Digital meets Culture

online event 23-24 November 2020

Collect & Connect: Archives and Collections in a Digital Age

Collect & Connect aims to promote exchange and discussion between researchers and heritage professionals in the field of digital heritage. The conference officially concludes the Making Sense of Illustrated Handwritten Archives research project and presents the results of finished and original research in the field of digitized archives and cultural and natural heritage collections. The 2-day program offers a mix of keynotes, a round table discussion, project demonstrations and paper presentations.

Keynotes:

Sharon Leon, Associate Professor of History and Digital Humanities at Michigan State University on ‘From Event to Data Set: Perspective, Structure, and the Problem of Representation in Data-Driven Digital History‘
Franco Niccolucci, director of VAST-LAB research laboratory at PIN in Prato, Italy (PIN – University of Florence) on ‘The data challenge for cultural and natural heritage‘
Lambert Schomaker, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen and scientific director of the ALICE (Artificial Intelligence & Cognitive Engineering) research institute on ‘From pixels to knowledge using AI: Where do the humans fit in?‘

Click here for the full program, including all paper presentations, the Round table and the Demolab presentations.

Connect with the other participants
One of the main aims of an in-person event is to connect with other participants. This can be a driver for new collaborations with different stakeholders in the field. We wouldn’t want you to miss out on that experience! NetworkTables enables you to connect with conference participants, exchange contact details and remain in touch with them after the conference. So please fill in your NetworkTables profile when you register for the event! You’ll find instructions on the registration page. NetworkTables is an online service which does not require you to install software on your computer.

Useful links and hashtags

International conference website Collect & Connect: Archives and Collections in a Digital Age. 23 – 24 November 2020, The Netherlands.

About the Making Sense of Illustrated Handwritten Archives project, its goals and its research partners.

#COLCO2020

#shareyourknowlegde

#collectandconnect

NEMO publishes Covid-19 follow-up survey

How do museums deal with the problems that emerged during the pandemic?

Six months ago, NEMO (the Network of European Museum Organisations) published a study on the impact of Covid-19 on the European museum sector.

In recent weeks we are experiencing a second wave of museum closures across Europe and NEMO started to update the map of re-openings with dates and information concerning second closures.
bit.ly/NEMOmap.

After this first study on the impact of Covid-19 on the European museum sector, NEMO has published a follow-up survey to map the status quo and check in with the museums on how they deal with the issues that emerged during the pandemic.

The second Covid study of NEMO will present an in-depth evaluation of:

Income losses, its consequences and mitigation.
Development of digital museum offers.
Questions related to a “new normal”, including the re-assessment of museum priorities and success criteria.
Staff and visitor safety during the pandemic.

Participation in this survey will help identify the policies and measures to be proposed at European level.

The link to the survey is here and responses are accepted until Friday 20 November 2020.

The Rock project presents the final report on CH and RIS3

Linking Cultural Heritage to Smart Specialisation Strategies

Today, place-based mainstream innovation policies in the EU are by large the so-called Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation (RIS3 or S3 in acronym), which are promoted as an ex-ante conditionality for member states to get access to the European Structural and Investment Funds via Operational Programmes. Those strategies should be seen as a fast track to connect heritage to innovation policies more massively, as well as an excellent way to expand funding opportunities.This report provides a pathway to those interested in connecting the cultural heritage field with the smart specialisation strategies, in particular: i) RIS3/S3 regional leading authorities wanting to focus on cultural heritage at different levels and dimensions; ii) heritage managers wanting to frame cultural heritage within the innovation policy, notably the strategies for smart specialisation; iii) city officers wanting to unlock the potential of heritage as a driver for innovation-led local development.
It is the final output of the ROCK project task named “Linking Cultural Heritage-led Urban Regeneration to Smart Specialization Strategies”. Main goal of this task was to give a transnational response to the need for better connecting heritage-applied technologies and innovative activities to the existing smart specialisation strategies.
The ROCK project has been focused on historic districts as testbeds to demonstrate the full potential of cultural heritage as a driver for regeneration, sustainable development and economic growth. Based on a role model approach, ROCK´s final goal has been refining a European pattern on heritage-led urban development and regeneration.
Download the full document here

online capacity building workshop, recording available

Digital Transformation for User Engagement in Cultural Heritage

This unique webinar organized by Photoconsortium in collaboration with Europeana and the Cyprus University of Technology was proposed in the contex of the EUROMED 2020 webconference. A capacity building workshop dedicated to Cultural Heritage Institutions looking at new opportunities offered by Digital Heritage collections and technological tools for getting closer to their existing network and for engaging with new audiences.

Digital Transformation for User Engagement in Cultural Heritage

Download the presentation from the event: PDF, 10 Mb

Following the pace of the digital transformation is a must that all CHIs are currently experiencing, requiring big efforts in digitization, online presence and social media actions, all with the objective to increase visibility and to become more deeply rooted in the heritage community. This is enabled and backended with services and systems for digital collections management, aggregation to online repositories, and tools for metadata enrichment and annotation.

During the covid 19-crisis, when they were forced to close their premises, museums and libraries became fully aware of the importance of leveraging their digital cultural collections as a form of compensation for the unavailability of the physical spaces. As the digital environment very much is a global one, CHIs are now engaging with users from all over the world, thus meeting new audiences with no geographic boundaries. Yet this expansion, both in terms of audience and digital features adding to the physical experience, remains complementary to the place and role of memory institutions as representatives of their local community and its history.

In the post-covid scenario, therefore, it will be more important than ever to reconnect with local communities, by compelling user engagement actions via user-driven storytelling, co-creation, crowdsourcing and citizen participation.

In this multidisciplinary webinar, success stories and best practices from international projects were presented as case studies, offering different perspectives on what is possible to achieve by leveraging digital collections, technology and tools.

Case studies presented and discussed in the event:

Fifties in Europe Kaleidoscope, user engagement with photographic heritage
WeAre#EuropeForCulture, co-creation events and citizen participation: stories from Nicosia
Europeana: a community empowering the cultural heritage sector in its digital transformation
PAGODE – Europeana China and Europeana XX: Century of Change: diversity, multiculturalism, identity and storytelling

Speakers:

Dr. Antonella Fresa, Promoter / Photoconsortium
Prof. Fred Truyen, KU Leuven / Photoconsortium
Prof. Marinos Ioannides, Cyprus University of Technology
Ariadna Matas, Europeana Foundation
Sofie Taes, KU Leuven / Photoconsortium

Join our virtual booth!

REACH Project at the #OpenKnowledgeWeek on line exhibition

From 27 to 30 October 2020, REACH will participate to the virtual exhibition organized in the framework of the Rock Open Knowledge Week, a four days on line event for city officers, policy-makers, urban researchers, cultural actors and civic changemakers. The event will be joined by more than 50 keynote speakers, hundreds of participants and offers an extensive programme of 20 sessions including talks, live sessions, thematic online seminars and the virtual exhibition to discover the technological solutions developed by ROCK partners and learn about other relevant EU-funded projects focusing on cultural heritage.
To join the exhibition you shall register to the event and then you will be free to visit the booths of the ROCK sister’s projects, to make questions to the exhibitors, to plan a B2B meeting, to participate to debates and exchange your knowledge and experience.
REACH will be waiting for you!!!
Register here https://rockproject.eu/ROCK-open-knowledge-week
Follow the event on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin
Download the Press release of the event

Save the date: 16-19 November 2020

NEMO’s European Museum Conference 2020:Museums Making Sense

The Network of European Museum Organisations (NEMO) invites you to discuss how museums can help visitors make sense of complicated matters – be it climate change or migration processes or economic relations. Through storytelling methods, museums can help us understand complex interrelations. Museums can work as innovative labs to test different complex scenarios, giving the opportunity to find answers for questions like:

How do we want to live?
How could the future look like?

Register to experience the online version of the NEMO European Museum Conference 2020 – Museums making sense. The conference is free of charge.
Spread out over four days, we invite you to take part in morning and afternoon sessions. In the registration form below, please tick the boxes for all of the sessions that you want to join. We will provide you with the individual links to join the sessions shortly before they take place. The links will be sent to the email address that you enter below. In most cases will you be able to join/ leave a session later/ earlier if you have to.
Full programme is available at: https://www.ne-mo.org/about-us/european-museum-conference-2020/programme.html
Contact: office@ne-mo.org
Conference webpage: https://www.ne-mo.org/about-us/european-museum-conference-2020.html

Coventry creates is now live!

18 Pieces Of Research, 18 Creative Responses

A digital exhibition of artworks created during lockdown and inspired by university research. 18 artistic responses to research dealing with several and multifaceted themes: Coventry poetry, Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matters movement, Coventry and refugees, its twinning history, women’s suffrage, homelessness and interactive games.
Coventry Creates is part of the ongoing work by Coventry and Warwick universities in the lead up to the City of Culture. The University Partnership has funded over 30 creative research projects, involving over 50 Coventry organisations and local communities.
During the March-May 2020 Covid-19 UK lockdown the two Universities selected 18 local artists to receive a grant that allowed them to continue their work during the pandemic. Coventry Creates received over 100 applications by researchers from the social sciences, arts, science and medicine from across both the city’s universities.
The project, Coventry Creates, provided up to £2,000 funding to the chosen projects so that they could keep producing artwork for this collaborative digital exhibition, in the run up to UK City of Culture 2021.
The exhibition will be hosted until December 2022 and all art works will also be kept in the Coventry City of Culture Digital Archive. The collaboration between The University of Warwick and Coventry University follows a new Memorandum of Understanding that provides them with new opportunities to work together to the benefits of arts and culture throughout the region.
Organisers invites to visit the online exhibition and participate to a survey that is available on the Coventry creates webpage.
Download the Coventry Creates flyer
Coventry Creates webpage
More blog about Coventry Creates

Espacio Byte, digital art museum, launches a new online exhibition on computer viruses

Virus Attack! First computer pandemics

Espacio Byte, digital art museum, presents a new exhibition on computer viruses.
An approach to the aesthetic dimension of disruptive phenomena in the digital ecosystem.
The curatorial project raises an analogy between pandemics in the biological and digital sphere, and how both end up interfering in the dynamics of human activities.
A reflection on how technology has been integrated into contemporary society and it is impossible to consider human and digital as separate entities.

Link to exhibition: http://www.espaciobyte.org/virus-attack

About the museum
Espacio Byte is an online museum dedicated exclusively to digital art. A source of information to learn about its first manifestations, contemporary movements, and specific issues. The museum offers a natural environment for digital-native artworks, an interface to exhibit the work of artists who, through the use of digital technology as a means of expression, explore new languages, poetics, and aesthetic values.
The platform brings together a large spectrum of practices including software, virtual & augmented reality, visual and sound art, as well as the ones created specifically to be experienced on the Internet.
Espacio Byte is a non-profit organization focused on education, a space open to exchange and collaboration. An interactive experience for recreation without physical limitations, open 24 hours a day. Founded in 2012, Espacio Byte was created with the mission of researching, exhibiting, and conserving digital art.

get your GIFs ready for the new edition of the annual contest of creativity with cultural heritage!

GIF IT UP 2020

Throughout October, GIF-makers, history nuts, culture enthusiasts, and Internet fans are invited to take part in GIF IT UP 2020, the latest edition of the annual contest hosted by Europeana that challenges people to create animated cultural heritage images and share them online. GIF IT UP is a great and fun way to demonstrate how digital tools can foster culture and creativity. This year, it’s more relevant than ever as we all spend so much more of our lives online. The internet is where we now work, play and interact with others and the COVID-19 pandemic has encouraged many cultural institutions and people to ‘go digital’ and to engage with cultural heritage – often for the first time.

This year’s contest is going even more global in its offer of inspiring and diverse content to reuse and remix and get creative with. Along with Europeana’s regular partners, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), New Zealand’s Digital NZ and National Library of Australia’s Trove, two new content partners have joined the fun – Japan Search, which gives access to digitised cultural heritage from Japan, and DAG Museums in Kolkata, India.

Website: https://gifitup.net/

HOW TO PARTICIPATE? The competition is open to people of all ages, professionals and amateurs alike. Choose among the millions of public domain works from the content partners, create your GIF, and submit your entry!

Rules: https://gifitup.net/rules/

WHAT ARE THE PRIZES? Prizes will be online art history courses from DailyArt magazine and Red Bubble gift cards. There will be a special category for the best GIF & runnersup, 1st time GIF-makers, children & teens (below 18) and a bonus category for GIPHY backdrops. Moreover, GIF IT UP has its own GIPHY Channel that exposes the participants’ creations to millions.

About Europeana

Europeana is Europe’s platform for digital cultural heritage, empowering cultural heritage institutions to share their collections with the world. Through Europeana’s collections website millions of cultural heritage items from around 4,000 institutions across Europe are available online. The Europeana Foundation is the organisation tasked by the European Commission with developing a digital cultural heritage platform for Europe. Europeana DSI is cofinanced by the European Union’s Connecting Europe Facility.
More Info on https://www.europeana.eu/en

October 12- November 27, by the Climate Heritage Network

Culture x Climate 2020: mobilising arts, culture and heritage for climate action

Culture x Climate 2020 is a virtual global forum for arts, culture and heritage-based climate action, presented from 12 October to 27 November, by the Climate Heritage Network.

Culture x Climate 2020 brings together leaders, practitioners, researchers, and experts from business, government, universities and civil society to promote new partnerships between cultural actors and stakeholders across sectors. It is designed to unite all those interested in the role of arts, culture and heritage in tackling the climate emergency and aims to enhance the capacity of these sectors to help build a climate-neutral and resilient world in the time of COVID-19.

Over a 45-day period, three events series will be held:

November Dialogues. A series of three virtual Dialogues across multiple time zones under the theme: “A Culture of Resilience: Mobilising Arts, Culture and Heritage to Win the Race to Zero” held as part of the UN November Dialogues.
Regional Climate Heritage Forums. A series of five Climate Heritage Network regional forums that will spotlight the work in each region of the world to mobilise arts, culture and heritage for climate action. They include Africa and the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, Latin America and the Caribbean, and North America.
Climate Heritage Mobilisation Webinars. A series of 7 webinars, held in partnership with Historic England’s Climate Friday, showcasing the diverse work across the Climate Heritage Network to increase the ambition and capacity of arts, culture and heritage to engage in climate action, science and policy.

In addition, on November 16, Climate Heritage Network members and other partners will meet in an action-oriented Annual General Assembly with the aim of organizing, planning and preparing to bring the voice of arts, culture and heritage to the next UN Climate Summit (COP26).