Digital meets Culture

adding richer and interlinked metadata to existing collections in Europeana helps to make them come to surface and be more visible and easily searchable

PAGODE, an effort for annotating digital heritage collections

image: Wereldculturen Museum CC-BY via Europeana

PAGODE – Europeana China is a project aiming to highlight digital collections of Chinese heritage, with a particular attention on those made available by various cultural heritage institutions in Europeana, the European digital library. Many of those collections would benefit from additional and richer information (i.e. metadata) to make the resources more visible and easily searchable.

Among the activities in PAGODE, a big effort is deployed to annotate and enrich with additional metadata a selection of existing collections from Europeana. This is done in two different actions:

Automated semantic enrichment: by the use of algorithms and artificial intelligence, additional metadata are extracted from the existing records. The additional metadata are then re-associated to the cultural resource, also adding links to authority files and established LOD thesauri. A human-in-the-loop approach in the validation of the enrichments guarantees the highest level of confidence for these AI-generated information, thus sending back to Europeana trustable metadata. This task is coordinated by partner PostScriptum.

Deep curatorial annotation on selected objects: this is also called the PAGODE Annotation Pilot, and the action makes use of a crowdsourcing platform, where users can access curated collections sourced from Europeana and manually “tag” each record with appropriate keywords about places, subjects and highly-specific terms related to Chinese heritage. This task is coordinated by partner Photoconsortium.

Both actions are based on specific lists of keywords developed by the Sinologists, specialized in Chinese heritage semantics, of the University of Ljubljana.

Expected outcomes:

While the automated semantic enrichments are now completed, offering additional metadata to over 20.000 existing records in Europeana, the Annotation Pilot is continuing all across the summer, expecting to offer back to Europeana over 3.000 items with curated annotations.

Two campaigns were deployed in the past months: Scenes and People of China, consisting in ca. 1.900 records annotated with over 26.000 tags; and Artefacts, consisting in ca. 600 records with over 6.900 tags.

Additionaly, a summer annotation sprint is currently ongoing with participation of students of digital humanities master courses at the University of Ljubljana and at KU Leuven. Expected result from the students’ annotation sprint is to achieve additional 1.000 objects enriched with about 24.000 tags.

A dedicated seminar in the PAGODE Digital Festival series, set on 31st August 2021 h. 10.30, will showcase the impact of this crowdsourced annotation activity in terms of user engagement with digital cultural heritage and also in education.

PAGODE – Europeana China is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility Programme of the European Union, under GA n. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2019/1931839

in Karlsruhe (Germany) and online, 2-4 December 2021

EAI ArtsIT 2021 – 10th EAI International Conference: ArtsIT, Interactivity & Game Creation

image from EAI website © Badisches Landesmuseum, foto ARTSIT Uli Deck

ArtsIT takes place from December 2nd to 4th as a hybrid event at the UNESCO Creative City of Media Arts Karlsruhe, Germany, and in Cyberspace.

The conference brings together researchers, practitioners, artists, and academia to present and discuss the symbiosis between art and information technology. Since 2009 ArtsIT has become a leading scientific forum for the dissemination of cutting-edge research results in the intersection between art, science, culture, performing arts, media, and technology. The role of artistic practice using digital media is also to serve as a tool for analysis and critical reflection on how technologies influence our lives, culture, and society. ArtsIT is therefore not only a place to discuss technological progress but also a place to reflect on the impact of art and technology on sustainability, responsibility, and human dignity. Besides the main track, the event also focuses on the advances seen in two areas that have significantly contributed to the field in the last years, namely, virtualization and artificial intelligence with special sessions.

All information about the event is avialble here: https://artsit.eai-conferences.org/2021/

Calls for papers are open until 30 July:

online event, 29 November - 3rd December 2021

MTSR 2021, 15th Metadata and Semantics Research Conference

The 15th International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR 2021), as well as the SPECIAL TRACK on METADATA & SEMANTICS for CULTURAL COLLECTIONS & APPLICATIONS, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, will take place virtually on 29th November – 3rd December 2021.

Call for papers open – Submission deadline: July 25th, 2021

AIM AND SCOPE

Cultural Heritage collections are essential knowledge infrastructures that provide a solid representation of the historical background of human communities. These knowledge infrastructures are constructed from and integrate cultural information derived from diverse memory institutions, mainly libraries, archives and museums. Each individual community has spent a lot of effort in order to develop, support and promote its own systems, tools and metadata for the management of cultural information, mainly related to its particular resources and use.

In this framework, the management of the cultural information has to deal with challenges related to (i) metadata modeling, specification, standardization, extraction, (semantic) enrichment, mapping, integration, effective use, and evaluation, (ii) knowledge representation as conceptualization to provide the context for unambiguously interpreting metadata, and (iii) information integration from different contexts for the provision of integrated access, reuse and advanced services to users.

At the same time, there are also inter-domain efforts targeted to semantically align data (research data, educational data, public sector information etc.) to cultural information. New challenges are also emerged from the need to incorporate cultural information into the new publication paradigms, where a variety of resources (data, metadata, processes, results, etc.) are linked and integrated, providing better shareability and reusability. Currently, Linked (Open) Data, as part of the Semantic Web Technology, is having a major role in modernizing cultural heritage collections. Providing to users the possibility to re-use and integrate data into their own systems is currently more than a need, given that transparency and access to information is a prerequisite. A critical factor to the effectiveness of many aspects of all the above efforts is the quality of metadata, as interpreted by its context and use and evaluated by the proper measures and methods. Many institutions and aggregate infrastructures are dealing with the poor quality of metadata that inevitably results in poor integration, search and reuse, while their enrichment, in terms of contextualization, co-referencing, alignment, etc., is really challenging.

The aim of this Special Track is to maintain a dialogue where researchers and practitioners working on all the aspects of the cultural information will come together and exchange ideas about open issues at all stages of the cultural heritage information life cycle. The track also welcomes works related to semantics and applications for new approaches to cultural information publication and sharing, as well as to interlinking to other datasets published in the Semantic Web universe.

TOPICS

The papers in this special track should be original and of high quality, addressing issues in areas such as:

* Cultural Heritage metadata models, standards, ontologies, knowledge organization and representation systems

* Cultural Heritage information integration, interoperability and mappings

* Automated extraction of metadata, entities, and patterns from Cultural Heritage resources

* Metadata manual or automated (Semantic) enrichment and search

* Metadata quality metrics, tools and services

* Linked Open Data approaches in the Cultural Heritage domain

* Publication, linking and citation of Cultural Heritage information and resources

* Large volume content management

* 3D models-indexing, storage and retrieval approaches

* Infrastructures for sharing content

* Digital Curation workflows and models

* Provenance and preservation metadata for Cultural Heritage digital resources

More information on submission can be found at the MTSR 2021 call for papers web page.

IMPORTANT DATES

July 25th, 2021: Submission deadline

August 31th, 2021: Notification of decision (Acceptance/Rejection)

September 20th, 2021: Camera-ready papers due

November 29th – December 3rd 2021: the Virtual MTSR 2021 Conference will take place

SPECIAL TRACK CHAIRS

* Michalis Sfakakis, Dept. Archives, Library Science and Museology, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece (sfakakis@ionio.gr)

* Lina Bountouri, Dept. Archives, Library Science and Museology, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece and EU Publications Office – European Commission, Luxembourg (linabountouri@gmail.com)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE (TBA)

8th July 2021,Porto (PT)

Values in participation in cultural activities, UNCHARTED at KISMIF 2021 conference

This week, from 6 to 10 July, the KISMIF (Keep It Simple Make It Fast) 2021 conference, will be held in Porto, Portugal. This event is an international academic/cultural/artistic event based in the city of Porto, open for contributions from the global community of artists, researchers and activists working on all aspects of underground scenes and do-it-yourself (DIY) cultures.

The event aims to promote the debate on the most varied artistic fields: music, theater, performing arts, cinema, literature and poetry, graffiti and urban art, graphic design, drawing, architecture, radio, graphic design, drawing, architecture, cartoons and comics….
It intends to provide all participants with a unique sensory and scientific experience in terms of global DIY cultures and offers a cultural program formed by a set of artistic events, with a focus on underground music and its artistic expressions.

Each edition of the KISMIF Conference offeres a summer school where participants can analyze and discuss in depth some specific issues around the topics covered in the conference.

The 2021 edition is the fifth of the event and the topic will be ‘DIY Cultures and Global Challenges’.

The 8th July, UNCHARTED project will be present at the event with the Panel “Values in non-professional participation in cultural and artistic activities: examples from the UNCHARTED project” based on values from cultural participation.
The themes explored will be:

Values from Community-engaged artistic projects
Values from culture and community based creative tourism
Values of autonomous culture: Illegal musical events in the times of COVID-19
The Values of Remote Participation in Choirs and Cultural Initiatives during Covid-19

Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra (PT), CNRS-Université de Montpellier (FR) and Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths University of London (UK) are the UNCHARTED partners involved in the Panel with their presentations.

The ll Architecture POETRY PHOTOGRAPHIC PERFORMANCE by University of Bolton, School of the Arts (United Kingdom) will conclude this section.

The conference will have a hybrid format: on site and on-line.

More information at: https://www.kismifconference.com/
Read the programme at: https://www.kismifconference.com/programme/

a rich programme of participative events to start in Autumn 2021

WEAVE LabDays

blog by Marie-Louise Crawley and Rosa Cisneros (COVUNI).

In response to one of WEAVE’s central research questions, ‘What open and reusable digital tools can be developed for working with Cultural Heritage content?’, the Coventry team has been tasked with building up the capacity of CHIs to work with digital intangible heritage and with cultural communities. We will produce practices and guidelines for CHIs concerning community engagement and management, materials for training, considering the available tools for social transformation and negotiation strategies.

To accomplish this, we will be developing a WEAVE methodological framework. This will specify hands-on methodologies, building on the LabDay methodology used in the CultureMoves Europeana Generic Service project for communities to engage with project activities and to select the content and collections to be aggregated. Labdays will take place from Autumn 2021 onwards, targeting the following communities: Roma community; Traditional Portuguese dance and culture; Historical dance community (Early Dance Circle [EDC]); Daguerreotype photography community; Slovenian CH community.

credits: CultureMoves 2020

The LabDay framework is underpinned by Communicative Methodology (CM), a sociological method that aims to cross social, cultural and linguistic boundaries. This framework enables an open, egalitarian dialogue between researchers and participants; it is a collaboratively-held space where all voices are acknowledged and valued and stakeholders can reflect together on their needs, desires and various forms of participation.

This bottom-up approach will enable cultural communities to themselves become a driver for the WEAVE Toolkit, developing from their bespoke needs concerning the management of their intangible and tangible heritage.

credits: CultureMoves 2020

As topics addressed will include sensitive topics such as the relation to identity politics and the issues of (virtual) repatriation/restitution, the open and egalitarian nature of the LabDay methodology offers a safe space for these sensitive topics to be addressed and considered and to feed into the development of the WEAVE Toolkit.

To learn more about the LabDays carried out within the CultureMoves Project, you can read the CultureMoves White Paper and deliverable D4.1 Report on CultureMoves services demonstration, both available here: https://www.culturemoves.eu/#resources

Crawley and Cisneros have also published a short article entitled ‘Moving, annotating, learning: MotionNotes LabDays – a case study’ in the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media Special Issue ‘Digital Annotation and the Understanding of Bodily Practices’ (edited by Scott deLaHunta, David Rittershaus and Rebecca Stancliffe): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14794713.2021.1880141

The ROCK Project’s Book is out!

The ROCK project sees historic city centres as laboratories to demonstrate how Cultural Heritage can be an engine of regeneration, sustainable development and economic growth. ROCK approach foresees the systemic and flexible application of a series of role-model practices in the testing sites of three Replicator cities, to turn historic city centres afflicted by physical decay, social conflicts and poor life quality into Creative and Sustainable Districts.
This book, edited by UNIBO, highlights the major result of the ROCK project: it includes essays, practices descriptions, reflections from the project as well as a series of lessons learned from the ROCK cities and tools.
It is part of the CPCL Series, published in Open Access by TU Delft Open Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology.
Reach the book here.

#i-Portunus Houses call for applications: two days left to the round 1 deadline

The pilot project i-Portunus, financed by the European Commision, supports artists mobility focused on creating, connecting, learning and/or exploring.
i-Portunus Houses is open to hosts (organisation or established individual artists/cultural professionals) to team up with 2 to 5 artists and/or cultural professionals, legally residing in different Creative Europe countries + UK, with the intention to work together on one or more collaboration projects. The scheme is open for all cultural sectors (except audio-visual sectors), approaches and working modalities. To participate is required to organised a project with a hosting organization or with a partner in another Creative Europe Country.
Under this new pilot scheme two similar calls have been launched, to enlarge the opportunities for physical mobility:

Round 1: Friday 21 May – Wednesday 30 June
Round 2: Monday 23 August – Sunday 3 October

Throughout both submission periods, a series of online peer-moderated i-Portunus Market Square events is offered. The i-Portunus Market Square events are info- and matching sessions for hosts, artists and cultural professionals to identify, form and prepare new teams for successfully co-designing and submitting a joint collaboration proposal. These events are not mandatory.

In the framework of round 1 the main objective of the collaboration project has to be one of the following:

Create: (co-)creation of artistic work, production, performance
Connect: networking, internationalisation
Learn: increase competences, professional development
Explore: research, future collaborations/projects

Apply Now!!
More information here

The Programme is online!

The 2021 MARE People & the Sea Conference

The 11th MARE People and the Sea Conference will take place from the 28th of June to 2nd of July, 2021. This year, the conference will be held virtually and will focus on the theme “Limits to Blue Growth?”. For decades sustainable development has served as guiding concept for policy makers, including those concerned in coastal and ocean governance. At the same time, the ‘blue economy’ and ‘blue growth’ have nowadays become popular concepts in marine policy. Notions on blue growth especially ask attention for new uses of the oceans, such as renewable energy (wind at sea), deep sea mining and deep-sea fishing but also aim at highlighting ecosystem services that have societal value (coastal protection, CO2 storage and biodiversity). The concept aims to reconcile two seemingly opposing uses of the oceans: exploitation and conservation, in the same way as was intended with the use of ‘sustainable development’. The concept also seems to promise that there still is a new, not yet reached frontier for economic expansion.

MARE Policy Day 2021: Coastal & Maritime Cultural Heritage
As always, the MARE Conference is accompanied by a Policy Day. This year theme is Coastal & Maritime Cultural Heritage.

MARE, the Centre for Maritime Research, is an interdisciplinary social science organisation interested in the use and management of marine resources. Its objective is to provide a stimulating intellectual climate for academics and policymakers working on topics related to coasts and seas. Although MARE limits its action radius to the social sciences, it seeks active collaboration with other disciplines. It strives to maintain a balanced mix of academic and policy-oriented research. MARE takes a global perspective, emphasising the coastal zones of Europe, Asia, and Africa. It covers a broad spectrum of topics, drawing on expertise from fields such as law, history, economics, political science, public administration, anthropology, and geography.

Mare Conference programme and schedule here.
For more information about the theme and the policy day program, please click here.
MARE website

A female director for the Louvre!

The Louvre is about to get its first female director for the first time since its opening in 1793. Laurence des Cars, current head of the Musée d’Orsay and Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, was recently appointed by President Macron as the future leader of the world’s greatest museum and will start her new position on September 1^st.
Laurence des Cars’ focus for the future of the Louvre is threefold :

increase access to young adults and teenagers, a segment of population whose opportunities and well-being have been particularly hit by the Covid crisis
strengthen the process of restituting Nazi-looted art. As the Director of the Musée d’Orsay, des Cars initiated and spurred the restitution of the only Klimt painting owned by a French museum (Orsay) to the heirs of the former owner Nora Stiasny
present exhibitions that resonate with and address current societal events

Under her leadership, the Musée d’Orsay has seen its number of visitors increase every year, reaching 3.7 million visitors in 2019, year of the acclaimed exhibition Posing Modernity : the Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today. Trying to appeal and serve younger and more diverse audiences was already a big focus for des Cars at Orsay : her last and latest capital project for the Parisian institution (titled Orsay Wide Open and made possible by a 20 million euros donation) is a new building comprising – amongst other things – of an 650 square meters educational center dedicated to young people. This new site is set to open in 2024.

Expected outcomes:

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