Digital meets Culture

Valletta (Malta), 22-24 February 2020

Artificial Intelligence and Digital Heritage: Challenges and Opportunities – ARTIDIGH 2020

A special session at the 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART) is called on:

Artificial Intelligence and Digital Heritage: Challenges and Opportunities – ARTIDIGH 2020

This special session welcomes papers that reflect upon, discuss and present the technical and societal challenges (e.g. labour to produce labeled datasets, heterogeneity of data, bias in training sets) digital heritage professionals and researchers are facing when trying to capitalise on the transformative power of artificial intelligence in the context of digital archive, image, and audio/visual collections. Next to position papers, we are also looking for papers in which project consortia discuss their approach and present first results.

Chairs: Andreas Weber (Twente University), Marieke van Erp (Digital Humanities Lab KNAW Humanities Cluster), Maarten Heerlien (Rijksmuseum Amsterdam).

Topics include, but are not limited to:

Bias and digital collections
Dealing with uncertainty, quality issues and collection gaps
Multimodal collection access
Geographic/spatial enrichment and access
New ways of accessing collections such as associative and serendipitous search
Network Analysis
Natural Language Processing for the Heritage Domain
Trend and change analysis
Automatic collection provenance enrichment
Reflections on the influence of AI on the heritage domain

ICAART 2020 will take place from February 22 to 24 in Valletta, Malta.

Please find the full call for papers at http://www.icaart.org/ARTIDIGH.aspx

The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History accompanies the virtual travellers in the history of art, millennia before Christ

Discovering the Met’s website and online resources

Text by Caterina Sbrana.

Dear readers, I once again speak about New York and in particular about the Met, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which digitized a large number of historical documents in the last two years and made them available to the “World” via their website. The Museum has three sites in New York City: The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.

Those who browse the Mets’s website, millions of visitors, immediately understand what its mission is:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art collects, studies, conserves, and presents significant works of art across all times and cultures, in order to connect people to creativity, knowledge, and ideas.

I will go into further articles on the history of the Met, as well as the various collections on line. Today I would like suggesting the virtual navigation along The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History founded by the Heilbrunn Foundation, New Tamarind Foundation, and Zodiac Fund, that tells the story of art and global culture.

Navigation is made easy by the fact that you can select the period (from 8000 B.C), the geographical area or theme. Take Mesopotamia as an example: A universally accepted chronology for the entire ancient Near East remains to be established.

[…] By 8000 B.C., agricultural communities are already established in northern Mesopotamia, the eastern end of the Fertile Crescent. Early in the sixth millennium B.C., farming communities, relying on irrigation rather than rainfall, settle ever further south along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

I suggest some virtual paths that you can follow along the timeline: the section Key Events describes historical facts in chronological order; Related correlates facts and events; Work of Arts shows archaeological finds of extraordinary beauty. We can study the East, the Middle East, some African countries, Central Europe, America, Oceania.

Take for example the Roman Empire in the period from 1 to 500 a. C. in the Italian Peninsula: after the presentation of the historical period you can browse the images of archaeological finds, each of which presents a detailed description. The section Key events describes historical events in chronological order: the first commented date is 14 A.D. : Augustus dies and his stepson Tiberius (r. 14–37 A.D.) is left master of the Roman empire. His assumption of power is the first step toward introducing the principle of dynastic succession in the empire. One of the last, 476 A.D.: The German Odovacer deposes Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor in the West, and becomes the first barbarian king of Italy.

As I said the Related section, correlates through keywords the events, in this case of the Italian peninsula, with other events of the neighboring countries. In subsequent articles I would like to describe Asian art, especially that of the Batak ethnic group, but also the extraordinary history of Chinese calligraphy and much more.

It is not difficult to imagine how such and numerous documents can be used in the field of education and the possibilities that students could have, not only to carry out interactive research but to understand the richness of the different cultures.

https://www.metmuseum.org/

Amsterdam (The Netherlands), 16-20 September 2019

iPRES 2019 – Eye on the Horizon

In its 16th edition, the iPRES conference will bring together scientists, students, researchers, archivists, librarians, providers, and other experts to share recent developments and innovative projects in a wide variety of topics in digital preservation from strategy to implementation, and from international and local initiatives. Year on year the debate and research profiled at iPRES have moved digital preservation from a technology driven niche specialism of experts to a global challenge with the community to match.

iPRES 2019 is hosted by the Dutch Digital Heritage Network, a collaborative effort of a group of leading heritage institutes, helping to address the challenge of reliable access to digital resources. The ultimate goal is to develop a network of common facilities, services and knowledge base to improve the visibility, usability, and sustainability of the rich digital collections of Dutch heritage institutes. iPRES and the Dutch Digital Heritage Network are all about preserving our digital heritage for the future.

The Conference Theme is Eye on the Horizon, aiming to broaden the voices and approaches participating in the conference, reflecting the venue and looking forward to the future. The future of digital collections but also the future of the iPRES community. This main theme is subdivided into five major themes:

Collaboration: a Necessity, an Opportunity or a Luxury?
Designing and Delivering Sustainable Digital Preservation
Exploring New Horizons
Building Capacity, Capability and Community
The Cutting Edge: Technical Infrastructure and Implementation

Information
All information regarding the conference is on the conference website www.ipres2019.org.

Registration to the iPRES Newsletter via communications@ipres2019.org

Social media: @iPRES2019 on both Twitter and Instagram.

Any questions, please contact info@ipres2019.org or contact one of the Programme Committee Chairs directly.

Berlin (Germany), 20-22 September 2021

Languages and the Media 2021 – NEW DATES

Due to the impact of the COVID-19 virus, the organisers of Europe’s most renowned conference on audiovisual localisation have announced the postponement of ‘Languages & the Media.’

The conference, which was scheduled to take place in December 2021, is rescheduled on 20-22 September 2021 at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Berlin.

Our mission has always been to provide a rich environment to connect, share valuable insights and knowledge, and to educate and engage our community in ways that we feel virtual environments cannot fully replicate. As event organisers, we strongly believe that on-site networking and social mingling are the essence of the Languages & the Media experience that our attendees have come to love over the years. Therefore, we have taken the decision to reschedule the event to 2021, when circumstances should allow us to deliver the kind of event you look forward to in a safe manner.

Please look at the FAQ page of the conference website, www.languages-media.com, for more information and to contact the organisers directly if they have specific concerns.

>>>>>

The theme of the 13th International Conference on Language Transfer in Audiovisual Media will be “Riding the wave” of recent trends that are fast becoming reality in audiovisual localisation.

New working conditions are rolling in faster than ever before. Innovation is the order of the day. The industry is consolidating while new entrants are disrupting the conventional workplace. Platforms are proliferating. Immersive environments are becoming more pervasive. New workflows are emerging. Concurrent translation and post-editing are gaining ground. Language tools are being integrated and experimentation and reinvention abound.

The need for research has never been greater. With the validity of older norms and standards under scrutiny, new models of good practice are emerging, forcing the audiovisual localisation industry to take stock and re-examine audience needs while legislation and regulation are also whipping up the wind of change. As our 2018 keynote speaker David Padmore pointed out, our shared goal is to break down language and sensory barriers to audiovisual content that educates, informs and entertains the world. To achieve this, all stakeholders must come together and collaborate to address our industry’s challenges with responsible, comprehensive and fair strategies.

The conference will include innovative presentations and workshops that focus, among other topics, on emerging tools and practices, including videogame localisation, machine translation and post-editing, transcreation, ad localisation and new revoicing applications. Click here for a full list of conference themes and subthemes.

Secretariat: ICWE GmbH
Leibnizstrasse 32
10625 Berlin, Germany
Tel.: +49 (0)30 310 18 18-0
Fax: +49 (0)30 324 98 33
E-Mail: info@languages-media.com
www.languages-media.com

10-12 July, L’Aquila, Italy

The REACH project at Silk Cities conference 2019

The international Conference “Reconstruction Recovery and Resilience of Historic Cities and Societies” took place in L’Aquila from 10 to 12 July 2019.

It was organized by Silk Cities an independent professional and academic initiative for contextual knowledge exchange, research and advocacy.

In the framework of Small Town Heritage pilot action, Paola Branduini and Fabio Carnelli, from Politecnico of Milan, associate partner of the REACH project, in collaboration with Mauro Fazio, MISE, presented the first findings of the survey from North Italy about the preservation of rural landscapes as a tool for building resilience in the context of small towns.

Main topics of the conference:
– Managing reconstruction, heritage and city planning
– City recovery: social, psychological, economic and culrural heritage
– Linking urban resilience and cultural heritage

A special sessions on L’Aquila was planned

Further information:

http://silk-cities.org/

Conference Poster

Conference Programme

The Municipality offers an APP that takes us in the town “that disappears”

Civita di Bagnoregio, a pearl in the middle of Lazio region (Italy)

Text by Caterina Sbrana, photos by Fabrizio Sbrana.

Dear readers, this time I’ll take you to a village that I consider an authentic open-air museum, where alleys, palaces, small squares and the bell tower tell us of a distant past in an extraordinary valley surrounded by gullies. When arriving at Civita, indications inform us that it is possible to download for free an APP that is a guide for the village, which I of course immediately did.

The APP has a commercial section with information about restaurants, farmhouses, pizzerias etc..; it begins with a tourist guide about Civita of Bagnoregio and Bagnoregio. We are in the Lazio region, in the province of Viterbo. I wrote that it is an open-air museum: Civita dates back to 2500 years ago, when the Etruscans settled here. Porta di Santa Maria is the only door left. Someone thinks the original doors were five, someone else thinks there were two doors in origin. Porta Santa Maria allows us to enter the village after having passed a long walkway suspended over the valley. In the guide we can read “ The Etruscans made Civita (of which we do not know the ancient name) a thriving city, favoured by the strategic position for trade due to the proximity to the most important communication routes of the time”.

I suggest you read the first part of the guide, that contains historical information about the village, on your smartphone before you go up, before crossing the pedestrian bridge that was built in 1965. I say this because, while climbing, it is better not to take your eyes off the view of the village and the surrounding valley that offer breathtaking views. With the help of the APP we discover the history of the village, why Porta Cava has become Porta Santa Maria, the domination of the Lombards, the struggles between Guelphs and Ghibellines, the history of the church of San Donato.
An interactive map shows us the most interesting places: the house of San Bonaventura, the museum of landslides, the Chapel of the Madonna del Carcere.
From the APP you can buy the ticket to Civita, enter a Live Chat in which the virtual assistant “Napoleon” offers you a choice of 104 languages (marked with flags) to give you directions, discover events, read the latest news. Also, activing the GPS device, the APP follows you one step after the other and leads you to the point where you want to go, especially allowing you to plan your tour from home.

A museum that lives, a place of extraordinary beauty, a discreet APP that take us on a beautiful tour.

Website and info: https://www.civitadibagnoregio.cloud/scarica-lapp-civita-di-bagnoregio/

deadline for submissions is 1 October (full papers) and 15 October (posters and presentations) 2019

e-AGE2019 Call for papers and posters

Scientists, researchers and educators are invited to submit full papers reporting on their original and unpublished research in e-Infrastructures and computational and data-intensive sciences for e-AGE, Integrating Arab e-infrastructure in a Global Environment, the annual international conference organized by the Arab States Research and Education Network.

e-AGE supports ASREN’s major objectives that are related to dissemination and awareness, promotion of research collaboration and joint activities, and establishment of research networks in the Arab region and worldwide.

e-AGE 2019 takes place in Abu Dhabi on 11-12 December 2019. the theme this year is “Groundbreaking research and education networks”.

Topics of interest include, but not limited to:

Scientific computing and data-intensive e-Science in areas related to energy, environment, health, climate, water, agriculture, biology, economy, medicine, as well as in social sciences and humanities.
Perspectives on NRENs, including challenges, operation, sustainability, funding, governance, business models, security and services.
Problem-solving environments, Virtual Research Environments, Science Gateways and collaborative tools, applications and services.
Education and e-Learning Technologies, access to educational resources, repositories, libraries and contents, cloud, grids, parallel and distributed computing, and high performance computing.
Internet technologies and trends, Internet of Things, Security, SDN and AAIs.
Artificial Intelligence tools, deep learning, big data, and open science platforms.

Deadline: 1 October 2019 (full papers) and 15 October (posters and presentations)

Download the Call For Papers (PDF, 574 Kb)

Website: http://asrenorg.net/eage19/

Submit your project and share your success across Europe!

Call for Entries: ILUCIDARE Special Prizes within the European Heritage Awards/Europa Nostra Awards 2020

The European Heritage Awards / Europa Nostra Awards are Europe’s top honour in the field of cultural heritage.

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

For the next two editions of this scheme, two new ILUCIDARE Special Prizes will be awarded from among the submitted applications. ILUCIDARE is a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme with the aim of establishing an international network promoting heritage as a resource for innovation and in international cooperation.

In 2020 and 2021, the European Heritage Awards / Europa Nostra Awards will contribute to ILUCIDARE by identifying, promoting and facilitating the upscaling of best practices in cultural heritage-led innovation and diplomacy.

The European Heritage Awards / Europa Nostra Awards (previously the EU Prize for Cultural Heritage / Europa Nostra Awards) was launched by the European Commission in 2002 and has been run by Europa Nostra ever since. The Awards have brought major benefits to the winners, such as greater (inter)national exposure, increased visitor numbers and follow-on funding. The Awards scheme is 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 under grant agreement No. 821394.

Are you active in the field of heritage-led innovation or diplomacy?
Submit your project and share your success across Europe!

Further informations:

Watch video

Apply now! www.europeanheritageawards.eu/apply
Deadline: 1 October 2019 (last date of sending)

europeanheritageawards.eu
ilucidare.eu

Deadline for consultation on 8 September 2019

Horizon Europe Co-design 2021-2024: share your views with the European Commission

The Horizon Europe framework programme from 2021 to 2027 is the next and largest collaborative multinational research and innovation investment in Europe with a proposed budget of 100 billion euro.

The last April, the European Parliament and Council reached a political agreement on Horizon Europe and started to prepare the strategic planning process to identify missions and European Partnerships, major policy drivers and strategic policy priorities.

The planning focused in particular on ‘Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness’ and will help shape European research and innovation investments in the coming years.

As part of the process, the Commission has launched a public consultation to collect input from across Europe and beyond to discuss on the strategic orientations of the future European Research and Innovation programme Horizon Europe in particular for the first period 2021-2024.

European Commission encourages everyone with an interest in future EU research and innovation priorities, to share their views through the consultation, which will close on 8 September 2019, and to participate at the key event European Research and Innovation Days.
This event is an annual policy event of the European Commission, bringing together stakeholders to debate and shape the future research and innovation landscape and it will take place in Brussels from 24 to 26 September 2019.

More info here.

European Young Heritage Professionals Forum, 20-24 May, Zadar, Croatia

A new generation of professionals and Cultural Heritage Messengers

The European Young Heritage Professionals Forum was organized by UNESCO in partnership with the European Union within the joint project ‘2018 – European Year of Cultural Heritage: Engaging Youth for an Inclusive and Sustainable Europe’.

It took place from 20 to 24 May 2019 in Zadar, Croatia, hosted by the Croatian Commission for UNESCO and the Croatian Ministry of Culture.

The Forum is developed in close cooperation with the non-governmental organization Diadrasis.

The aim of the Forum was to explore potential synergies and challenges of working on tangible and intangible cultural heritage in the European context to create a new network of young cultural heritage professionals.

Every day, project laboratories took place, and the 28 participants, from the Member States of the European Union, had the chance to collaborate with peers and experts to refine their ideas and improve their projects.
They explored potential synergies and challenges of working on tangible and intangible cultural heritage and discussed the different realities of working at local, national, and international levels.
The young professionals were be encouraged to become active ‘Cultural Heritage Messengers’ by spreading the importance of active participation of local communities to protect and safeguard the cultural heritage.

The Forum proposed an innovative approach to cultural heritage highlighting the linkages between tangible and intangible cultural heritage.

Two local case studies from Zadar offered an excellent opportunity to experience in a direct and hands-on manner: the 28 young Cultural Heritage Messengers designed interactive awareness-raising activities around each of the two local case studies and worked closely with local students to adjust their communication strategies to the local context: the participation of local people has exceeded all expectations!

The Forum was a great success and the important message that the young professionals will carry and spread in their own countries and communities is about the strong potential of tangible and intagible heritage which all are called to protect.

Further information here.