Digital meets Culture

April 27 2022

NEMO webinar on using cultural heritage to foster social cohesion: the MEMEX project

On April 27, NEMO (the Network of European Museum Organizations) organized a webinar focusing on the use of cultural heritage to promote social cohesion by strengthening historically under-represented communities.

For the occasion, the experts of the MEMEX project will be present to provide a strong example of how cultural heritage and its reinterpretation and reuse through digital storytelling are a key means to shape a more inclusive society.

MEMEX (MEMories and EXperiences for inclusive digital storytelling) is a three-year project H2020 (2019-2022) that promotes social cohesion through collaborative tools that provide inclusive access to cultural heritage and, at the same time, facilitate encounters and interactions between communities at risk of social exclusion.
The project provides tools that allow the communities to tell their stories and promote their cultural diversity, as well as claim their rights and equal participation in the European society.

Through the MEMEX app installed on a smartphone, the users can create and visualise stories related to their personal memories and experiences digitally linked to the geographical locations of either intangible (e.g. an event) or a tangible cultural places/object.

Participation in the NEMO webinar is free, but registration is mandatory and is open until April 25. Find out more about the webinar and how to register at the link https://www.ne-mo.org/news/article/nemo/register-to-a-nemo-webinar-on-using-cultural-heritage-to-foster-social-cohesion.html

Visit the MEMEX project website for more information: https://memexproject.eu/en/project

by implementing the groundbreaking, yet challenging, human-in-the-loop model, the company manages to combine the best of human and machine intelligence

Meet WEAVE Team: ThinkCode

ThinkCode is a start-up company which designs and develops custom intelligent solutions and high-end software products by adopting and applying cutting-edge technology in the area of Artificial Intelligence into real- word applications. Consisting of people with strong research and industrial background, ThinkCode provides AI-enabled services that span a great range of applications such as Image Annotation, Sentiment Analysis, and Metadata Enrichment. In addition, by implementing the groundbreaking, yet challenging, human-in-the-loop model, the company manages to combine the best of human and machine intelligence in order to build real working solutions.

The company focuses on the Computer Vision field, as image analysis and manipulation has been the main area of expertise of its people, from the theoretical as well as the practical point of view. State-of the-art deep learning technologies have been applied to images and videos for a variety of applications, including object detection, image segmentation, and photo aesthetics extraction and evaluation. Furthermore, our know-how has been transferred to the audio data analysis field as well, with deep neural networks developed for song classification and instrument recognition in recordings from modern and historical sound archives. ThinkCode does not limit itself to developing and applying AI algorithms to images, text and sound, but produces high quality visualization tools for any from the above services.

Creative Commons CC0

This is achieved through intuitive graphical user interfaces, conforming to strict design principles in order to improve the user experience, thus resulting in a complete end-to-end AI software service. Synapsis (Smart coNtent AnalySIs Service) is a core company service which puts into practice the latest Artificial Intelligence techniques and offers a variety of utilities concerning the image and sound analysis field, accompanied by a user friendly UI and an application programming interface (API) for third party applications.

For WEAVE, ThinkCode is involved in technical expertise, leading the developments on the metadata enrichment tools, and also part of the technical support for the aggregation of content to Europeana.

Website: thinkcode.io

Team:
Orfeas Menis – Mastromichalakis (he/him) is an Artificial Intelligence Engineer in ThinkCode since June 2021. He is also a Research Associate in the Artificial Intelligence and Learning Systems Laboratory of the National Τechnical University of Athens, where he holds the position of Ph.D. student since October 2020. He has published papers in various scientific conferences and journals and has been involved in numerous European projects regarding the digitization, management, and enrichment of Cultural Heritage. Since June 2021 he is also a member of the Expert group οn AI literacy of the Council of Europe.

Anna Christaki (she/her) is a senior software engineer and founder of Thinkcode, specialising in software solutions. She graduated from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and received her MSc in Advanced Computing from the Computer Science Department, University of Bristol, UK. She has many years of experience as a Full Stack Web Developer and has worked with different web technologies. She has a deep understanding of how a web application gets done from concept to design to completion and can communicate effectively with product owners, UX teams, frontend and backend developers throughout the analysis, design and product implementation. She has participated as a developer in several European projects such as EUscreen, EUscreenXL, Europeana Fashion, Europeana Sounds, Photography and E-Space crafting solutions for the management, aggregation and creative reuse of digital cultural heritage.

scope of the meeting was to understand challenges and difficulties tour guides face during their work, and develop future policies.

Meeting with local tour guides, Vjosa valley, Albania

text and images by Egla Serjani, CeRPHAAL

At the core of the INCULTUM project are local communities and stakeholders, as the main protagonist, able to improve cultural tourism in the chosen Pilot areas. In the Upper Vjosa valley, amongst the identified stakeholder groups engaged in the project are the local tour guides. Therefore, during early April, CeRPHAAL organized a joint meeting with some of the local tour guides operating in the Pilot. The intention of the encounter was to understand challenges and difficulties they are faced to during their work, and develop future policies that aims to mitigate their concerns. The guides were introduced with some new touristic attraction points and itineraries that may be of interest to be added to their domestic tour package. Also, the meeting brough up significant insights about tourism management in the area, which will be further discussed, developed and tested during the implementation of the INCULTUM project in the Pilot.

Discover more about INCULTUM Pilot 8: https://incultum.eu/pilots/8-vjosa-the-shared-river/

great imagery of the 20th century is archived in 5 million image objects in the TopFoto archive, digitalized at its best

Meet WEAVE Team: TopFoto

all images courtesy of TopFoto.co.uk

Topham Partners LLP (TopFoto) – UK

Founded in London in 1927, TopFoto is a rich resource for the world’s political and social history of the 20th century, illustrating the events, cultures and public figures that have shaped tomorrow’s world. TopFoto is an independent, family owned and operated, picture archive and agency, for many years now based just 45 minutes south of London by train, but in the rural heart of Kent, garden of England.

The TopFoto archive contains some 5 million image objects from engraved illustrations, glass plate and acetate negatives, vintage prints, and transparencies to today’s digital files being accessed, enjoyed and published by users all over the world via TopFoto.co.uk and from partnerships, including Europeana.

With over 20 years of experience in digitisation, TopFoto’s analogue collection has been digitally saved by TopFoto’s onsite production studio, with more coming onstream daily. Accessible for image licensing, research and general interest.

Today, hope is high in the Welsh villages where the 1949 rush for coal is something just as precious as the gold sought in the Klondike. – Mr James Thomas prefers to take his daily bath in the old-fashioned way in front of the fire. Pit baths are expected in Windsor in the next twelve months. Mrs Nelly Thomas, as she had done for over forty years, pours cold water over her husband’s back. Watching him is his son, Sylvester Thomas in Senghenydd and Aber Valley

With partner-archive relationships, TopFoto offers over 3 million digital images. These images are discoverable via an online asset management system, approved users can download in high resolution. TopFoto’s primary revenue is generated by licensing and IP, which helps conserve and protect the collections. TopFoto work extensively worldwide with museums, galleries, cultural infrastructure developers, educational and general book publishers and designers, advertising & PR companies, hotel groups. Ongoing projects are as varied as the vintage photo packaging for Tyrrells Crisps to Chartwell, the home of Winston and Clementine Churchill.

The team includes:
Flora Smith, FRSA, Managing Partner of TopFoto, who graduated from Manchester University in 1993 in Politics and Modern History. After three years of living in St Petersburg, Russia which included working as International Relations Adviser to the Director of the State Russian Museum, she returned to the UK and ran a successful opera and theatre company for 6 years as the Executive Producer in the top team of three, rescuing the then-derelict Wilton’s Music Hall in the East End and operating the 55-strong music theatre/opera company out of London and Cape Town, before being headhunted by the Victoria and Albert Museum Development Director as a fundraiser. She moved to join her family business (at the bottom rung) in 2007 – originally lured in for just a few months to help organise the outstanding Ken Russell 1950s negative archive. Flora Smith took over as TopFoto’s Managing Partner in December 2016. He is a Fellow of the British-American Project (and former Executive Committee member) as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

John Balean is Operations Manager of TopFoto. He graduated from the University of Newcastle, Australia in 1996 with a Bachelor of Arts in the Visual Arts and a major in Photography. After a brief period as a freelance photographer and visual artist he joined TopFoto where he is a highly experienced Operations Manager and his role includes coordinating EU / Europeana projects as well as negotiating for new photographer collections. John has given lectures and written about the picture industry with a specific interest in Press Photographic History. He is currently Chair of PICSEL and previously served 10 years as a board member of both BAPLA and CEPIC.

Within the project Balean and Smith are responsible for providing content. The content being sourced has ranged from dance to Gypsy/Roma/Traveller photographs. The team was also part of initiating and organising the Rommi Smith and Cristella Listra October 2021 LabDay, as Dr Rommi Smith was commissioned by Flora as TopFoto’s inaugural Writer in Residence as way of increasing public engagement with the treasures of the archive. The idea of the initial artist post was suggested by Rommi Smith and funded from a small section of a grant from the UK’s Lottery Fund for Heritage of £85,500, awarded to TopFoto in 2020 by the DCMS (Department for Media, Culture and Sport) in recognition of the national and international heritage importance of the TopFoto archive.

The digital platform that enhances and promotes Volterra XXII is online

Volterra is the first Tuscan city of culture

Volterra, the Tuscan town studied by UNCHARTED as part of WP5 experimental and demonstrations together with the cities of Budapest, Porto and Barcelona, has been awarded the title of first Tuscan city of culture 2022.

The participatory cultural project called Volterra XXII intends to unite people, places and activities by relating them to the world and to promote the excellence and specificities of a territory that has made human regeneration the meaning of its social and cultural proposal.

Starting from April, for 9 months, over 300 events will take place, including exhibitions, shows, cultural initiatives.

In order to promote Volterra XXII and all scheduled events, the digital platform https://volterra22.it has been specially created which intends to be:

“Una nuova piattaforma digitale per valorizzare, promuovere e mettere in rete un intero territorio che vede la cultura al centro di un importante percorso sul tema della rigenerazione umana”.
“A new digital platform to enhance, promote and put online an entire territory that puts culture at the center of an important path on the theme of human regeneration”.

On the platform, the various initiatives are organized into 5 main thematic sections:

Volterra tells: initiatives to regenerate one’s roots
Volterra curates: cultural projects to regenerate the community
Volterra includes: cultural activities to regenerate intergenerational relations
Volterra innovates: cultural projects to regenerate work
Volterritorio: to regenerate cultural projects

Users have the possibility to search by time periods and by themes, even by crossing them, and for each event a description, timetables, geolocation, link to the site or social page are provided.

Thanks to this tool, created by Softhrod, the technical sponsor who conceived and developed the system, it will be possible to consult all the cultural initiatives of Volterra XXII and to know in real time which events are present in the city, in the territory and in the municipalities that support the project.

The platform is in continuous and constant evolution and updating with new events and initiatives; the Volterra22 app will also be available soon.

Visit https://volterra22.it to find out more about the initiatives organized in the coming months to enhance the great cultural, artistic and historical heritage of Volterra.

Europeana conference, 28 - 30 September 2022

Europeana 2022: call for proposals is open

The 2022 edition of the Europeana conference will take place on 28 – 30 September and a call for proposals has been launched for the occasion.

The event will be organised in a hybrid format and the conference programme will be open to professionals working in the cultural heritage sector to share expertise, knowledge and experience in varied sessions.

The conference aims to explore “how we can collaboratively build a common data Space for Cultural Heritage and raise voices from across the sector to empower digital transformation and explore the role digital cultural heritage plays in today’s and tomorrow’s world.“

A call has been opened to submit proposals for a webinar, workshop, session or interactive intervention to be held during Europeana 2022. The sessions will be 30 minutes long, can be delivered live, in person or by video, recorded or presented live online.

Proposals must cover the following themes:

Common Data Spaces
Diversity & Inclusion
Participation & collaboration
Climate Action
Storytelling
3D, multilinguality and AI
European Year of Youth

The call for proposals for the Europeana 2022 conference will be open until 27 May 2022. Here the page with the information to participate in the call.

Further information about the conference and the call are available at: https://pro.europeana.eu/page/conference

the course is focused on methods for understanding tourists' behavior analyzing spatiotemporal behavior patterns

Advanced Spatio-Temporal analysis, doctoral course

In the framework of INCULTUM project, the Uppsala University team in collaboration with Copenhagen Business School is organizing a doctoral course to run in April, May and September 2022. The course is taking place partly online and partly in hybrid form.

The doctoral course “Advanced Spatio-Temporal analysis” links research on consumer behaviour in general, using tourist behaviour as an example, with spatio-temporal analysis to create an understanding of how place, space, and time influence individuals’ and groups of individuals’ behavior. The aim of the course is to introduce different methods related to spatio-temporal analysis providing insights into research design, ethical aspects of data collection, methods for analysing GIS data combined with open source street maps.

Extended deadline for enrollment: 22nd April 2022, please contact Golondrian Janke, Golondrian.janke@fek.uu.se.

Learning objectives:
The course will enable the student to:

compare and discuss theoretical grounds and assumptions related to tourists’ behaviors and movement patterns
analyze and reflect on how sociocultural, demographic and psychographic factors affect spatio-temporal behaviours
understand how the geographies and range of activities of tourist destinations affect tourists’ spatiotemporal behaviour
be able to design survey methods for collecting spatiotemporal behavior patterns
be able to use different analytical methods related to spatiotemporal data.

Read the Course syllabus (PDF)

At the workshop, the researchers presented the tourists' engagement journey visualized through trajectories of tourist movements together with other collected information

INCULTUM Pilot: meeting with stakeholders in Sweden

text and images courtesy of dr. Sabine Gebert Persson, Associatate professor
Uppsala University

On April 4, 2022 a total of 18 individuals representing different stakeholders gathered in Torsö (Sweden) to listen to and discuss data collected during the summer of 2021. The participants were representatives from a number of different organizations and associations, ranging from the local community association, the Swedish church (as the largest landowner in Sweden), the municipality, and a representative working with Leader projects to the local conference center, fishing guides, and shops selling local handicrafts.

Photo: Sabine Gebert Persson, presenting the results

At the workshop, the researchers presented the tourists’ engagement journey visualized through trajectories of tourist movements on the island together with information on eg. how the tourists’ felt that their expectations were met or not as well as their willingness to recommend the destination. The presentation resulted in a vivid discussion on how the destination can develop in a sustainable manner.

Photo: Vivid discussion on what to develop and how

A number of new areas to develop were identified related to sights/activities, information/communication, and transport/infrastructure, where new ideas and collaborations were discussed. Setting up QR codes that tourists can use for accessing information while also providing the stakeholders with information on movements is one example of a project initiated as a part of developing sustainable methods for monitoring walking and biking trails.

Learn more about INCULTUM Pilot 10 Escaping into the archipelago landscape

RURITAGE is associate partner of INCULTUM, striving to enable rural regeneration through heritage

Newly released RURITAGE “Travelling Voices” book

INCULTUM and RURITAGE projects have in common a keen focus on empowering marginal and rural areas in the promotion of their cultural and natural heritage, which not only needs to be safeguarded but also leveraged for communities-driven sustainable development.

As a great outcome of RURITAGE, a beautiful book has just been released.

image from RURITAGE website

How does cycling on an abandoned railroad in Norway sound to you? How about going on a geological wine-tour, in Germany? Maybe drinking from a miraculous healing spring in Austria and sword fighting in a shiny armour is more to your liking. If none of these entice you perhaps an Italian monster with a black body, yellow eyes and the head of a toad does! However, if shaking your feathers is more to your taste, then Turkish clarinet musicians that play for hours will certainly make you twinkle! These are just some of the curious stories you will find in the newly released RURITAGE Project “Travelling Voices” book. Apart from those, 24 other stories written by Tóth Gyula Gábor and illustrated by Livia Hasenstaub, will take you on a virtual tour of RURITAGE’s six Replicators territories.

It took months of interviews, gathering information about the regions and the project, curating images, writing and drawing to create the wonderful Travelling Voices book. The book is now ready to be shared with the world and tell the stories of six regions in Europe which are using their natural and cultural heritage as drivers of rural regeneration.

VIEW BOOK >>>

The INCULTUM project will build on RURITAGE outcomes and policy development to support strategies for participatory approaches, with the aim to unlock new opportunities of growth in peripheral areas.

Read more on RURITAGE website: https://www.ruritage.eu/

hosted by the University of Algarve, a meeting between INCULTUM partners to discuss about the local pilot

INCULTUM discovers Algarve and Campina de Faro

End of March 2022, INCULTUM partners Promoter and University of Algarve met to discuss about the work ongoing in the Pilot 2 Agrarian coastal plain: Campina de Faro. Campina de Faro is part of the coastal plain of the Algarve, with an ancient and continuous human occupation. Situated on an aquifer and with fertile soils, it is still, despite urban-touristic pressure, a living testimony of the historical interdependence between the cities and the food production space (gardens, orchards) based on the traditional irrigation system (norias, wells, aqueducts, tanks, canals) now in the process of being abandoned.

[Show as slideshow]

This hydraulic heritage, together with the old farms, is in a process of degradation, given the new irrigation methods and the strong real estate pressure on the periphery of cities. The agricultural vocation of this territory and its proximity to the Ria Formosa Natural Park, on the one hand, and the residential-tourist urban spaces on the other, make it highly important as a natural foodshed associated with urban development and sustainable tourism, both as a supplier of agricultural production (organic food) and an alternative touristic destination to sun and beach (agro-tourism, rural tourism, cultural tourism).

The proposed actions in the Pilot are directed towards the survey, diagnosis and architectural and hydraulic rehabilitation of a group of norias, aqueducts and tanks in order to contribute to the preservation of the landscape’s memory and to the (re)activation of its identity. Other actions will aim at the revitalization of historic irrigation systems, practices and techniques, namely the recovery of traditional cultivation techniques and species of fruit trees are in the process of disappearing (tangerine trees, for example). The definition of cultural routes for the hydroagricultural heritage and the organization of little markets for the sale of vegetables and fruits in the villages, will be an attraction for visitors, bringing tourism closer to polyculture and to the Mediterranean diet, with an impact on the local economy.