Digital meets Culture

a blogpost by guest author dr. Martina Bofulin tells about the material and immaterial legacies of Chinese people who emigrated

The heritagization of the emigration from China

img. Part of the exhibition at the Overseas Chinese Museum of China, Beijing, source: http://www.7782tour.com/museum/27.html.

PAGODE – Europeana China is proud to host an expert blog written by dr. Martina Bofulin, Slovenian Migration Institute, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

The blog explains how legacies from Chinese emigration are now taken into appropriate account as part of Chinese heritage. After the reforms from 1980s, a different view of this type of cultural heritage is giving the fair recognition to tangible and intangible expressions of Chinese culture flourished abroad.

For a long time considered to be traitors and agents of imperialism, Chinese emigrants are now turned from ideologically suspicious to patriotic, with their material and immaterial legacies being celebrated in China through museums, rituals, and monuments, in different ways at national and local level.

Read the full blog on PAGODE – Europeana China website.

Call open until October 1st 2020

The European Heritage Awards / Europa Nostra Awards 2021 are open for submissions!

Now is the chance for Europe’s most inspiring architects, craftsmen, cultural heritage experts, professionals, volunteers, public and private institutions, and local communities to be recognised for their achievements!

Watch the video.

Europe’s top honour in the field of cultural heritage, these annual Awards identify and promote best practices in the conservation and enhancement of tangible and intangible cultural heritage; stimulate the trans-frontier exchange of knowledge throughout Europe; increase public awareness and appreciation of Europe’s cultural heritage; and encourage further excellent initiatives through the power of example.

The Awards recognise outstanding conservation projects, innovative research, the longstanding dedication to heritage of professionals and volunteers, and exceptional initiatives in awareness-raising, training and education.

In 2021, up to 30 remarkable heritage achievements from all over Europe will be awarded. Of those, up to 4 winners will receive a Grand Prix with a monetary award of 10,000 Euro. One winner will also receive the Public Choice Award following an online vote conducted by Europa Nostra, the European Voice of Civil Society committed to Cultural Heritage.

In addition, from among the submitted applications, two ILUCIDARE Special Prizes will also be awarded for excellence in heritage-led innovation and international relations.

The European Heritage Awards / Europa Nostra Awards, which were launched in 2002 and have been run by Europa Nostra ever since, are supported by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. The ILUCIDARE Special Prizes are supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme.

The Awards have brought major benefits to the winners, such as greater (inter)national exposure, increased visitor numbers and follow-on funding.

Submit your application and share your success stories across Europe!

Entry forms and guidelines: www.europeanheritageawards.eu
Deadline for submissions: 1 October 2020 (date of sending)

This article is available in other languages.

September 28, 2020 - online

The HeLLo project final event

Due to the COVID-19 global crisis the Organizing Committee of the HeLLo project (Heritage Energy Living Lab Onsite) final event has come the decision on doing the HeLLo conference fully virtual.
The event will be held on September 28 from 2:15 PM (ITALIAN local time) until 6:30 PM.

The HeLLo project final dissemination and communication event will be mostly grounded on the developed in situ experiment and its results, outcome of the tested internal insulation technologies, in Palazzo Tassoni Estense (Ferrara, Italy), a 15th century listed building.

In particular, it will be an opportunity to:

remind the motivation of the project, framing it in the current international panorama
describe the technical characteristics of the project
revisit the room in Palazzo Tassoni Estense where the experiment is carried out and all the criticalities associated with the experiment itself
show the parameters that have been monitoring, where and how it is done
call up the technical worktable developed with the Heritage Authorities and present the three insulation technologies studied
present in detail the monitoring system and how data is being recorded
vidence the major frailties and difficulties faced in hygrothermal simulation
show and discuss the main results, namely through data collected in situ and the one obtained through simulation
present the main conclusions and show future work scenarios

To read more information and keep up-to-date with the registration, visit the dedicated web page.

online event, 27-30 October 2020

Cultural Heritage as Oxygen in Times of Crisis

From 27th October 2020 to 30th October 2020, the ROCK Open Knowledge Week will take place online on the topic: Cultural Heritage as Oxygen in Times of Crisis.

After the annulation of the conference in Bologna, scheduled on 14-15 May, ROCK project presents this event during which the ten ROCK cities – Athens, Bologna, Cluj-Napoca, Eindhoven, Lisbon, Liverpool, Lyon, Skopje, Turin, and Vilnius, will share their results, lessons learned, and best practices.
They will present innovative solutions and tools, developed over the three years of the project, which aimed to shape sustainable and heritage-led urban futures.
They also will underline the importance of cultural heritage as a driving force of urban sustainability.

At ROCK Open Knowledge Week will participate local administrations, businesses, policy makers and researchers, more generally to all those looking for new ways in which cultural heritage can contribute to the regeneration, sustainable development and economic growth of cities.

The event will take place online and the participation is open for everyone and free of charge.

It will be possible to engage with other participants in chat rooms, answer surveys, leave ideas on a brainstorming whiteboard, and, in a dedicated Q&A space, ask questions.

For further information, registration and programme, please watch this page.digita

Call open until October 1st!

European Heritage Awards / Europa Nostra Awards 2021

The European Heritage Awards / Europa Nostra Awards 2021 are open for submissions!

Watch the video.

In addition, from among the submitted applications, two ILUCIDARE Special Prizes will also be awarded for excellence in heritage-led innovation and international relations.

The Awards have brought major benefits to the winners, such as greater (inter)national exposure, increased visitor numbers and follow-on funding.

Submit your application and share your success stories across Europe!

Entry forms and guidelines: www.europeanheritageawards.eu
Deadline for submissions: 1 October 2020 (date of sending)

This article is available in other languages.

The international competition: Reimagining Museums for Climate Action

How can museums address the urgent problems of climate change?

There are 3 days left to register for the international competition “Reimagining museums for climate action”.
This competition invites designers, architects, academics, artists, poets, philosophers, writers, museum professionals, community groups and the public at large to think about how (re)design the museum as an institution, to help bring about more equitable and sustainable futures in the climate change era.

Museums can encourage new forms of governance and participation, support transdisciplinary research and education, and provoke systemic change across society.

This call is directed to proposals that reimagine the museum as a form of radical climate action:

What will museums look like in this profoundly altered world?
How will they function and who will they serve?
What role might they play in reconnecting nature and society, and in combatting the knotted problems of climate change, inequality and social justice?

Proposals that address the themes climate justice and green future will be particularly welcome.

The registration deadline will be on the 31st July 2020.
The submission deadline will be on the 15th September 2020.

The competition is part of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Heritage Priority Area’s contribution to the UN Climate Change Conference, known as COP26, which is due to take place in Glasgow in 2021.

For complete information, consult the website.

Training AI to be aware of cultural heritage contexts is not as simple as teaching it to identify different objects in a picture.

Leveraging the power of AI for European cultural heritage

AI will now be well-versed in cultural heritage due to a new EU-funded project called Saint George on a Bike. Composed of researchers from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and Europeana Foundation, the project has begun training natural language processing and deep learning algorithms in culture, symbols, and historical context with the aim of automatically generating rich metadata for hundreds of thousands of images from various European cultural heritage repositories.

Training AI to be aware of cultural heritage contexts is not as simple as teaching it to identify different objects in a picture. Saint George on a Bike is fine-tuning the algorithms so that it “thinks” in context and according to time parameters.

“The AI we are developing will be able to tell whether a painting shows Saint George on a horse or a bike,” said Maria Cristina Marinescu, senior researcher at BSC and coordinator of the Saint George on a Bike project. “This is not as easy as it sounds because the shapes are similar. By training it in various cultural heritage elements including the first appearance of the objects depicted and the period the painting is from, the AI algorithm would conclude that a 16th century painting of Saint George would logically depict a horse rather than a bike.”

Of course, humans could analyse and add descriptive information to every painting manually. However, the sheer number of images that would need annotations make the size of the task unrealistic. BSC´s MareNostrum 4 supercomputer provides the compute power necessary to process large volumes of AI-created data for the automatic descriptions.

Researchers in digital humanities will be able to benefit from the project´s work by using the rich metadata for statistical and symbolic analyses, among others. It will also be useful for mapping events reflected in cultural artifacts, such as social movements and historical events.

There are also advantages for users of cultural heritage websites like Europeana, which will serve as the initial test-bed for the metadata enrichments generated by the project. Visitors will soon be able to expect a richer browsing and discovery experience when accessing their archives.

About Saint George on a Bike
Co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility of the European Union, Saint George on a Bike´s main objective is to provide high-performance metadata enrichment capability by using HPC resources in the cultural heritage domain. The project runs from 1 September 2019 to 31 August 2022 with a budget of nearly €1.5M.

For more information
Visit the project website: https://saintgeorgeonabike.eu
Contact Rose Gregorio (BSC): rose.gregorio@bsc.es

online event, 17-18 September 2020

Museums and Social Responsibility – Values revisited

Within the framework of Germany’s presidency of the Council of the European Union, NEMO and the German Museums Association are co-organising the online conference Museums and Social Responsibility – Values revisited from 17-18 September 2020.

The conference will focus on what social responsibility means for museums. Through their daily work, museums make a significant contribution to social responsibility by dealing with questions that are connected to social cohesion, social inclusion and social diversity. From 17-18 September, we will discuss what museums can do, what is needed, and what still is missing to make an impact on our European society. We want to redefine and clarify the field for the museum landscape.

Website and registration: https://www.ne-mo.org/about-us/eu-presidency-museum-conference.html

online event, 22-24 September 2020

European Research and Innovation Days

European Research and Innovation Days is the European Commission’s annual flagship event, bringing together policymakers, researchers, entrepreneurs and citizens to debate and shape the future of research and innovation in Europe and beyond.

This year’s online format will provide an opportunity to connect, take stock of research and innovation achievements in the global response to the pandemic and build on the EU’s response: worldwide coordination of excellent science for global health, social and economic recovery. The interactive sessions will let participants provide input on how research and innovation policy and funding can help propel Europe’s recovery and pave the way to a green, digital and resilient future. Building on the success of last year, the 2020 edition will feature three days of intensive policy co-designing, thought-provoking panels and matchmaking opportunities.

The interactive sessions will let participants provide input on how research and innovation policy and funding can help propel Europe’s recovery and pave the way to a green, digital and resilient future. Building on the success of last year, the 2020 edition will feature three days of intensive policy co-designing, thought-provoking panels and matchmaking opportunities.

In a crucial year, following an unprecedented global crisis, just ahead of the launch of Horizon Europe – the next research and innovation programme starting in 2021 – and an enhanced European Research Area, this event is a unique chance to discuss how research and innovation will benefit the future of Europe.

Registrations will open early September.

More info: https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/events/upcoming-events/european-research-and-innovation-days_en

This ambitious, five-year project is increasing awareness and enjoyment of sound today

Unlocking Our Sound Heritage, a UK project led by the British Library

The British Library is home to the UK’s sound archive, an extraordinary collection of over 6.5 million recordings of speech, music, wildlife and the environment. These recordings, from the UK and around the world, date from the birth of recorded sound in the 1880s to the present day. The sound archive forms a vital part of the nation’s collective memory and tells a rich story of the diverse history of the UK.

However, sound items are under threat, both from physical degradation, and as the means of playing them disappear from production. Professional consensus internationally is that we have approximately 15 years in which to save many of our sound collections through digitisation, before they become unreadable and are effectively lost.

The Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project – part of the Save our Sounds programme – aims to preserve and provide access to half a million of the nation’s rare and unique sound recordings: not just those in the British Library collections but also key items from other collections preserved across the UK.

The project is swiftly progressing:

A network of audio preservation centres has been established across the UK, with expert staff in place to catalogue, digitise and preserve sounds
100,000 rare and at-risk sound recordings have been digitally preserved
Through new and improved cataloguing records, discoverability and access to sounds is being improved
A programme of learning and outreach activities is being delivered nationwide, including workshops, learning events for families, public tours and exhibitions; by the end of the project, even more people will have engaged with sound recordings.

In the “Sound and Vision” blog, the British Library curators showcase interesting and curios examples from the archives, such as this selection of waves recording. There are almost 400 specific recordings of waves in the archives, demonstrating the sheer variety of sounds that the sea can produce.

Or you can enjoy the highly complex chant of the skylark, available also in slow mode so to appreciate every nuance of this romance repeal that male skylarks use to attract partners.

If you prefer to move from natural sounds to humans, you can for example listen to an interesting recording of visual artist Barbara Kruger in conversation with the art historian Griselda Pollock at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1991.