Digital meets Culture

“The societal value of culture and the impact of cultural policies in Europe”: UNCHARTED at EVA 2021 Florence International online Conference

On June 14^th 2021, the UNCHARTED project was presented at EVA Florence 2021, the “Foremost European Electronic Imaging Events in the Visual Arts”. The Conference was held at Palazzo del Pegaso, Regional Council of Tuscany, Florence and attended by participants on line.
The key aim of this yearly meeting is to provide a Forum for the user, supplier and scientific research communities to debate and exchange experiences, ideas and plans in the wide area of Culture & Technology. Participants receive up to date news on new EC and international arts computing & telecommunications initiatives as well as on projects in the visual arts field, in archaeology, history and other culture activities. It represents an important opportunity to promote working groups, new projects, technology and art exhibitions as well as to present scientific and technical demonstrations.
In this general context the UNCHARTED project was introduced by the Technical Coordinator, Antonella Fresa from Promoter srl, in the framework of session 5 “Access to the culture information” chaired by Enrico Del Re, University of Florence. After a brief description of the mission and the topic of research, Dott. Fresa presented the activities and events planned for the next future, in particular it was announced the first UNCHARTED workshop that will be held in Porto on September 2021 and will be the occasion to presents and discuss the first outputs of the project.
Download the presentation here.
Visit the UNCHARTED website regularly to follow the progress of the project and subscribe the Newsletter.

The 2021 Special Prizes shortlist is out!

The ILUCIDARE Consortium including Europa Nostra, and the European Commission are delighted to present the shortlisted projects for the 2021 edition of the ILUCIDARE Special Prizes, awarded within the European Heritage Awards / Europa Nostra Awards!
Being co-funded by the Creative Europe and the Horizon 2020 programmes, the ILUCIDARE Special Prizes are a concrete example of how synergies can be built among EU programmes to enhance their impact.
The European Heritage Awards / Europa Nostra Awards are run by Europa Nostra in partnership with the European Commission since 2002 and are widely recognised as Europe’s top honour in the field of cultural heritage.

The 9 shortlisted projects for the ILUCIDARE Special Prizes 2021 are:

Heritage-led innovation
- 3D reconstruction of the Maison du Peuple – Horta Museum, Brussels, Belgium
- Basilica of Santa Croce, Lecce, Italy
- HAP4MARBLE – Marble Conservation by Hydroxyapatite, Italy
- AP Valletta, Malta
Heritage-led international relations
- Northern Lebanon Project, Italy / Lebanon
- Friends of Bryggen and the Bryggen Foundation, Bergen, Norway
- Preservation of the Wine Cellars of Negotinska Krajina, Serbia
- Leather Painting Restoration in the Hall of the Kings of the Alhambra, Spain

EU-LAC Museums − Museums, Community & Sustainability in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, United Kingdom
Read more…
Download the press release

web-based solutions for presenting digital content

Meet WEAVE Team: the coordinator IN2

Every couple of weeks the WEAVE team will publish a blog post which will feature a partner of the WEAVE consortium. This first blog item features the project coordinator IN2 (https://in-two.com), based in Germany.

IN2’s mission is to provide software solutions that simplify how businesses and people collect, organise, discover and present digital content. IN2 builds cutting-edge scalable software for the web & mobile. The company covers the whole spectrum of application development and provisioning from human-centered-design, user interaction, software development and deployment from our own private cloud (DevOps). IN2 has a strong experience in R&D activities and the transfer of that knowledge to the market and is working closely with top universities, actively shaping European funded research in the fields of social media, digital content, digital culture, and cultural heritage. Previous work includes building a flexible framework for multimedia management and publishing, social media sensing and social media analysis, semantic annotation of web content using linked data, semantic recommendation engines, and aggregating archives of media art and building one‐stop destinations for accessing and reusing thematic content.

IN2 has coordinated the Europeana Generic Services project CultureMoves and was the main technical partner providing the underlying tools for content re-use. Previously we have successfully coordinated the H2020 project EMMA, which developed a platform that uses interactive storytelling and AI to better connect and engage with audiences through more compelling content and experiences (a result of this project was the now commercially available Tellit service – https://tellitapp.com/about).

The coordinator of WEAVE is Dr. George Ioannidis, a senior manager with many years of experience in multi-partner collaborative projects. The project also names Dr. Konstantina Geramani from IN2, who has extensive expertise in knowledge transfer and business modelling, as the sustainability manager of the project and Alexandru Stan as the main person responsible for the technical work.

Feel free to contact George (gi@in-two.com) for any questions about WEAVE.

Cover Photo by Marvin Meyer

online, 16-17 June 2021

Europeana Aggregators Fair

On June 16 – 17, the Europeana Aggregators’ Forum will open their virtual doors to cultural heritage professionals and anyone with an interest in high quality, open cultural heritage content at the Europeana Aggregators’ Fair.

The event is a a great opportunity to find out more about how high quality cultural heritage content is being made accessible to new audiences through Europeana, and how you can get involved. An exciting programme will give participants the opportunity to listen to inspiring speakers, join panel discussions, take in training webinars and ask questions of the people working in aggregation.

If you’re interested in bringing your content to new audiences, meeting the people who work behind the scenes to make cultural heritage available through Europeana and receiving guidance and training from experts in this field, register now!

Coordinated by the European Commission

“Towards gender equality in the cultural and creative sectors” the new report by the OMC working group of Member States’ experts

The report “Towards gender equality in the cultural and creative sectors” focuses on the role that culture plays in promoting gender equality and how to achieve gender equality within the cultural and creative sectors.

It was drafted by the OMC (open method of coordination) working group of Member States’ experts and implements the Council Work plan for culture 2019-2022 when, for the first time, the promotion of gender equality and the fight against gender discrimination were identified as goals of the EU, including in culture.
The document focusses on the following key challenges:

gender stereotypes
sexual harassment
access to the labour market and the gender pay gap
access to resources
access to leadership positions and female entrepreneurship

A chapter is dedicated to examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women working in the cultural and creative sectors.

The report provides recommendations on how to achieve gender equality and diversity and use the potential of culture and arts as a vector for promoting these values.

It also displays an overview of over 250 good practices from all over the EU.

More information at https://ec.europa.eu/culture/news/new-report-recommends-how-close-gender-gaps-cultural-and-creative-sectors

Download the report here.

a three years journey across cultural tourism in Europe

Kicking – off the INCULTUM project

On the 4th of June 2021, the large group of partners from all over Europe met online to officially start the INCULTUM project. The core activities are about researching and empowering cultural tourism in peripheral areas, also unlocking their potential by the implementation of a series of local pilot projects.

Spanning from North to South and including a variety of natural and historical sites, the pilots will enable cross border collaborations and innovative approaches to sustainabel tourism and development. In facst, tourism is more than travelling and consumption: it is a way to learn and improve oneself, to enrich one’s vision and improve mutual understanding. Thus it has great potential when it comes to culture, nature, knowledge and personal experiences.

Discover the INCULTUM Pilots: https://incultum.eu/pilots/

Nemercka Mountain in the Vjosa Valley (Albania)

The INCULTUM project deals with the challenges and opportunities of cultural tourism with the aim of furthering sustainable social, cultural and economic development. It will explore the full potential of marginal and peripheral areas when managed by local communities and stakeholders. Innovative participatory approaches will be adopted, transforming locals into protagonists, able to reduce negative impacts, learning from and improving good practices to be replicated and translated into strategies and policies.

The ten pilot cases of living territories and communities will be investigated and on the basis of the findings innovative customised solutions will be co-created. Additionally, pilots will be used to identify and compare drivers and barriers that account for the success or failure of participatory models. Pilots will also allow to assess outcomes and analyse the pre-conditions needed for a future full implementation and scaling up of potential solutions. Pilots will provide new quantitative and qualitative data that will be combined with official statistics and novel data gathered by the use of self-developed IT applications and the exploitation of previously untapped data sources.

The research behind the project will eventually generate recommendations for effective and sustainable policies, and will create new synergies among public and private stakeholders and new investments.

Ireland, photo by John Tierny

discussing the concept of citizen science as a participatory research methodology in cultural heritage

CitizenHeritage presented at NTNU event

CitizenHeritage project partner Katerina Zourou (Web2Learn) was invited by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Brussels office, to give a presentation about CitizenHeritage project on June 4.
The topic of the talk was “Citizen science initiatives in the cultural heritage sector: insights into open cultural data”

Citizen science — active public involvement in scientific research — is growing bigger, more ambitious, and more networked and supports the open science ideal through open knowledge circulation and open data (Irwin, 2018; European Commission, 2020). The presentation discusses the concept of citizen science as a participatory research methodology in cultural heritage and reviews good practices in creating and communicating open cultural data in citizen science initiatives.

A sample of 25 practices of European Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) that we analysed between December 2020 and March 2021 will be presented through the following nine dimensions of openness: Open access; Open data; Open metadata; Open metrics; Open-source software/hardware (use or development); Open access results; Open file formats, Open datasets and Open documentation. The analysis will take the form of data visualisations for the public. This presentation contributes to the understanding of barriers and enablers in the documentation of tangible and intangible cultural heritage in participatory, citizen-enhanced ways

Link to Abstract: https://www.ntnu.no/machform/view.php?id=946685

Katerina Zourou, PhD, is a senior researcher in learning and teaching from an open perspective (open educational resources and practices) and from a networking and collaboration perspective (collective learning, social networked learning). She is also head of Web2Learn in Greece. She acts as project leader or partner in transnational projects funded by the Council of Europe, the European Commission, and national funds.

Registration is now open for the 2021 European Research and Innovation Days

The EU annual meeting has recently opened the door to registration. This second on line edition is planned for the 23^th and the 24^th June 2021. As every year this Research and Innovation event organised by the European Commission, will bring together policymakers, researchers, entrepreneurs and the public to debate and shape the future of research and innovation in Europe and beyond.

The rich two-day programme will foster connections and collaborations between individuals and experts from all areas and will assure a dynamic and interdisciplinary discussion. The virtual event consists of two main areas: the Event Area (which hosts Live Sessions, Workshops, the Horizon Village, the Networking and the Game Zone) and the European Research and Innovation Exhibition featuring over 100 of the best research and innovation projects. Participants will be able to move easily from one area to the other and discover all interactive features available.

The European Research and Innovation Days is an unmissable event for all those who are willing to build a greener and more digital future.Participate!!! Register now and reach more information here. Follow the event on social media! #RIDaysEU

online 23-24 September 2021

Discovering Chinese Heritage in Europeana – PAGODE Final Conference

See the full programme here: https://photoconsortium.net/pagode/final-conference/

Recordings of the event are made available on the same page.

PAGODE is a Generic Service project granted by the European Commission in the frame of the Connecting Europe Facility Programme, in support to Europeana. Several European cultural institutions participate in the project as partners and are associated to contribute with their digital collections about Chinese cultural heritage. PAGODE project has set out to increase rich user experiences and high audience engagement with Europeana by proposing a thematic approach in the aggregation, curation and presentation of Chinese culture related content that is hosted in European museums and cultural institutions.

A better understanding of the cultural values of China and of the cultural exchanges between China and Europe will allow European institutions to connect and share more widely their collections and metadata across new sectors and borders, increasing awareness and usage of Europeana internationally.

In this two-day conference, speakers shared their experiences of making Chinese cultural heritage collections accessible via Europeana and of developing tools towards this direction. The project results were also presented as well as exchange of knowledge and best practices that support the digital transformation of cultural heritage institutions with a focus on Chinese Cultural Heritage hosted in European Cultural Institutions.

#EuropeanaChina

#CEFTelecom

#ConnectingEurope

#allezculture

online 16-17 June 2021

PAGODE at Europeana Aggregators Fair

In June 2021 the Europeana Aggregators’ Forum and Europeana Foundation held the first ever Aggregators’ Fair, and PAGODE had a prominent participation with one ignite talk by Kostas Kostantinidis (Postscriptum) on day one and a dedicated session entitled Behind the scenes of PAGODE: building an aggregation value chain by Antonella Fresa (Promoter), Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik and Maja Veselič, (University of Ljubljana) and Sofie Taes (PHOTOCONSORTIUM) on day two.

At this online web conference, the Europeana Aggregators’ Forum opened their virtual doors to cultural heritage professionals and anyone with an interest in high quality, open cultural heritage content. The exciting programme gave participants the opportunity to listen to inspiring speakers, join panel discussions, take in training webinars and ask questions of the people working in aggregation. It was a great opportunity to find out more about how high quality cultural heritage content is being made accessible to new audiences through Europeana, and how institutions can get involved.

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