Digital meets Culture

London (UK), 18th September 2017

Future Minds – Art and Technology in the future

Kyoto University and Goldsmiths, University of London are organizing an International Symposium entitled “Future Mind” – Art and Technology in the future.

Location: the Stuart Hall Building, Goldsmith, University of London

Program:

Registration and Coffee (9:00 – 9:35)

Welcoming talk (9:35~9:45)
Ambassador of Japan Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Embassy of Japan in the United Kingdom

Talk by Kyoto University’s President and Goldsmiths College’s Warden (9:45~10:15)
Dr. Juichi Yamagiwa, President, Kyoto University
Mr. Patrick Loughrey, Warden (President), Goldsmiths College, University of London

Break （10:15 – 10:30）

Session 1 （10:30 – 12:00）Art of Future, Future City and Looking for Japan
Presenter: Mr. Conrad Bodman
Presenter: Prof. Sherry Dobbin
Presenter: Prof. Naoko Tosa

Lunch （12:00-13:30）
Greeting Talk （13:30-13:40）
By Mark D’Inverno, Professor of Computer Science and Pro-Warden (International) at Goldsmiths

Session 2（13:40 – 15:00）Communication of the Future, Vision and Mind
Presenter: Prof. Ryohei Nakatsu
Presenter: Prof. Frederic Fol Leymarie

Break (15:00 – 15:20)

Session 3 （15:20 – 16:20） VR Art and Imaging of the Future
Presenter: Prof. William Latham
Presenter: Prof. Koji Koyamada

Session 4 （16:20 – 17:40）AI, Art Critic of the Future Mind
Presenter: Prof. Liang Zhao
Presenter: Dr. Guido Orgs
Presenter: Prof. Koji Yoshioka

Social Gathering (17:40 -19:30)

For more information, please visit the event website at http://at.kokoro.kyoto-u.ac.jp/

MediaConch in action! Issue #3

Interview with Kieran O’Leary

Kieran’s workstation

Hey Kieran! Introduce yourself please.

Hi! I’m Kieran O’Leary, originally from a relatively rural part of County Cork in Ireland, now living in Dublin City, working in the Irish Film Archive within the Irish Film Institute. I’ve been fascinated by digital video since about 2002, when I got my first home PC (I was around 17 years old, so relatively late to the party). I started encoding my DVD collection to MPEG-4 ASP AVI files and became fascinated with the process. A few years later, I got into some terrible amateur filmmaking and photography, which ultimately landed me an internship with the Irish Film Institute and I’m still here, mostly working on code, workflows, metadata, digitisation/migration, facilitating access to our collections and other good stuff.

What does your media ingest process look like? Does your media ingest process include any tests (manual or automated) on the incoming content? If so, what are the goals of those tests?

My colleagues Eoin O’Donohoe and Anja Mahler handle deliveries of new, contemporary content, such as AS-11 broadcast files and DCPs/DCDMs that are delivered as part of overarching agreements with The Irish Film Board, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, and The Arts Council. They are considering implementing MediaConch to confirm that the deliveries are as agreed, but I mostly deal with reformatted tapes or scanned film. A lot of the tests that we do are based around figuring out if we did everything as best we could – could we have migrated that tape better, were the correct settings definitely used, etc. As we transcode our uncompressed video to FFV1/MKV, the main checks that we do involve framemd5s to ensure that the FFV1/MKV file produces the exact same content when decoded. Occasionally, we are able to convince some vendors to provide us with checksums, so we perform fixity checks upon arrival. We recently had to use FCP7 for some tape capture, and the v210/MOV files in the Capture Scratch had no interlacement or aspect ratio recorded in the container. I wrote a simple mediainfo check to see if these conditions were true: Check if Pixel Aspect Ratio = Square (It should be 16/15) and check if no interlacement info is specified (it should be interlaced top field first).

I am currently working on a project where we received about 25 hard drives full of production material from a production company, Loopline Film. We will need a lot of checks here as the content is all quite heterogenous – a large mix of P2 cards, various XDCAM flavours, DSLR, migrated tape, FCP projects, subtitle files and many more. There are a lot of duplicate files so we will have to perform various tests and checks to figure out which are the best candidates to move forward into our ingest workflows.

Generally, our ingest process involves registration, metadata extraction, packaging into a consistent folder structure, fixity, descriptive and technical cataloguing, and attempting to log every step in the process as best we can.

Where do you use MediaConch? Do you use MediaConch primarily for file validation, for local policy checking, for in-house quality control, for quality testing for vendor files?

MediaConch always makes me feel guilty because I know that I should be using it in more of our workflows. Currently, we mostly use the GUI when files are delivered from vendors. We are supposed to get a hard drive full of files with various attributes, and MediaConch automates a lot of this work via local policy creation, usually created from an ‘ideal file’.

As we have a lot of FFV1/Matroska, it would be an important preservation event to perform an actual validation against the FFV1/Matroska standard via Mediaconch in order to ensure that we have valid, standard compliant files.

I recently started experimenting with using MediaConch’s implementation checker for our FFV1/Matroska files. The pull request is here: https://github.com/kieranjol/IFIscripts/pull/201. It is designed around the package structure for our existing FFV1/MKV files. It finds an MKV file, launches MediaConch’s command line interface, creates an implementation report in XML format and stores it in our metadata folder, then the script parses the XML to check if all tests were a success or not. These preservation events are logged in a growing log file in our logs folder, and then the checksum manifest for the package is updated to reflect the new/changed files. It really was lovely to be able to quickly integrate MediaConch into our workflows, as well as enrich existing packages. I think I’ll probably get this process to run as part of our FFV1/Matroska normalisation script as well, so we have instant validation.

These events will ultimately be logged as ‘eventType=validation’ PREMIS events as well. Just in case you were curious, I ran the process on 290 files and all passed 🙂 Each validation only took a few seconds, though one stubborn file took a lot longer. Dave Rice got to the bottom of the issue eventually though.

It has also been used intermittently for in house quality control. I recently had an epiphany where I realised that MediaConch HAD to be used for our in house quality control, because one of my scripts had a stupid bug that would have been caught much quicker with a MediaConch policy.

At what point in the archival process do you use MediaConch?

It’s usually at an early stage. We use the Spectrum Collections Management standard here in the IFI, so the phase is ‘Object Entry’. This is a pre-accession period where the files are still undergoing quality control measures, and they may be rejected.

Do you use MediaConch for MKV/FFV1/LPCM video files, for other video files, for non-video files, or something else?

It’s actually been mostly used for vendor supplied files, which are usually v210/mov, sometimes prores/mov, but occasionally DPX or AS-11. As mentioned, it is in the process of integrating into our FFV1/Matroska workflow.

Why do you think file validation is important?

File validation is an important step in ensuring that we are putting the best possible files forward for ingest. In terms of the material that we receive from vendors, validation of the content ensures that we are getting what we pay for, and that there are no issues that could end up being a preservation risk. In terms of file format validation, it’s really important that we can verify and document (as a validation Event in PREMIS!) that we have created or received files that comply with the file format specification. It’s one of the reasons that I like FFV1/Matroska so much. I know a lot less about Matroska than FFV1, but it’s good to know that we can figure out if we have valid files which ultimately should have the greatest level of interoperability going into the future.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Not much, just that I wish I’d engaged with the command line interface for MediaConch sooner. It is super flexible and I wish that there were more examples of use out there.

Thanks to Kieran! Check out all of Irish Film Archive’s scripts here on GitHub.

Vienna (Austria), 8-10 November 2017

CHNT22 Urban Archaeology and Integration

The programme of the Cultural Heritage and New technologies CHNT conference this year includes different sessions:

Integrating historical maps and archaeological data using digital technologies
Adding life to written sources by studying the dead
New realities 3: virtual, augmented reality and other techniques in Cultural and historical Heritage for the general public
3D digital reconstruction and related documentation sources
3D Documentation in Underwater Archaeology: Photogrammetry, Georeferencing, Monitoring, and Surveying
New Approaches to Medieval Structures and Spaces
Reflections and research on archaeological practices in the digital era
The Employment of Mobile Applications for Survey, Documentation and Information

The programme also includes a special session on Cultural Heritage and Armed Conflict and a series of roundtables, trainings, poster sessions, and more.

The conference will be opened by Dr. Brigitte RIGELE (Head of the municipal and provincial archives of Vienna).
This year’s keynote speech will be hold by Martin SCHAICH about “Vianden Castle3D – “linked” in space and time for historical building research, visualization and presentation”.

The full programme is available here: http://www.chnt.at/program-2017/

This year we organize for the first time a special APP-Award for Young Scientists: the Vienna City Award for Innovative Apps in Cultural Heritage for young researchers

This award will be sponsored by the Vienna Municipal Department of Cultural Affairs with a donation of EUR 1000.

Specific terms and conditions

Age under 35
no commercial product
The app should be produced in English.
The app presenter(s) must be on site.
The app should be available to interested users in any appropriate form (including the stores – Play Store and Apple Store – free download is required).

For more information – visit our homepage – www.chnt.at

until 31 December in Sant Cugat, the exhibition from digitized vintage photography showcases everyday life in 1839-1939

“All Our Yesterdays” photographic exhibition at Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya

Another instance of the successful photographic exhibition All Our Yesterdays, originally produced in the framework of Europeanaphotography project (2012-2015) and now curated by the spin off association PHOTOCONSORTIUM, is taking place until 31 December 2017 in Sant Cugat, Barcelona, at the premises of the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya, organized by Photoconsortium member GENCAT.

All Our Yesterdays features a kaleidoscope of early photographic masterpieces from the very beginning of photographic history, selected by an international group of partners from 13 European countries to showcase how the camera has captured the world and everyday life in Europe between 1839 and 1939, from its most beautiful angles as well as its most dramatic days.

All Our Yesterdays was inaugurated in 2014 in Pisa and has become a travelling exhibition with other editions in Leuven, Copenhagen and now Sant Cugat.

About ANC: http://anc.gencat.cat/es/inici/

Roma 11th July 2017

Framework agreement between DiCultHer and DARIAH.it

Pillar of this agreement between DiCultHer Digital Cultural Heritage, Arts & Humanities School education network and DARIAH.it, the Italian hub of the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, is to transfer the results of European research and to promote services and best practices for the use of ICT in social sciences and arts.

Martedì, 11 luglio, dalle ore 9:45 alle 11:00, presso la sala stampa della Camera dei Deputati verranno illustrate le finalità e gli obiettivi dell’Accordo quadro fra la Scuola a rete in “Digital Cultural Heritage, Arts and Humanities” (DiCultHer) e DARIAH.it, il nodo italiano della Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, alla presenza della Presidente Commissione Cultura della Camera dei Deputati, On. Flavia Piccoli Nardelli.

Le parole chiave sottese all’attuazione dell’Accordo sono: “trasferire i risultati della ricerca europea, formare, promuovere servizi e buone prassi d’uso delle ICT nel campo delle scienze umane e delle arti” .

PROGRAMMA

Saluto:

Flavia Piccoli Nardelli, Presidente Commissione Cultura, Camera dei Deputati
Introducono:
Gilberto Corbellini, Direttore Dipartimento scienze umane e sociali, patrimonio culturale, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche.

Germano Paini, Università degli Studi di Torino, Presidenza DiCultHer

Presentano l’Accordo quadro:

Emiliano Degl’Innocenti, CNR, Coordinatore Nazionale DARIAH.it

Carmine Marinucci, ENEA, Segretario Generale DiCultHer

A digital artwork by Situ Xiaochun.

Sightseeing tour of Dream Land

Dream Land is a virtual space that was recently included in an important collective exhibition entitled “Self Criticism” at Beijing’s museum Inside Out. A second exhibition of Dream Land took place in the office of the artistic director of newspaper Beijing Youth Daily, where the office furniture and objects are “contaminated” by the virtual elemets of Dream Land.

On the computer screen, there are the digital landscapes, while on a tv a video showcase a boy (the son of the artist) who is discovering this virtual space and tells his impressions; the walls are decorated with the child’s drawings where he reinterpretates the virtual landscapes.

The visitors of the virtual space Dream Land can interact with the digital artwork via their smartphones with which they can navigate the virtual landscapes.

[Show as slideshow]

Explaining the creation of Dream Land

Dream Land is a conceptual artwork. The core of the work is composed by five virtual landscapes created through an expert use of digital technologies.

During the creation of these virtual spaces, all the parts are generated starting with elements that come from the artist’s wishes, inspired by things that he has not, or cannot get, but that, in this virtual spaces, he can realise. For this reason, the project is named Dream Land.

This experience highlights limits and capacities of the artists who can, in this way, with courage, show them to the visitors. The artist hopes that facing his limits can create a reflection on heavenly aspects of life on one hand, and on the concrete problems of the contemporary society on the other hand.

Dream Land intentionally presents images of quiescent states, without a timeline, while, at the same time, uses sounds that bring their own time line, creating a feeling of dislocation. Everything appears as in a modality of idealisation, coming to express a sort if unpractical, unfeasible and unrealistic greed and voracity of desires.

To express this kind of impulse, the artist uses such virtual and not realistic space. The artwork seems to imply a lack of fortitude to confront with your own limits, suggesting instead to follow a sort of psychological escape.

The virtual digital landscapes represents an actualisation of the virtual reality concept. The five landscapes are connected each other, and the visitor can move back and forth through the links between the five virtual scenes. He/She can choose 360° random view, can navigate online using his/her smartphone or the video of a computer, or use a VR card board for a more immersive experience.

Dream Land will invite other artists, poets and musicians to create their own artworks, which are promoted in a show similar to the advertising of touristic trips. It will be a session, pitching the voyage as main theme of the action art, and eventually exhibiting the images of the virtual landscapes.

A family cruise

The Second Chapter is the invitation to discussion after the opening of Dream Land.

It consists in inviting members of your family and your friends to visit Dream Land, demonstrating how the interaction with the virtual space takes place, and reflecting on this virtual voyage. This allows to understand the different personal interpretation of the experience, to look at the various feelings of the visitors, and to perceive the wide assortment of thinking of each subjectivity.

The first session will show an interview to the son of the artist, after his energetic interaction with Dream Land. Sharing the same blood, grown in rather different environments, facing similar objects, immersed in virtual spaces, the dialogue between these two independent persons, with two different ages, will allow the visitors to reflect on the different understandings of the various issues raised by such deep experience.

This is the second in a series of interviews with people using MediaConch within their institutions.

Interview with Kathryn Gronsbell

Kathryn with MediaConch

Hey Kathryn! Introduce yourself please.

Hi Ashley! I’m the Digital Collections Manager at Carnegie Hall. I develop and support sustainable practices around the digital asset lifecycle to ensure the availability and integrity of material related to the Hall and its history, collections, programs, and operations. I can be found talking about the struggling mass transit infrastructure in NYC, metadata quality assessment, and my Great Pyrenees rescue pup on Twitter.

What does your media ingest process look like? Does your media ingest process include any tests (manual or automated) on the incoming content? If so, what are the goals of those tests?

In 2012, the Carnegie Hall (CH) Archives started a multi-year initiative to digitize the majority of our physical holdings for preservation and access. We outsource our paper, video, audio, and film reformatting to different vendors and use a digital asset management system (DAMS) to organize, catalog, and present the material. Our quality control (QC) procedures for incoming digitized material are available on Carnegie Hall’s Github. The process enables control and documented oversight from the point of hard drive / FTP delivery from a digitization vendor to ingest into our DAMS.

We aim to reduce risk while expediting the review and verification process with the QC procedures. The QC procedures increase our own accountability (How long does it take us to process 1 batch? What step is most time-intensive? Where can we expedite work by using different tools or workflows?) and allow us to better vet the continued work of our vendors (Are batches from the same vendor failing the same steps over time?). Another priority of the QC workflow is the ability to actually do it – the work is split between me and our Asset Cataloger, Lisa Barrier.

Where do you use MediaConch? Do you use MediaConch primarily for file validation, for local policy checking, for in-house quality control, for quality testing for vendor files?

Our primary use case for MediaConch is local policy checking against the digitization specs. We outsource our digitization, so quality testing the vendor output is a built-in function of our policy checking. We chose to balance manual review with automated testing: we perform manual visual/aural QC on 25% of a batch (or more, if the batch is small) and run MediaConch against the entire batch. I wrote a script which summarizes the MediaConch output to help expedite the review process for this step. We save MediaConch reports to an internal network drive for future use – we hope to build a digital repository in which we can submit submission information packages (SIPs) which contain information like the XML metadata from vendors and MediaConch reports.

At what point in the archival process do you use MediaConch?

MediaConch is part of Carnegie Hall’s pre-ingest procedures.

Carnegie Hall Github page for MediaConch commands with terminal window

Do you use MediaConch for MKV/FFV1/LPCM video files, for other video files, for non-video files, or something else?

Our specs vary by source format, so we pass a variety of things through MediaConch (audio and video). We will be reviewing and likely revising our digitization specs in the next year, and MediaConch’s ability to support Matroska, FFV1, etc. may play a role in our decision-making process.

Why do you think file validation is important [or whatever you are doing]?

There is an argument for verifying requested policies are being enforced on material digitized-as-a-service, and the ability to do so in-house, with a low learning curve. For my work in the CH Archives, I focus on how each step fits into the larger picture of what the entire workflow aims to achieve – accountability, dependability, and reproducibility.

Because of staff changeover and other factors, not all of our QC is completed in what I consider a ‘normal’ time frame. There is material digitized in 2013 that hasn’t made it past half of the QC workflow (pause for screams of horror). In updating and improving our QC strategy, we acknowledge that the reality of our procedures mean batches may be processed asynchronously or in a wildly delayed timeframe, and manage those unfortunate symptoms of the prioritization juggling act that is preservation/archiving moving image material.

Anything else you’d like to add?

MediaConch is an incredible resource for Carnegie Hall. There was a few-month period where all QC on audiovisual files screeched to a halt. We were using MDQC, a policy checker built on top of ExifTool and MediaInfo, for audiovisual material. We ran into an issue which prevented us from analyzing files over ~200GB, despite a few months of troubleshooting. Many of Carnegie Hall’s archival study recordings are full length concerts and performances, so we have some big uncompressed files to process. We still use MDQC for our still image material (concert programs, flyers, posts, photographs) but have transitioned to using MediaConch for any audiovisual material in the QC process. Without this tool, we would have a bigger QC backlog and would have needed to invest more money and time in determining how to facilitate policy checking audiovisual files. Thank you MediaConch creators, maintainers, and contributors!

“Concerts at Carnegie Hall – Michael Rabin, 1955” Michael Rabin, GIF Courtesy of the Carnegie Hall Archives

Thanks so much, Kathryn! For even more fun from the Carnegie Hall team, check out their Linked Data project repository.

New release available on the PREFORMA Open Source Portal

DPF Manager 3.4 available to download

A lot of improvements and new features have been included in the new release of the DPF Manager.

The most important changes are the inclusion of a Quick Check functionality that allows to perform a fast validation of the files, which can be later analyzed in more detail if desired performing a full check. Also, the reports now include hints that explain how to fix them (whenever possible). A new metadata fix has been added to solve ascii encodings (a common baseline error, that is produced by many softwares and operating systems). And now, the PDF reports can be seen directly from the GUI (instead of opening an external PDF viewer).

This release also includes some minor improvements and a set of bugfixes, that can be seen in the github page and the list of issues closed in the current milestone.

The benchmarking tool anounced in the past release is in progress and will be ready in the release of July.

Budapest (Hungary), 9-10 November 2017

ICT Proposers’ Day 2017

ICT Proposers’ Day 2017 will take place on 9 and 10 November in Budapest, Hungary. This networking event centres on European ICT Research & Innovation with a special focus on the Horizon 2020 Work Programme for 2018-20. An Opening Ceremony and Social Event will be organised by the Hungarian Ministry of National Development and will take place on 8 November.

The event will focus on the 2018 Calls for Proposals of the Horizon 2020 Work Programme in the field of Information & Communication Technologies. It will offer an exceptional opportunity to build quality partnerships with academics, researchers, industrial stakeholders, SMEs and government actors from all over Europe.

The programme will include:

Networking sessions where potential proposers present their project ideas, organised according to the Pillars and Topics of the Work Programme 2018-20;
Information sessions on how to prepare and submit a proposal;
Information stands on the ICT-related topics of the Work Programme 2018-20 and the content of the calls for proposals;
A European Commission information desk to supply information on the content and logistics of the event;
Booths, organised by village, which serve as meeting points for people interested in the same research topics;
Ample space for informal networking and bilateral meetings between participants.
Workshops and Face2Face Brokerage organised by Ideal-Ist.

More info and registration: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/events/ict-proposers-day-2017

Los Angeles (US), 6-9 November 2017

Communicating the Museum – CTM17 Los Angeles: Museums Beyond Walls

Communicating the Museum (CTM) was launched in 2000 and since then over 5’000 professionals from the cultural sector have attended this conference.

Following a very successful edition in Paris in June, the 19th edition of the international conference Communicating the Museum will take place in Los Angeles, 6-9 November 2017. Join us to discuss the role of museums in society and how they reach out to diverse communities. Discover how museums share their expertise and collections beyond the building. International experts from arts organisations will show us how they reach out to society through culture. John Giurini from the J. Paul Getty Museum and Miranda Carroll from LACMA are preparing an amazing itinerary to discover the most innovative art scene of Los Angeles.

Confirmed speakers include:

Lars Ulrich Hansen, Head of Communication, Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Denmark
Jennifer Northrop, Director of Marketing and Communications, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA
Tim Marlow, Director of artistic programmes, Royal Academy of Arts, United Kingdom
Cathy Pelgrims, Head of Public and Education, Museum aan de Stroom, Belgium
Ann Philbin, Director, Hammer Museum, USA
Abhay Adhikari, Founder, Digital Identities, Sweden
Shirani Aththas, Manager, Communications & Public Affairs, Australian National Maritime Museum, Australia

More info and registration: http://www.agendacom.com/communicating-the-museum-2017-los-angeles/tickets/