Digital meets Culture

Abu Dhabi (UAE), 11-12 December 2019

e-AGE 2019: “Groundbreaking research and education networks”

The e-AGE conference had established itself as an important venue for networking among experts and scientists. In 2019, e-AGE held at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, UAE during 11 – 12 December 2019 with a focus on demonstrated successes in using research and education e-Infrastructures and a need for interoperable high speed networks at national, regional and international levels. In short words, e-AGE19 is coming with “GROUNDBREAKING RESEARCH AND EDUCATION NETWORKS” as the main theme of the conference and all activities will be centered on it.

e-AGE19 will include events, workshops and meetings centered around the following themes:

e-AGE Annual Conference
The 12th Event on Euro-Mediterranean e-Infrastructure
The 9th annual shareholders meeting of ASREN
EUMEDCONNECT3 Project meeting
AfricaConnect2 Project meeting
Internet2 Middle East SIG Meetings
Workshops dedicated for e-Infrastructure users

Moreover, special sessions will be dedicated to specific domains, mainly focusing on experiences in connectivity and e-Infrastructure, applications and services across a variety of scientific domains. It is also important to show how research infrastructure creates tangible benefits to communities and collaborations. It is still critical to demonstrate how research connectivity can promote collaboration and innovation. Different discussions will be stimulated during e-AGE to drive outcomes and concrete results on practical steps towards developing a regional e-Infrastructure.

To Learn More Visit eage19.asrenorg.net

Dubrovnik, 25-27 September 2019

THE BEST IN HERITAGE 2019 – Projects of Influence

Presenting a comprehensive insight into best practices globally, this year’s The Best in Heritage will feature 42 museum, heritage and conservation projects that have been awarded in the previous year. They have been handpicked from a list of some 300 laureates of about 50 international and national award schemes, and come from five continents.

The three-day gathering will consist of two events – IMAGINES, presenting new technologies and multimedia laureates, and the core programme, where institutional and large scale projects take the stage. Each of the events will start with a Keynote address by the 2018 “Project of Influence” winner: Historic Royal Palaces from the United Kingdom, represented by their creative producer Tim Powell, and Textile Museum Tilburg from the Netherlands, represented by the museum’s director Errol van de Werdt, respectively.

The featured laureates present an inspiring variety: from art museums to archaeological and civic engagement projects, from national educational programmes to conservation and protection initiatives, from museums of the future to environmental and community museums… and then there are apps, websites, animation… the list goes on.

The participants, usually some 150 in number and coming from more than 30 countries, will have the opportunity to get up-to-date with current trends and developments, but also to engage in discussions, and meet the presenters in person at numerous social occasions.

The organiser regards all the presented laureates as being of influence, each of them having been commended by reputable professional juries. However, every year the conference culminates by proclaiming two winners of the “Project of Influence” award – those which by their excellence and impressive presentation are esteemed as innovators with a lasting impact. The votes for the award are cast by an international audience comprised of professionals, together with a group of expert moderators which, together with last year’s laureates, form the Jury.

Defined by many participants more as an experience than a conference, and as offering a “breath of fresh air”, the gathering proudly boasts its interpersonal, intimate nature, and its role as a global meeting place for colleagues who speak the same heritage language. It is a simple, elegant, single-track event – a true celebration of professional excellence in the growing public memory sector.

The Best in Heritage is organised in partnership with Europa Nostra (with support of Creative Europe programme) and ICOM (International Council of Museums), is under patronage of The City of Dubrovnik, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, and sponsored by Meyvaert Glass Engineering and Exponatec Cologne. The local partner is Dubrovnik Museums.

Programme and registration: https://www.thebestinheritage.com/conference

About featured laureates: https://www.thebestinheritage.com/featuring

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BestInHeritage

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheBestInHeritage

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheBestInHeritage

Previous presentations: http://presentations.thebestinheritage.com

Official hashtag: #TBIH2019

Contact: info@thebestinheritage.com

Let's get involved!

Workshop on Historical Irrigation Systems Management

The 28th of June, was held in the Castillejar (Granada) a full day workshop focus on the management of historical irrigation systems.
The event was addressed to Municipalities, irrigator communities, Associations, water users and all these interested in technique of irrigation for the Guadiana Menor local area.
The initiative was organized by Agapro (Farmers and producers association) in collaboration with MEMOLab Laboratory from the University of Granada.
Prof. Jose María Martín Civantos from UGR, left a contribute talking about the values of irrigator systems and the experiences carried on in the framework of MEMOLab and the REACH projects.
Click for more information.

Pisa (Italy), 28 June - 21 July 2019

Arno, Compagno di Vita – photoexhibition in Pisa

European Commission’s project WeAre#EuropeForCulture is partnering with Photoconsortium’s network to organize participatory events in various European cities, with the aim of creating exhibitions that include both institutional and crowdsourced heritage and which celebrate the diversity of European cultural heritage, by engaging citizens in the co-creation of cultural experiences. The series of exhibitions is a legacy from the activities of the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018.

The Italian edition of the series, ARNO, COMPAGNO DI VITA, is dedicated to the lovestory between the river Arno and the citizens of Pisa: from regattas to floods, from fishing to the traditional games and festivities, the river has always been a companion in Pisa’s everyday life.

The exhibition was created with crowdsourced images, stories, objects and memories. A co-creation session with seniors, students and photo amateurs and collectors took place on 31 May; the exhibition is hosted at the Museo della Grafica and the vernissage was on 28 June 2019.

[Show as slideshow]

photo credit: (c) 31/5/2019 Martino Sisti; 28/6/2019 Rudy Pessina

ARNO, COMPAGNO DI VITA

Organized by PHOTOCONSORTIUM

Vernissage event 28th June 2019

Until 21st July 2019

https://www.photoconsortium.net/europeforculture/pisa/

12 June 2019, Consolidated Progress Report on the implementation of Commission Recommendation (2011/711/EU) 2015-2017 is available

European Commission report on Cultural Heritage: Digitisation, Online Accessibility and Digital Preservation

The Consolidated Progress Report reviews and assesses the overall actions and progress made by Member States in the European Union in implementing the Recommendation (2011/711/EU) which is one of the main EU policy instruments on digitisation, online access and digital preservation of cultural heritage material.
It is based on the Member States specific reports submitted
through the DCHE (Expert Group on Digital Cultural Heritage and Europeana).

In the report some important themes emerge:
– use of 3D technology for digitisation of cultural heritage artefacts, monuments and sites,
– initiatives to enhance digital capacity in the cultural heritage sector.
Some examples of good practice during the 2015-2017 are also presented.

The recent fire at Notre Dame that broke out on 15 April 2019 proves that immovable cultural heritage, an important part of Europe’s cultural resources, is particularly vulnerable to threats difficult to predict or prevent. In this contest, the report shows a new important trend: the Member States are increasingly working to make the most of digital technologies and reporting funding programmes for digitisation of immovable cultural heritage, some of which reported 3D digitisation in particular.

The report shows how Member States plan, organise and monitor digitisation strategies and funding across all areas of cultural heritage from library and museum archives to historical buildings.
Moreover, about the Online Accessibility of Public Domain Material, it reveals that most States promote preserving public domain status of cultural heritage after digitisation.

The largest chapter deals with the support given by the states for the development of Europeana, the European cultural platform providing access to a wide array of digital content from Europe’s libraries, archives and museums.
The data collected by Europeana confirm that quantitative targets have already been widely achieved while it is necessary to focus on quality management.
In order to promote high-quality content in Europeana, the EU funded aggregation projects have begun to include quality criteria.

The chapter “Digital Preservation” reveals that the majority of Member States has implemented a variety of action plans, strategies and initiatives for the long-term preservation of digital material: action points at the national level, activities
of public institutions, competence centres or associations taking action in this area; three Member States reported participation in European projects dedicated to digital preservation.

The Recommendation is recognised by the Member States as a very important instrument for setting up national policies, coordinating activities, keeping up with progress and to give new impetus to existing policies.
However, the Member States suggest a reinforcement and update of some themes to keep up with the overall regulatory, political and technological developments, as well as to review low impact provisions.

Further information: the report on Cultural Heritage: Digitisation, Online Accessibility and Digital Preservation

Leicester (UK), 12 September 2019

Keywords – finding the right words to find the right records

Collections Trust’s 2019 conference revisits an important topic: Keywords – finding the right words to find the right records.

If your users struggle to find things in your collections database, this event is for you. This one-day conference will be held in the beautiful Victorian art gallery of Leicester’s New Walk Museum. Aimed at anyone who works with collections, the theme is terminology control and why it matters.

Date: Thursday 12 September 2019
Venue: New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester

Tickets: https://collectionstrust.org.uk/product/2019-ct-conference/

The Collections Trust conference always aims to give both the bigger picture and case studies from a range of museums. This year is no exception, and we are delighted to confirm the following speakers, with more to follow.

Revealing hidden histories Helen Johnson, Museum Development Officer , West Midlands Museum Development
Flat file to thesaurus: improving terminologies at the National Gallery Rupert Shepherd, Collection Information Manager, The National Gallery
Virtually shoes Jane Seddon, Collections Manager, Northampton Museums and Art Gallery
Developing specialist archaeological vocabularies Dan Miles, Research Resources Adviser, Historic England
Keywords for documenting collections management processes Marta Mroczek, Inventory Manager, British Museum

If you’re in Leicester the day before, there is an optional pre-conference visit to the award-winning King Richard III Visitor Centre, and also a suitably-themed pub quiz. Follow the links for further details.

The website is actually a digital memorial to the millions of enslaved Africans forcibly pulled into the slave trade

Voyages, a digital resource about slave history

ph. Fabrizio Sbrana

Text by Caterina Sbrana.

There are various projects that look into the story of slavery and offer digital resources to historians, students and researchers. One that we already explored is the Zamani project to create a Slave Trade Database, collecting and presenting 3D digital models of monuments and sites related to the slave trade together with other spatial and contextual information.

We continue to follow the research on slavery, looking for digital documents related to slave history because this subject seems to us to be more and more relevant. Another interesting project is Voyages: an online database explores 36,000 slave voyages that occurred between 1514 and 1866. This huge project is directed By Philip Misevich (Assistant Professor of History, St. John’s University), Daniel Domingues (Assistant Professor of History, University of Missouri-Columbia), David Eltis (Professor Emeritus of History, Emory University), Nafees M. Khan (Lecturer in Social Studies Education, Clemson University) and Nicholas Radburn (postdoctoral Fellow, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences).

Voyages website

When we talk about the slave trade that has affected 12.5 million Africans, we are actually talking about the largest forced oceanic migration in human history. “From which port did the voyage begin? To which places in Africa did it go? How many enslaved people perished during the Middle Passage? And where did those enslaved Africans end the oceanic portion of their enslavement and begin their lives as slaves in the Americas?” These are the questions that researchers have tried to answer and this is how the team explained the idea behind the research and also what are the problems encountered. “Given the size and complexity of the slave trade, combining the sources that document slave ships’ activities into a single database has presented numerous challenges. Records are written in numerous languages and maintained in archives, libraries and private collections located in dozens of countries. Many of these are developing nations that lack the financial resources to invest in sustained systems of document preservation. Even when they are relatively easy to access, documents on slave voyages provide uneven information. Ship logs comprehensively describe places of travel and list the numbers of enslaved people purchased and the captain and crew. By contrast, port-entry records in newspapers might merely produce the name of the vessel and the number of captives who survived the Middle Passage. These varied sources can be hard to reconcile. The numbers of slaves loaded or removed from a particular vessel might vary widely. Or perhaps a vessel carried registration papers that aimed to mask its actual origins, especially after the legal abolition of the trade in 1808. Compiling these data in a way that does justice to their complexity, while still keeping the site user-friendly, has remained an ongoing concern.”

Through a function of the Voyages site, visitors can interact with sources and materials, they can submit new material on transatlantic slave voyages and also they can help researchers identify possible errors in the database. In the website we can also find lessons created by teachers for middle school, high school and college students. Clicking on lesson plan, web site visitors have various possibilities to access Resources with a gallery of images including: Manuscripts, Places, Slaves, Vessels.

https://slavevoyages.org/resources/images/category/Slaves/3

“This is one image of a group of illustrations published in The Illustrated London News on June 20th, 1857. The illustrations were created by the newspaper based on images sent with a letter from Kingston, Jamaica, dated May 11th, 1857, describing the capture of slaver “Zeldina” and the conditions of the slaves disembarked. The schooner “”Zeldina”” embarked slaves at Cabinda, but she was blown off her route to Cuba, captured by the British naval force in April, 1857, and stationed at Port Royal, Jamaica.”

Meanwhile the research team is also working at an African Origins database. By combining the names of 100,000 Africans liberated from slave vessels with information from Voyages on liberated Africans’ ports of origin, the “Origins website aims to better understand the homelands from which enslaved people came”. Reasearchers said: “Through these endeavors, Voyages has become a digital memorial to the millions of enslaved Africans forcibly pulled into the slave trade and, until recently, nearly erased from the history of not only the trade itself, but also the history of the Atlantic world.”

Website: https://www.slavevoyages.org/

The work of digitization allows to admire the extraordinary drawings of one of the most important wildlife artist.

www.audubon.org: A Vibrant Digital Library

Text by Caterina Sbrana.

John James Audubon (1785-1851) was not the first person who painted and described all the birds of America, but he was one of the youngest “country’s dominant wildlife artist(s)”. We are talking about his seminal Birds of America, a collection of 435 life-size watercolors of North American birds printed between 1827 and 1838, all reproduced from hand-engraved plates. This is a portal into the natural world.

A collection born from the failure of Audubon: in facts he was briefly jailed for bankruptcy; with a family to support and no other prospect Audubon goes away from Henderson, while Lucy, his wife, earns money as a tutor for rich families. With a gun, pencils, some notebooks and a young assistant, the artist collects a lot of material about American avifauna. In 1826, with his collection partially finished, he sailed to England. His life-size bird paintings, along with descriptions of wildlife, hit just the right spot at the height of the continent’s romantic era. “The American Woodsman was literally an overnight success”.

As we read in the web site dedicated to him “He encapsulates the spirit of young America, when the wilderness was limitless and beguiling. He was a person of legendary strength and endurance, as well as a keen observer of birds and nature.”

Nearly two centuries later, Audubon prints are coming to life once again in a vibrant digital library : https://www.audubon.org/birds-of-america.

https://www.audubon.org/birds-of-america/american-avocet (Plate 318)

In the digital archive it is possible to make a search by inserting the common name (not scientific) of the bird or to scroll through the paintings of birds, inserted in alphabetical order. You can also see the plates in chronological order. The birds are drawn in their habitat, while they look for food or feed the newborn, in pairs in groups or singles, while they fly or while they are placed on a branch. Plate 1, for example, represents an extraordinary Wild turkey one of the most interesting of the birds indigenous to the United States of America.

For each bird there is a long description of the areas where it lives, its habits, the mating and especially the description of what these animals do during the year. It is specified also the scientific name of both the bird and the plant represented.

https://www.audubon.org/birds-of-america/wild-turkey

“The Turkey is irregularly migratory, as well as irregularly gregarious. The males, or, as they are more commonly called, the gobblers, associate in parties of from ten to a hundred, and search for food apart from the females; About the middle of April, when the season is dry, the hens begin to look out for a place in which to deposit their eggs”.

To better understand the accuracy in the description we do a search by entering “flamingo” : we immediately find out that it is plate 431 – American Flamingo.
And immediately the description: “On the 7th of May, 1832, while sailing from Indian Key, one of the numerous islets that skirt the south-eastern coast of the Peninsula of Florida, I for the first time saw a flock of Flamingoes. It was on the afternoon of one of those sultry days which, in that portion of the country, exhibit towards evening the most glorious effulgence that can be conceived”.

https://www.audubon.org/birds-of-america/american-flamingo

You can admire the composition in its entirety, you can zoom some parts, download it in high resolution, or share the image via Twitter fb, e-mail and other social network. The extraordinary thing is that we have the comparison between the painting and a modern photograph of the species observed in the section “bird guide”: Audubon had an extraordinary ability to observe every detail of the painted subject from the color of the plumage to the shape of the beak and movements. I suggest at least the navigation among the Audubon Birds not only to bird watching enthusiasts or ornithologists, but to all those who like to observe beautiful things.

Website: www.audubon.org

13 June 2019, Manhattan, New York

Panel discussion: “The Artist Isn’t (Physically) Present: Women in Digital Art”

Thursday 13th June at Showfields, Manhattan, New York, the interesting panel discussion “The Artist Isn’t (Physically) Present: Women in Digital Art” took place to discuss why digital art, like other artistic format, continues to be dominated by male exponent although there are excellent female digital artists who work and sell in the virtual realms.

The debate was carried on by the artists Molly Soda, Claudia Hart, and Faith Holland, prominent female artists and it was led by Poppy Simpson, head of content and curation at Meural.

The artists explained the complexities of working and selling their work and the ways in which they are building their digital art practice.
They talked about “their predictions for what a digitally driven and more inclusive art market might look like in the future,” according to the organizers.

During the event, the works of the panelists were displayed on the Meural Canvas, a digital screen that collectors and consumers can hang in their homes to show a variety of visual art.

smart discussion in preparation of upcoming project achievements

Kaleidoscope project meeting in Helsinki

The progress meeting of 50s in Europe Kaleidoscope project took place on the 5th June in Helsinki, attached to the annual event of Photoconsortium hosted by Museovirasto.

Partners met particularly to discuss the next steps in two main areas of the project: the development of the services for visual recognition and for crowdsourcing that the project is implementing to support metadata creation and enrichment for photographic content relating to the fifities, and the content selection for the project’s exhibition to be lauched in a double format: as a travelling physical exhibition of printed photographs to premiere in Pisa on 6th September, and on Europeana as a virtual exhibition to be published online in Autumn 2019.

Other topics tackled in the meeting touched upon the progress of the MOOC, to be available for user testing in Autumn and the brand new access point for educational content online, the upcoming Educational Portal which will be available soon also including cooperation with Europeana community on education.