Digital meets Culture

Promoting the Practice of Digital Curation

The 2020 Annual Global Art Access Corporation Curatorial Competition

The Global Art Access Corporation is a nonprofit focused on arts, culture and humanities. It was founded in 2019 with the aim of promoting access and engagement with art and history to a wider audience, through the creation of analog and digital educational programs, the foundation of partnerships with stewards of material culture and educational or communications platforms and the development and application of new and existing technology.

The main sectors of activity are:
Digitizing Private Collections. Global Art Access Corporation offers support to digitize the publicly inaccessible art in high resolution or gather already digitized artwork in order to help the stewards of privately held or difficult to access material culture to reach a wider audience with their collections and archives.

Quarantine Museum Education. This education initiative aims at bring together schools and museums, forced to close due to the COVID19: trought technology a virtual community is created where students can learn from museum education professionals.

Digital Accessibility and Inclusion. Global Art Access Corporation helps institutions to understand how improve accessibility measures to don’t exclude website visitors with disabilities, the websites must become inclusive and include programming for visitors with learning differences.

The Corporation has launched its first Annual Curatorial Competition focus on the value of open access images.

The museums around the world have worked hard, particularly in the recent months, to digitize their collections and to facilitate open access images of public domain works of art.

The 2020 Annual Global Art Access Corporation Curatorial Competition is dedicated to promote this effort, stressing the value of open access images and valorising digital exhibitions.

All exhibitions must be submitted by the 1st October and the finalists’ exhibitions will be published on Global Art Access Corporation’s Website.

A commission of professionals will consider each submission and three finalists will be selected by October 15th.

The 1st November a Grand-Prize winner will be announced.

Further information here.

Paris (France), 18th September - 4th October 2020

S+T+ARTS exhibition VISIBLE SENSIBLE

The new S+T+ARTS exhibition VISIBLE SENSIBLE is opening at Fondation Fiminco, in Romainville (Grand Paris), from September 18th through October 4th, organized by two partners, French Tech Grande Provence and Fondation Fiminco.

Today, 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to rise to almost 70% by 2050. Over the past century, our cities have been built primarily on an efficiency and productivity approach. However, the technological advances that have benefited our societies have shown their limitations, those of the depletion of natural resources and the destruction of natural ecosystems. Against the background of climate change and environmental emergency, the concept of smart city, the ultra-technological and connected smart city, has given way to the concept of a resilient and sustainable city. Undoubtedly, this urban ideal implies changing the rules of the game, reinventing our living spaces, private or public, questioning our way of thinking and living in the city.

What place should be given to technology in this transition process? How can they be seized upon to create new imaginations, collective and participatory systems, spaces for reflection and criticism?

The exhibition “VISIBLE SENSIBLE“ invites us to observe, question, imagine, build our future living spaces, intimate or shared, real and virtual. In this exhibition, connected objects, virtual reality and AI, are all technologies made visible and therefore more transparent, through sensitive artistic experiences. Around interactive installations resulting from collaborations between artists and researchers, the public is invited to become an actor of a creative, poetic and sustainable innovation.

Website: https://www.starts.eu/agenda/regional-starts-center-exhibition-visible-sensible/detail/

This interactive exhibition includes the artwork of Yann Deval & Marie-Ghislaine Losseau, So Kanno’s installation, and the collaborative game of the SONY Computer Sciences Laboratory – Paris.

online event, 11-13 November 2020

Europeana 2020: Crisis, Change and Culture

2020 is not the year we thought it was going to be. A global pandemic has changed our day-to-day lives. The Covid crisis has brought home how connected our lives are across the globe, while the injustices and societal inequalities that exist between them have been thrown into sharp relief. This demands a response from us. Above all, this year has shown us that we need to build more coherent, coordinated and effective approaches to dealing with the challenges facing society, whether it is a short-lived natural disaster, a pandemic, or the ongoing battle to combat climate change.

This is as true for the cultural heritage sector as it is for our wider society.

In recent months, culture has shown to be a compelling force: people turned to digital technology and communication to share culture and come together as families, in friendship groups and as communities. As we move through and on from these crises, how can digital culture create meaningful and positive change in our society?

Now is the time to look critically at the role of cultural heritage, and reimagine it.

Europeana 2020 builds on that momentum to explore how – together – we can develop an open, knowledgeable and creative society.

Website and registration: https://pro.europeana.eu/page/conference#

Call for proposals is open until 30/9.

The experience of atomic bombing through stories collected in a digital archive

Hiroshima, 6th August 1945: the “Bomb Experience”

text by Caterina Sbrana.

“It was a hot, clear morning. I was getting ready to leave for the Tax Office, near Hatchobori, where I worked as a Mobilization Workforce Student. There was a bright flash and an extremely loud noise and then the house crumbled. For a few minutes I was in darkness. I lay on the floor, covering my ears and eyes, unable to move.

I waited for some light to shine through the rubble and dug myself out. I went and stood in the yard and looked around. All of the houses in the area had collapsed and the roofs were sprawled on the ground. By the time I got to the streetcar tracks, I was completely surrounded by fire. So I took the only way out, which led me in the direction of Yoshijima. There were many people around me escaping the fire, but no one spoke. We all walked with a horrified look across our faces. Many people were swaying as they walked. They were naked apart from rags hanging from their outstretched arms. I was not thinking very clearly and my mind could not comprehend why they would all be naked. I mostly remember the destroyed houses and water squirting out of the broken pipes” […].

This is the beginning of Teru Feruta’s (maiden name, Kawaguchi) tale “My A-Bomb Experience”.

A month has passed since August 6th. A date on which each Japanese, in their own way, remembers the terrible epilogue of the Second World War. As usual, every year, the press dedicates articles or broadcasts to commemorate this terrible page of human history and proposes us testimonies of survivors who, year after year, are always in fewer numbers. The words, written or spoken, remind us that at 8:45 am “Little Boy”, so called the enriched uranium nuclear bomb, was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima bringing with it death and destruction. Three days later it was Nagasaki’s turn. 100 to 200 thousand civilians died. 75 years divide us from that August 6th, 1945, but memory can approach that event and not let it fall into oblivion, browsing the specifically created website.

The home page is gradually enriched with pictures or photographs of places; by clicking on a portrait we receive some informations: Kiyoko Takenaga: tells what happened to his family on that dramatic day. Image from: http://hiroshima.archiving.jp/index_en.html

To deepen our knowledge I suggest to visit the Hiroshima Archive website, as through the stories of survivors we can consolidate our idea of the repudiation of war no ifs, ands, or buts.

Hiroshima Archive is “a pluralistic digital archive using the digital earth to display on it in a multilayered way all the materials gained from such sources as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the Hiroshima Jogakuin Gaines Association, and the Hachioji Hibakusha (A-bomb Survivors) Association.

All users can get a panoramic view over Hiroshima to browse survivors’ accounts, photos, maps, and other materials as of 1945, together with aerial photos, 3D topographical data, and building models as of 2010. The archive aims to promote multifaceted and comprehensive understanding of the reality of atomic bombing”.

By clicking on Viewing with Digital Earth a series of images appear and each photograph can be enlarged and tells the epilogue and the consequences of the release of atomic bombs. Image from: http://hiroshima.archiving.jp/index_en.html

The “Hiroshima Archive” has been produced in 2011 by melding a large amount of materials accumulated over 66 years with the latest Internet technologies, with a view to passing on the experiences and messages of A-bomb survivors to future generations.

The interactive map on the home page is gradually enriched with pictures or photographs of places. Clicking on the photos of people appears the name of who tells and a description.

Another example of the destruction of bombs is witnessed by this photograph. Image from: http://hiroshima.archiving.jp/index_en.html

If we click on the photos of the environments we can get an idea of the level of destruction of the bomb.

A 5-minute video with captions in Japanese and English takes us to Japan. A circular tale that begins with the image of a watch dial that marks 8:45 and ends with the same dial that continues to mark the same time. As if time had stopped. In between, starting from the Peace Memorial, the narration tells, through a series of photographs, the life of Hiroshima before the nuclear attack.

We share the goal of the creators of the archive “to make the archive a platform to gather the threads of stories for the future by sharing the past memories and the present messages in both real and web spaces” and “to collect from all over the world messages of hope for peace and nuclear abolition and incorporate them into the digital archive”.

http://hiroshima.archiving.jp/index_en.html

http://hiroshima.mapping.jp/news_en.html

http://hiroshima.mapping.jp/index_en.html

Share your knowledge on digitized archives!

23-24 November 2020: “Collect & Connect International conference”

The conference aims to promote exchange and discussion between researchers and heritage professionals in the field of digital natural and cultural heritage.

It officially concludes the NWO/Brill Creative Industries Project Making Sense of Illustrated Handwritten Archives and it will present the results of finished and original research in the field of digitized archives and natural and cultural heritage collections.

Experts in the field of:

Digital Humanities
Digital, Cultural and Natural Heritage
Digital Collection and Archives Curation
Semantic Data Integration

Are invited to submit their contributions which present, discuss, and reflect upon the technical, social, and institutional challenges digital heritage professionals and researchers encounter when enriching heterogeneous digitized collections with context.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

- Semantic web approaches to interlinking digitized historical archives and collections
- Text and image interpretation in digital collections
- Multimodal collection interpretation and access
- Handwriting recognition and heterogeneous digital collections
- Machine learning and digital collections
- Bias and digital heritage
- Computer vision and digital collections
- Digital collections’ access and inclusivity
- Sharing and visualisation of heterogeneous historical archives and collections
- Citizen science (including crowdsourcing) and digital archives and collections
- Challenges of enriching digitized handwritten archive material
- Digital capture and annotation of heterogeneous collections and artefacts
- Dealing with uncertainty, quality issues, data bias and collection gaps
- Geographical and spatial enrichment of collections
- Application of common vocabularies and data reconciliation

Next to specialized paper presentations, the conference will also entail a variety of interactive formats (e.g., round tables or demos). Six to eight papers presented at the conference are expected to be selected for publication in the ACM Journal of Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH). All positively reviewed papers shall be submitted as proceedings volume to CEUR-WS.org for online publication.

Submission deadline postponed to 18 September 2020.

The conference will be held at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, from 23-24 November 2020 and will be fully online. Registration will open later this month.

Contact person: Maarten Heerlien, E-mail: m.heerlien@rijksmuseum.nl

For more details see:

Full call for papers
Website international conference Collect & Connect: Archives and Collections in a Digital Age.
Project Making Sense of Illustrated Handwritten Archives

Follow Naturalis Biodiversity Center on Twitter for updates on the conference.

#shareyourknowlegde #collectandconnect

Save the date: 23-24 November 2020

Collect & Connect International conference: paper submission deadline extended to September 18 2020

This conference welcomes papers that present, discuss, and reflect upon the technical, social, and institutional challenges that experts and researchers in the field of digital heritage encounter when enriching heterogeneous digitized collections with context.

Thematic scope of the conference:

Many handwritten archives and collections of physical objects in the realms of natural history, archaeology, history, art history and science entail combinations of textual and visual elements whose interpretation requires a range of different expertise and computational technologies.
In recent years, libraries, archives and museums have spent major efforts on annotating and enriching their digitized collections with contextual information, in order to make them retrievable and interlinked in novel ways. Often institutions aim to enhance their reach and relevance for broader user groups. A major challenge in the field is the heterogeneous character of many such digital archives and collections.

The conference has twofold scopes:

To officially concludes the NWO/Brill Creative Industries Project Making Sense of Illustrated Handwritten Archives and presents the results of finished and original research in the field of digitized archives and natural and cultural heritage collections.
To promote exchange and discussion between researchers and heritage professionals in the field of digital natural and cultural heritage.

It is addressed to all experts in the field of:

Digital Humanities
Digital, Cultural and Natural Heritage
Digital Collection and Archives Curation
Semantic Data Integration

Six to eight papers presented at the conference are expected to be selected for publication in the ACM Journal of Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH)

Submit your paper and join the conference! Collect & Connect will take place fully online. Registration will open later this month.

For more details see:
Full call for papers
Website international conference Collect & Connect: Archives and Collections in a Digital Age.
Project Making Sense of Illustrated Handwritten Archives
Follow Naturalis Biodiversity Center on Twitter for updates on the conference.

#shareyourknowlegde #collectandconnect

Save the date: 14-15 September 2020, Lublin (Poland)

International Scientific Conference: RUINS II – protection, use, management

Conference-call-Lublin The aim of the conference is to make a broad review of the problems related to the protection, conservation, use and management of historic ruins. The key assumption of the conference is comprehensive discussing the contemporary principles and forms of maintaining historic ruins in the historical, theoretical and practical aspects. The conference also aims to present and critically analyse the most interesting examples of contemporary protection, management and use of historic ruins. The results of RUINS project and the experience gained during project implementation will also be presented during the conference.
Three thematic sessions are planned within the conference:

1.Technical and conservation issues of the protection of ruins.
The topic of the “Protection” session are theoretical, conservation, technical and design issues related to the maintenance of the ruins. The speeches should refer to the principles and forms of maintaining the ruins from the point of view of architectural, conservation and landscape conceptions. The speeches regarding technical problems – methods and technologies – protection of crenelation and faces of walls, structural reinforcements, protection against water and moisture are also expected. The papers making a critical analysis of positive and negative examples of the protection of historic ruins are particularly welcomed.
2. Development of ruins for modern utility functions
The topic of the “Development” session is the critical presentation of the examples and forms of contemporary development, use and display of historic ruins. The speeches are expected to present various forms and aspects of Page 3 contemporary use of historic ruins – tourism, cultural events, exhibitions, commercial use, museum functions, etc. The presentations of the forms of utilisation that use and adapt themselves to the historical character of the ruin without interfering excessively with the historical substance and form are particularly welcomed.
3. Management of historic ruins
The topic of “Management” session is presentation of issues related to the management of ruins – i.a. form of ownership, organisation, financing, tourist traffic, organisation of events, promotion, education. The papers presenting the models and forms of ruins’ management that include all the aspects of such activities are expected. The papers presenting the modern best practice in historic ruins management are particularly welcomed.
Conservators, art and culture historians, employees of conservation services, specialists in the protection of cultural property, designers, representatives of local governments, university employees, owners and users connected with the protection, management and use of historic ruins are invited to participate in the conference.
The conference materials will be published in peer-reviewed periodical “Protection of Cultural Heritage” (in the issue 2/2020).
Contact: ruins@pollub.pl
Venue: Lublin University of Technology, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Architecture
Website: https://www.interreg-central.eu/Content.Node/RUINS/International-Scientific-Conferance-.html
Click here for Registration
Download the Conference programme
More information here

Join the online lecture series: September1-December 8 2020

New pilot project for ERIAC: Barvalipe Roma Online University

Bavarlipe Roma Online University is an online educational platform where Roma and non-Roma can access knowledge about the Roma identity(ies), history(ies) and culture(s) thorough a collection of high-quality lectures delivered by leading Roma scholars on topics ranging from the Roma Holocaust to Roma cultural productions. In partnership with Central European University (CEU), this project is part of ERIAC’s Roma Cultural History Initiative financed by the German Federal Foreign Office (FFO).
The course consists of 15 pre-recorded lectures; Each lecture is live-streamed on facebook and followed by open discussion with lectures, guests and audience members.
The series comprise a complete curriculum of Roma Cultural History that proposes a canon and acts as a reference for Roma cultural history.
The first lecture “Roma Identity, History and Historiography” by dr. Adrian Marsh is already available on Barvalipe Roma Online University’s webpage, on ERIAC’s website together with the list of next lectures.
Rosa Cisneros from C-DaRE of Coventry University (CU is REACH project Partner Coordinator) is involved in the initiative and will release her lecture on Romani Dance History next November.
More information on: https://eriac.org/barvalipe-roma-online-university/
ERIAC Facebook page
ERIAC Website: https://eriac.org/
CEU Website: https://www.ceu.edu/