Digital meets Culture

A bridge between opera professionals and specific marginalised communities

Opera co-creation for a social transformation: Traction H2020 Project

TRACTION project, funded by the Horizon 2020 programme, aims to use opera to define new forms of artistic creation through which the marginalised groups can work with artists to tell the stories that matter now.

Opera, a cornerstone of European cultural heritage, has always spoken to both elites and people, expressed both authority and revolution, inspiring generations with its passion, its beauty and its drama.
In recent decades its popular roots and radical edge have been lost and it is often seen as the staid preserve of the elite.

The project intends to design and develop a toolset to foster democratisation of opera, using technology as a means to reach new audiences and to connect artists with audiences.

TRACTION project carries out three trials as experimental activities to test and share new ideas through an opera co-creation: in Barcelona’s inner-city neighbourhoods, Ireland’s rural communities and Portugal’s prison for juvenile delinquents in Leiria.

To support these three trials the projects has created two different tools:

The Co-creation space: a tool that fosters and promotes asynchronous communication during co-creation activities between diverse communities and participants.
The Co-creation stage: a tool to connect communities and individuals in real-time, allowing multiple co-located stages and participants to perform together.

The long-term objective of the project is to define how art can be used and renew to build cohesive societies and a common culture in which everyone can feel that they belong.

More information at: https://www.traction-project.eu/

This Study, addressed to Cultural Institutions and professionals, presents recommendations and all relevant elements for successful 3D digitisation of cultural heritage

Study on quality in 3D digitisation of tangible cultural heritage

This unique study on 3D digitisation demonstrates that complexity and quality are fundamental considerations in determining the necessary effort for a 3D digitisation project to achieve the required value of the output.The overall aim of this study is to improve the quality of 3D digitisation projects for tangible cultural heritage, in support of European Union cultural heritage strategies.

The study, led by Cyprus University of Technology, has identified all relevant elements for successful 3D digitisation of cultural heritage, classifying them by degree of complexity and purpose or use. The study also looked at what determines the quality of a 3D digitisation project and made an inventory of existing formats, standards, guidelines and methodologies used by the industry.

This study will enable cultural heritage professionals, institutions, content-developers, and academics to define and produce high-quality digitisation standards for tangible heritage.
The elements of the framework include:
+ The technical parameters that determine the level of quality of 3D digitisation.
+ Existing digital formats, standards, benchmarks, methodologies and guidelines for 3D digitisation.
+ Past or ongoing 3D digitisation projects and existing 3D models and data sets that can serve as benchmarks.

Dr. Marinos Ioannides of the Digital Heritage Research Lab (DHRLab) at Cyprus University of Technology and Director of UNESCO Chair on Digital Cultural Heritage (CH) led this complex and all-encompassing project, working with nine important players in the industry and a number of external experts providing their research contributing to this exceptional study.

Access the Study and all Annexes

View the study: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/study-quality-3d-digitisation-tangible-cultural-heritage
Download Leaflet (PDF)

Summary

The 3D digitisation of movable and immovable cultural heritage can be an exceptionally complex process.
Factors such as the stakeholder requirements (available budget and time, expected use, required quality/accuracy), the characteristics of the object (size, geometry, surface, texture, material composition, state of conservation, location), the level of competence of the personnel involved and the type of equipment used, condition the production effort and have a direct impact on the quality of the final output.
There are no internationally recognized standards or guidelines for planning, organising, setting up and implementing a 3D data acquisition project.
As acquisition technologies and software systems become increasingly accessible, with photorealistic renderings now commonplace, it is even more crucial to understand the physics behind the hardware, the fundamentals of data capture and processing methodologies.
The definition of the complexity of a 3D digitisation project should cover both data capture and data processing (point cloud/modelling), should be calculated objectively, should be estimated before the data acquisition phase, should connect quality, technology and the purpose of use.
In cultural heritage projects, image-based data acquisition is usually preferred to other methods, such as laser scanning, because it is efficient, non-intrusive, easily deployable indoors and outdoors and low cost.
Quality parameters refer to different stages of the 3D digitisation process and vary depending on the type of tangible cultural heritage and the equipment and methodology used and the possible purposes or uses of the resulting 3D material.
There is no generally accepted standard for specifying the detail and accuracy requirements for geometric recordings of tangible objects. Accuracy refers to how close a measurement is to the true or correct value, whereas precision is how close the repeated measurements are to each other. A reliable survey instrument is consistent; a valid one is accurate.
There are no guidelines on ways and minimum amounts of data to be collected or the quality to be achieved during data acquisition, which entirely depends on the stakeholder requirements.
There is a pressing and urgent need for a technical specification to ensure interoperability and longer term sustainability of 3D data metadata and paradata, defining among other harmonised means to annotate 3D content, to combine 3D with audiovisual content, or to embed additional dimensions (e.g. time, material and story).
Advancements in 3D data acquisition software leveraging artificial intelligence will make 3D digitisation easier, faster, more accurate, and more informative. Faster connections, bigger bandwidth and lower latency, will improve real time global use and long-term availability and preservation, allowing to work with larger data volumes and bigger 3D models of higher resolution.

Learning from practice, 9-13 May 2022

RURITAGE Summer School dedicated to heritage-based regeneration at regional level

RURITAGE is an EU H2020 project which aims to regenerate rural areas through heritage.
Starting from the assumption that the cultural and natural heritage of European rural areas needs not only to be safeguarded, but also promoted and sustainably enhanced for regional and community development, RURITAGE intends to regenerate rural areas with the help of 5 Systemic Innovation Areas (SIAs) framework which identifies unique heritage potential within rural communities: Pilgrimage, Resilience, Sustainable Local Food Production, Integrated Landscape Management, Migration and Art and Festivals.

The project organized its next Summer School on May 9-13, 2022.
The event, titled “Heritage-based regeneration at regional level: learning from practice”, is arranged within the RURITAGE project by Savonia University of Applied Science.

It will be delivered in presence at the Savonia University, Kuopio Finland and include both lectures, study visits and interactive workshops with the participants.

The course will introduce to the RURITAGE methodology supporting rural areas to co-develop through their local heritage.
Savonia will give lectures based on their expertise on local development, especially as the Region of Gastronomy 2020-21.

The objectives of the Summer School are:

To learn from other regional development projects throughout Europe through a landscape, pilgrimage, local food, and art & festival perspective as a driver
To take part and learn from practical experiences and reflect on how they could be further adapted to your own local context
To exchange knowledge, experiences, and further network for future opportunities.

More information and the programme are available at https://www.ruritage.eu/summer-school-finland-2022/

webinar by One Dance UK, in partnership with the EU-Funded Project WEAVE

Fundraising 101 for *Global Majority dance practitioners

image courtesy of Rosa Cisneros, C-DARE Coventry University.

The EU-Funded WEAVE Team has been hosting several Capacity Building events over the last few weeks. On April 22^nd we held our final LabDay in the series but we continue to challenge issues in the dance and cultural heritage sector by creating spaces and events where under represented communities can come together, network, build solidarity and share best practices.

Rosa Cisneros from C-DaRE and a member of the WEAVE consortium, is also part of One Dance UK’s HOTFOOT Magazine editorial group and regularly contributes to the magazine. The focus of the publication is to highlight work and events from Dance of the African Diaspora and build synergies. For this event the WEAVE team have partnered up with One Dance UK to run Fundraising 101 – Operating as a *Global Majority Fundraiser in 2022.

More info HERE: LINK

Date and time: Thu, 5 May 2022 15:00 – 17:00 BST

About this event:

Are you a Global Majority Dance practitioner?
Would you like to gain knowledge to fund your work/company/project?
Want to know about the different types of funding available to you?
Need to know about the changes to Arts Council England project grants, or hear about Arts Council funding for the first time?

One Dance UK, in partnership with WEAVE is thrilled to host a webinar covering the current fundraising landscape for Global Majority dance practitioners.

Discover how to navigate your own narrative of being a Global Majority practitioner when creating your case for support.

Gain an overview from the Arts Council England (ACE) on Project Grant pathways and hear from the Chartered Institute of Fundraising (CiOF) about their RAISE programme.

With guest speaker, inclusive fundraising expert and co-founder of The Women of Colour Global Network; Haseena Farid.

Build confidence and knowledge and, most importantly, join the conversation on how to weave the vital experiences, identities, and expertise of our Global Majority communities into potentially successful funding bids.

The event is live BSL translated and a captioned version can be sent post-show.

The event is free – but registration is necessary

Speakers:

* Global Majority is a collective term that refers to people who identify as Black, Asian, Brown, dual-heritage, indigenous to the global south, and or have been racialised as ‘ethnic minorities’.

More information about the project or the event contact Rosa Cisneros E: ab4928@coventry.ac.uk

The course is devoted to practices within the opportunity-driven innovation areas: landscape, local food, art & festival, and pilgrimage.

RURITAGE Summer School dedicated to heritage-based regeneration at regional level

The 3-days Summer School, arranged within RURITAGE project by Savonia University of Applied Science, will be delivered in presence at the Savonia University (UAS), Kuopio Finland on 9-13 May 2022. It will include both lectures, study visits and interactive workshops with the participants.

It is targeted at professionals (such as Practitioners, regional development institutions, representatives of project pilots), and will focus on the RURITAGE methodology supporting rural areas to co-develop through their local heritage, as well as on practices within the opportunity-driven innovation areas: landscape, local food, art & festival, and pilgrimage. Based on these areas, we will have lectures from pilots in our project that have successfully regenerated their area through these innovation areas. Savonia will give lectures based on their expertise on local development, especially as the Region of Gastronomy 2020-21. The idea is that you will be able to apply lessons in your own areas and surroundings back home.

You can find more information and apply here: https://www.ruritage.eu/summer-school-finland-2022/

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

Promoted by NEMO, open until 3 June 2022

Survey on museums and climate change

On Earth Day 22 April 2022, NEMO, the Network of European Museum Organisations, member of UNCHARTED community, launched a survey to evaluate the status quo of European museums’ transition towards sustainability in a time of climate emergency.

With a comprehensive overview, NEMO will develop recommendations for policy makers that will help steer the museum and heritage sector towards a green and sustainable future.

The survey is open until 3 June 2022.

Our planet is transforming drastically and the museum sector needs to do its part to mitigate the damaging effects of climate change, lower carbon emissions and transition to sustainable solutions. To help museums take on this task, NEMO is asking museum professionals in Europe to participate in a survey that allows them to be part of pro-actively shaping climate policy for the sector, by the sector.

The survey seeks to investigate the role of climate change and sustainability in the following themes:

Strategic Relevance
Infrastructure and Building
Funding
Risk Assessment, Adaptation and Agility
Expertise, Skills and Training
Work Methods and Guiding Principles
Public Actions
Networking and Advocacy

Access the survey via bit.ly/NEMOclimate

Europeana empowers the cultural heritage sector in its digital transformation by developing expertise, tools and policies to embrace digital change and encourage partnerships that foster innovation.

Meet WEAVE Team: Europeana Foundation

Europeana is Europe’s platform for digital cultural heritage, empowering cultural heritage institutions to share their collections with the world. Through the Europeana website, millions of cultural heritage items from around 4,000 institutions across Europe are available online. We work to share and promote this heritage so that it can be used and enjoyed by people across the world. Our work contributes to an open, knowledgeable and creative society.

The Europeana Foundation is the organisation tasked by the European Commission with developing a digital cultural heritage platform for Europe. It is an independent, non-profit organisation that operates the Europeana platform and contributes to other digital initiatives that put cultural heritage to good use in the world.

Europeana DSI is co-financed by the European Union’s Connecting Europe Facility.

Photo: Gina van der Linden, 2018, CC0

Within WEAVE, Europeana Foundation has several roles. First, to support new content aggregation and offer technical expertise, leading a task on toolkit validation, integration and compliance with the Europeana Core Service Platform. Europeana Foundation is also supports the project’s capacity building activities. It worked with COVUNI and KU Leuven on a series of capacity-building events for cultural heritage professionals on diversity and inclusion, helping them gain a better understanding on how cultural institutions can support a more diverse and inclusive sector (https://weave-culture.eu/capacity-building/europeana-events/). Finally, within WEAVE, Europeana Foundation is working on communication, dissemination and community engagement activities through new Europeana blogs, editorials and a new virtual exhibition developing from the project.

The team involved in the WEAVE project include a number of team members. Michelle Lewis is the Project & Business Development Coordinator in the Programme and Business Development team. She oversees the coordination of Europeana’s generic services projects. Sebastiaan ter Burg, Gina van der Linden and Tamara van Hulst are from the Community & Partner Engagement team. Sebastiaan works on Digital Capacity building for the Cultural Heritage sector. Gina van der Linden manages and coordinates the many events Europeana organises. Tamara van Hulst hosts Europeana’s online meetings and supports the Community & Partner Engagement team activities.

CitizenHeritage multiplier event - Pisa, 28th June 2022

The role of photographic heritage in empowering communities’ participation in cultural heritage

image: Piazza dei Miracoli a Pisa, photo offred by Lucia Tomasi Tongiorgi in Promoter Digital Gallery CC-BY-NC-ND.

Organized by Photoconsortium in cooperation with the Museo della Grafica and University of Pisa and hosted at the Palazzo Lanfranchi, in the very city center on the banks of the river Arno, this 1-day conference invited leading speakers from the Citizen Heritage consortium partners and other experts in digital cultural heritage, in Social Sciences and Humanities research and in the use of participatory approaches in a cultural and/or educational context.

The main outcome of the event was to offer insights about successful stories of citizen participation in Cultural Heritage Institutions and Higher Education Institutions. An panel discussion complemented the conference programme.

All the presentations by the speakers are available in the conference’s webpage: https://www.citizenheritage.eu/multiplier-events/Pisa/

[Show as slideshow]

In addition to the conference, a citizen collection and digitization action wasorganized to digitize family album photos from the participants, and offer them for publication in Europeana, the European digital library. Finally, a preview visit to the exhibition about golf in the Museo della Grafica happily concluded the day.

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.