Digital meets Culture

keynotes and presentations, a digital exhibition and a workshop about photogrammetry composed the final event of the EU funded project dedicated to highlight tangible and intangible heritage of local communities

WEAVE final conference, recordings and presentations available

Hosted by CRDI in Girona at Centre Cultural La Mercè, the WEAVE project organized on 16th September 2022 its final conference, which explored the connections between tangible and intangible heritage, cultural communities and the process of digital transformation of cultural heritage organisations. The day was preceded by the plenary meeting of WEAVE consortium, held at the premises of Arxiu Municipal on 15th September.

[Show as slideshow]

CONFERENCE AGENDA with presentations

Joan Boadas (CRDI Director), George Ioannidis (IN2/WEAVE coordinator): Welcome messages

Jolan Wuyts (Collection Editor at Europeana): ‘Unheard voices: learning to tell more diverse stories in the cultural heritage sector’ – PDF

Antonella Fresa (Director at Promoter): Cultural values, identities, participation and local communities – PDF

Fred Truyen: Connecting communities and tangible-intangible heritage and capacity building – PDF

Matevž Straus: Creation and reuse of 3D models of monuments and tangible cultural heritage – PDF

Presenting the WEAVE toolbox:

George Ioannidis: WEAVEx – PDF
Matevž Straus: 3D assets manager – PDF
Nuno Correia: MotionNotes – PDF
Orfeas Menis-Mastromichalakis: Metadata Enrichment tools – PDF

Valentina Bachi and WEAVE content providers: Presenting the heritage collections digitized and published by WEAVE in Europeana – PDF

John Balean: Process and Discovery: using legacy taxonomy structures for locating intangible heritage imagery – PDF

Sofie Taes: Europeana editorials and virtual exhibition – PDF

Marc Hernandez, David Iglésias: The use of photogrammetry for 3D digitisation of a daguerreotype collection – PDF (coming soon)

The whole conference was recorded:

After the talks, for the participants in Girona a networking lunch and a digital exhibition gave the floor to all participants to engage in a lively discussion following the inspiration drawn from the programme.

To conclude the event, an interesting workshop about photogrammetry digitization took place to illustrate modern techniques to create accurad te and high quality 3D models of cultural heritage objects, with a particular focus on heritage photography.

September-December 2022

The travelling MEMEX Exhibition is coming!

News from UNCHARTED community! MEMEX, the three-year H2020 project, aims to promote social cohesion through collaborative, heritage-related tools that provide inclusive access to tangible and intangible cultural heritage and, at the same time, facilitate encounters, discussions and interactions between communities at risk of social exclusion.

In the next few days it will kick off the Traveling MEMEX Exhibition which from September will continue until December.
The event will be an opportunity to discover the stories created by the inhabitants through the MEMEX project, the project methodology, the prototype app, the pilot projects and the policy recommendations.

In Lisbon, Barcelona and Paris participants were engaged by the MEMEX project’s partners in a digital storytelling journey based on a dedicated methodology and a co-designed app aiming to reinforce inclusion and cultural participation: visiting local heritage through guided tours, reflecting on these places and expressions, identifying the topics and writing their stories, and finally, co-creating audio-visual stories, emphasizing the active role of the participants in re-interpreting existing heritage and in co-creating plural meanings of it.

The MEMEX exhibition will present some of the stories as well as the social and technological development of the project.
The exhibition entrance is free in all locations and open to all.

The itinerary of this narrative journey includes:

Lisbon – 19/09/2022 – 29/09/2022 – Pharmacy Museum – R. Mal. Saldanha 1, 1249-069 Lisboa, Portugal – Public opening on September 19th (5pm GMT +1)
Paris – 05/10/2022 – 13/10/2022 – Rosa Lab – 20 voie EU/19, Paris 75019 – Public opening on October 5th (5 pm CET)
Genoa from 20/10/2022 – 01/11/2022- Festival Della Scienza – Piazza Giacomo Matteotti, 9, 16123 Genova GE, Italy
Barcelona – 09/11/2022 – 23/12/2022 – Loop Festival – C/ de València, 302, 08009 Barcelona, Spain – Public opening on November 9th (7pm GMT+2)

More information on the exhibition is available here.

News from UNCHARTED community

NEMO statement on the impact of the energy crisis on museums in Europe

NEMO, the Network of European Museum Associations, after observing the exceptional increase of costs for electricity and gas and its impact on museums in recent months, has published a statement calling on policy makers to support museums to cope with the energy crisis and keep open.

With the exceptional increase of costs for electricity and gas, some museums’ energy bills are likely to increase by 400% and there are already reports of museums having to close due to the energy crisis. NEMO fears that more will follow unless appropriate measures are taken.

NEMO also writes that cultural spaces and offers are important for social cohesion and personal well-being during times of crisis. The closure and/or reduction of services of museums has a minimal impact in terms of energy savings but does have a significant impact on the cultural and social fabric of Europe in this challenging time.

Read the statement here

French food as cultural heritage and the role of locality

WEAVE blogpost: A taste of terroir?

img: Fishermen in Lorient (France) by J. Hersleven, Jacques – Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, Belgium – CC BY-NC-SA.

The cultural connection between heritage and food has gradually gained visibility over the last decades.

Read the blog published by the WEAVE project editorial team in Europeana to discover the role of food as #CulturalHeritage in France
HERE

This blog is part of WEAVE – Widen European Access to cultural communities Via Europeana: a project funded by the European Commission under the Connecting Europe Facilities (CEF) aimed at developing a framework to link the tangible and intangible heritage of cultural communities.

How to safeguard transient, traditional and untouchable culture

WEAVE blogpost: Caring for intangible cultural heritage

img: Gegants i capgrossos, CRDI/Ajuntament de Girona, PD.

Intangible cultural heritage is a substantial part of what makes up our histories and identities, understood to be practices, ideas, insights and experiences.

Read the blog published by the WEAVE project editorial team in Europeana, to learn how to safeguard untouchable culture
HERE

From 19 to 22 August 2022 each part of the island of Sikinos transformed into a field of play, discovery and creation, where the audience became from a spectator to a participant and co-creator.

Little Islands Festival 2022 aftermovie

The Festival that connects the Aegean landscape and nature with Audiovisual Arts, Little Islands Festival (LIF) is dedicated to all artistic communities experimenting with hybrid artistic practices at the boundaries of the performing and digital arts.

The 4th edition of Little Islands Festival took place in summer 2022 under the theme of “Communality”, and explored the notion of community and opened a dialogue on its meaning and scope. Our driving force is the Aegean Sea as an element of unity and communication that has shaped a collective life culture, moving between self-sufficiency, resilience and assertion, interaction and coexistence. The festival hosted the works of 100 artists from Greece and abroad, presented installations, screenings, music, alternative tours, workshops, talks, site-specific projects and audiovisual performances.

From 19 to 22 August 2022 each part of the island of Sikinos transformed into a field of play, discovery and creation, where the audience became from a spectator to a participant and co-creator. We experiment with public open art that interacts with the regions of the world, making events that transform into common places, creating performances, telling stories, connecting the shared memory of space with the new reality of the digital world. Seeking the unexpected, the artistic experience that stimulates the emotion and sensory bodies, the “here” and “now” co-presence of people.

the important Digital Humanities Congress took place in Hybrid format in September 2022

CitizenHeritage presented at DHC 2022 in Sheffield

The Digital Humanities Congress is a conference hosted by the DHI at the University of Sheffield every two years. Its purpose is to promote the sharing of knowledge, ideas and techniques within the digital humanities. The fifth Congress was held in Sheffield from 8th – 10th September 2022. The programme included three keynote speakers and 44 papers, as well as plenary presentations.

The talk delivered by CitizenHeritage coordinator prof. Fred Truyen (KU Leuven) was entitled CitizenHeritage: Crowdsourcing, Digital Curation and Citizen Science with European Photographic Collections, and discussed the results of work on Photographic Heritage collections in a series of EU-funded research projects among which “Kaleidoscope: the 1950s in Europe” and “Europeana XX: Century of Change”, where digitised collections were contributed to Europeana, and both AI as well as crowdsourcing technologies were used to enrich metadata. In the context of the project CitizenHeritage, the talk indicated a roadmap in how this can lead to genuine citizen science.

In pursuit of the many “Visual identities of Europe” in the 20th century, editorials and hybrid virtual/physical exhibitions were curated based on aggregated collections from a wide variety of heritage institutions, allowing to explore new relations between and objects, representations and narratives. The presentation explained how data aggregation, AI-supported data improvement and crowdsourced data validation contribute to innovative heritage research, involving citizens and stakeholder communities.

Visit conference site: https://www.dhi.ac.uk/dhc/2022/

Download the presentation by prof. Fred Truyen, PDF 9 Mb

A multistakeholders conference was organized in Palermo in July 2022 to discuss synergies and strategies of collaboration for the promotion of islamic heritage in Sicily

INCULTUM first institutional animation meeting in Sicily

The INCULTUM project is an international initiative which landed in Sicily by implementing a Pilot project for tourism promotion in the area of Trapani, coordinated by GAL ELIMOS, Local Action Group.

The Pilot is innested in a larger initiative called “Siqilyya ğannat ˀal arḍ- Sicily is Garden Paradise on Earth”, an itinerary to enhance the cultural, material and intangible heritage of Islamic Sicily, concerning the territory of 12 municipalities of the north-western coast of Sicily, from the Gulf of Castellammare to the Stagnone of Marsala, Egadi and Pantelleria islands included. That was the territory of the first arrival of Islam in Sicily (around the ‘600 there were the first incursions in Cossyra – the current Pantelleria, to arrive at a real “entry into force” in 827 at Capo Granitola) which generated the blossoming of a cultural stratification, collaboration and peaceful fruitfulness that is also an example in everyday life today.

In this light, GAL ELIMOS already signed a protocol of collaboration with the Department of Cultural Heritage and Sicilian Identity that implements actions for promotion, including an upcoming conference to be organized in collaboration with the Islamic Communities of Sicily, for the “revitalization” and the enhancement of the important and ancient Islamic roots of the island tradition.

In this strand of work, the ELIMOS Local Action Group organized in July 2022 a multistakeholders meeting in Palermo, at the Regional County Seat, to describe the work done so far in the area of Trapani, and to discuss with university experts and policy makers about strategies and actions for sustainable development of the Region. The event, in Italian language, was streamed live and available on the ELIMOS LAG facebook page, reaching out to over 15.000 contacts with a total of nearly 7.000 visualizations.

photo courtesy of GAL ELIMOS

The discussion was organized into two main “sections”:
the first one, including a number of institutional authorities, provided the main bases of the general framework related to the INCULTUM project, the methodological principles and action on which it is based and its contextualization in the Community landscape, national and local. The INCULTUM Pilot acts as a demo of a wider initiative, based on an innovative method of enhancing the cultural heritage and identity considered “minor”, while instead they are more representative of an intense traditional imprint that is safeguarded in each local territory, to be strategically leveraged for the realization of a more general growth planning, to negotiated with all the local actors, for the development of the “rural” community.

photo courtesy of GAL ELIMOS

The second session, unfolding various valuable contributions by distinguished representatives of the world of Culture and the University, highlighted the reasons for the main “anchorages” of the specific action of valorisation selected by the ELIMOS LAG in the INCULTUM Pilot, which is also close to other similar actions in the international project, especially the pilots carried out by the partners of Spain and Portugal of the INCULTUM network. By condensing projects, contacts, existing relations already carried out and under way and others in progress, the efforts prelude to further and more future developments which, in turn, will determine a wider result of dissemination and collaboration at several levels.

screenshot from conference recording

The conclusion of the works was entrusted to Dr. Liborio Furco, President of the ELIMOS LAG organiser and promoter of the initiative, who provided a systemic and sociological reconstruction of the fundamental motivations of INCULTUM Pilot, enriched with the considerations made by experts and scholars who have contributed to the meeting and who eventually commented that “The friendship between different cultures and civilizations does not mean homologation, but the enhancement of diversity: history tellsa bout a role that, for centuries, Sicily has played as a mediator of this enhancement of differences; a historical tradition that highlights the natural predisposition of our stratified and multifaceted culture. The hope is that this vocation can move on and generate arenas of common territorial public policies of the Mediterranean.”

Read the full report of the meeting (Italian language): PDF, 430 kb

View the recording on ELIMOS Facebook page.

Learn more about INCULTUM Pilot in Sicily

Cisneros and Canadian guitarist Caroline Plante discussed the complex Spanish artform and explored the role of women in Flamenco.

Rosa Cisneros from C-DaRE and WEAVE partner is part of “The Conversation” BBC podcast

text by Rosa Cisneros, Coventry University.

The BBC Podcast “The Conversation” invites two women from different parts of the world, united by a common passion, experience or expertise to tell Kim Chakanetsa their stories. In early September Rosa Cisneros was a guest on the podcast and helped produce “The Women of Flamenco”. Cisneros sat down with Canadian female guitarist Caroline Plante and both explored and discussed the complex Spanish artform and explored the role of women in Flamenco. The two talk about their experiences of growing up with Flamenco and also how flamenco is a form of activism.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct37mc

The new free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)

How to develop and implement effective digital strategies in cultural heritage institutions

How can cultural heritage institutions keep up with the latest digital technologies and trends? How can they organise and develop a digital workflow to enhance audience engagement and participation?

The new Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) “Developing Digital Transition Strategies for Cultural Heritage Institutions” aims to answer these and other questions in order to support cultural heritage professionals in developing digital strategies.

The course will start on September 26, 2022 and is organized by the inDICEs project, which has received funding from the European Union for 2020-2022 under the Horizon 2020 programme.

MOOC course addresses cultural heritage professionals, policy makers, students, and anybody with an interest in discovering how to address the challenges of digital transformation. Experts from various fields will teach how to design, evaluate and improve digital transformation strategies, as well as, provide insights and tools to assess the impact that cultural heritage institutions can have thanks to new technologies.

‘Developing digital transition strategies for cultural heritage institutions’ will cover six modules:

Digital Transformation & Self-Assessment: introductory module partly focused on the concept and importance of digital transformation.
Digital trends and Culture 3.0: the main transitions of the web, the different domains and types of impact of digital cultural participation, as well as trend watching practices are focal points.
Empowering IPR for the commons : how cultural heritage institutions can make reuse of digital content clear from a legal perspective.
Strategic skills, collaboration & organisation growth: how participation in networks can increase organisational capacity and help to optimise the impact of cultural heritage institutions.
Impact assessment: good practices, tools and methodologies to assess whether a strategy is working or needs to be refined or redirected.
Approaching technological innovation.

More information at https://www.edx.org/course/developing-digital-transition-strategies-for-cultural-heritage-institutions