Digital Archiving in the Cloud (PDF, 1,2 Mb). And finally Jan Just Keijser from Nikhef made a presentation on Data management for digital archivists (PDF, 1,1 Mb)

This occasion was a first step where projects that are working on the creation of a research infrastructure dedicated to the cultural heritage and the humanities could get together and agree on the need to set up a common plan in the light of establishing a Virtual Research Community to be acknowledged at European level by the world of e-infrastructure, to approach the next opportunities offered by Horizon2020.

Naturally, a common plan is an ambitious goal, it will be composed by several parts where each project and possibly new ones will have different roles and priorities, it will need time to be discussed, to analyse opportunities and threats, but it seems that also, thanks to the efforts spent in the last years, the community of the researchers on cultural heritage and humanities needs to be shaped more precisely, identifying common goals, strategies and synergies between the different initiatives.

For more information on DCH-RP wisit the project website.

A very successful event for the formal launch of the project

EAGLE project kick-off meeting

On April the 2nd 2013, the Accademia dei Lincei hosted the EAGLE Kick-off Meeting, a very successful event which brought together more than 20 cultural institutions and archives, universities, research centres and innovative SMEs from all over Europe, including the director of the Europeana Foundation – Jill Cousins – and representatives of Wikimedia Italy.

EAGLE is a Best Practice Network (36-month project) that brings together the most prominent European institutions and archives in the field of Classical Latin and Greek epigraphy, to provide Europeana with a comprehensive collection of unique historical sources which constitute an authentic pillar of European culture.

In particular, it will supply inscriptions coming from 25 EU countries, providing more than 1.5 M of images and related metadata, including translations of selected texts for the benefit of the general public. These represent approximately 80% of the total amount of inscriptions in the Mediterranean area.

[VIDEO: Kick-off meeting presentations]

The EAGLE kickoff meeting, organised with the support of Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and Sapienza University of Rome, represented the formal launch of the project.

Visit the Eagle website for more information on the project.

The Humanities and Social Sciences applications session also hosted a presentation of DCH-RP

Grids and Clouds symposium in Taipei (ISGC 2013)

The International Symposium on Grids and Clouds (ISGC) 2013 is held at Academia Sinica in Taipei in March 2013, with co-located events and workshops. The conference is hosted by the Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre (ASGC).

ISGC 2013 brought together from the Asia-Pacific region and around the world, researchers that are developing applications to produce these large-scale data sets and the data analytics tools to extract the knowledge from the generated data, and the e-infrastructure providers that integrate the distributed computing, storage and network resources to support these multidisciplinary research collaborations.

In particular there was a session devoted to Humanities and Social Sciences applications, where, among the others, a presentation about project DCH-RP was illustrated by Roberto Barbera, highlighting the importance of developing best practices and a roadmap for the sustainable long term and short term preservation of digital cultural heritage.

Read the whole chronicle of the speech, titled Big Data Challenges in the Humanities and Social Sciences, in the GridCast blog.

Sum up of year 1, plans for year 2 and few special guests

EuropeanaPhotography in Athens

The third plenary meeting of EuropeanaPhotography project took place in Athens, hosted by the National Technical University of Athens. The location was chosen in Athens because the meeting offered a technical training for the content providers of EuropeanaPhotography, who had the possibility to follow a lecture about the MINT tool and also to get training and personalized exercises on their own laptops. The whole event was organized by dr. Nikolaos Simou, who also held the training to the partners in cooperation with his colleagues of NTUA.

The MINT tool is a user-friendly platform developed by NTUA, and includes a multilingual vocabulary about photography, developed by KMKG. The tool is now ready to use for EuropeanaPhotography content providers: once the selected images are digitized, the related metadata will be ingested, mapped and enriched with the tool and the vocabulary, and then delivered to Europeana.

The MINT training was not the only special-event of the plenary meeting: in facts, on day 2 the meeting hosted a presentation about the Rights Labeling Campaign by Europeana’s IPR and Policy advisor Mrs. Julia Fallon. She was very kind and cooperative to take part in the whole meeting and to give a precious contribution to the discussion, that will drive interesting results as for IPR issue related to photography and digitized images.

In the plenary meeting, a sum up after the review, which result was “good”, had been presented by Antonella Fresa, and then all the WP Leaders presented plans for the upcoming months. The new partner which joined the project in November 2012, Fondazione Alinari, was welcomed by the others. Dimitrios Tsolis from University of Patrass gave a presentation of the IPR support tools that are under development for EuropeanaPhotography project.

Main activities of year 2 will be digitization (objective is 250.000 digitized image, of which 100.000 available in Europeana), enrichment and ingestion; while work will also proceed on the front of sustainability and IPR. Dissemination will be empowered and enlarged in order to reach a wider audience with which EuropeanaPhotography’s results can be shared. Open thematic workshops will be organized by the partners from autumn on, and a photography-dedicated issue of Uncommon Culture will host articles and interviews by the EuropeanaPhotography partners.

The Project Coordinator prof. Fred Truyen also published his impressions of the meeting in his blog about digital culture.

Present to the event were three representatives of the Greek Ministry of Culture, Mrs. Maria Kotlida, Mrs. Panagiota Gerasimou and Mrs. Katerina Moutogianni, who assisted to the training and to the presentations.

The partners enjoyed the warm hospitality at the Divani Palace Acropolis hotel, in the very center of the city, and the organization by NTUA was excellent. Lovely Greek specialties made lunch breaks and dinner extremely pleasant.

Finally, after the end of the meeting, partners had the possibility to visit Athens and the Acropolis surroundings, as unfortunately all the archaeological sites of the city were closed because of a strike. That was a pity; anyhow the picturesque area of la Plaka and the famous Syntagma square were enough to compensate the visitors.

Next appointment for EuropeanaPhotography is September 2013 in Vilnius, for a big event under the EU Presidency of Lithuania, where the plenary meeting will be jointed to a photographic exhibition and some cultural lectures. Organization is now in the hands of Lithuanian Art Museums.

Academia Sinica hosted the annual conference devoted to e-Learning and Digital Archive

2013 Teldap International Conference

Highlighting Retrospect & Prospect as the theme, 2013 TELDAP International Conference was scheduled on March 14-16 at Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. In 2008, Taiwan e-Learning and Digital Archive Program (TELDAP) was launched to integrate the digital archiving and e-learning projects and carry on the long-term goals. The International Collaboration and Promotion Division of TELDAP held the very first TELDAP International Conference in 2009 to provide a free and open forum for researchers around the globe to exchange innovative ideas and demonstrate exciting results which prompted inspiring discussions on the development of digital archive and e-Learning. Since then, International Collaboration and Promotion Division of TELDAP has been hosting high-quality, well-attended, and up-to-date international conferences annually.

There were five topics of discussion in the 2013 TELDAP International Conference: Technology and Scaling, Disciplinary Impact/ New Model Scholarship, Business Model and Sustainability, International Collaboration, and e-Learning. There has been a steep growth in digital contents over the decade, which demands a new form of preservation scaling. How to manage petabytes data thus becomes an important issue. Along with the development of digitalization, new technologies with innovative data analysis techniques have been invented and applied to the existing disciplinary and inspired innovative applications. To envision the future, the sustainability of digital collection becomes the focus. With limited resources, both cultural and scientific data encounters the challenges in terms of time and space. The future of digital archive project lies in the effective inter-disciplinary, inter-organizational, and international cooperation. Management methods, communication strategies, and troubleshooting are all important aspects in terms of collaboration.

From a series of pioneering national digital projects since 1998 to today’s TELDAP, it is now coming to a significant turning point. The blossom and success of TELDAP came from many people’s contribution. By exploring the crucial issues listed above, the conference continued to gather field experts, brilliant researchers, and devoted contributors from various institutes and diverse domains, leading the way to the golden age of a brand new digital era in Taiwan.

The three-day Conference was composed of 3 Keynote speeches, 15 oral sessions, 2 workshops as well as the Best Poster Award Contest. Topics covered in the 2013 conference include (1) Technology and Scaling, (2) Disciplinary Impact/New Model Scholarship, (3) Business Model and Sustainability, (4) International Collaboration, and (5) e-Learning.

During the “International Collaboration” session, the DCH-RP Project took a presentation on “Digital Cultural Heritage Preservation“. DCH-RP (acronym of Digital Cultural Heritage Roadmap for Preservation) is a coordination action supported by European Commission FP7 e-Infrastructures Programme, launched to look at best practice for preservation standards in use.

Dr. Antonella Fresa, Technical Coordinator of DCH-RP, took a presentation on behalf of the project.

This is the video presentation. Download PDF version here