Digital meets Culture

The deadline for submission is February 20, 2018.

Call for Proposals: Virtual Archaeology at EAA

In September 2018, the EAA European Association of Archaeologists will organize its annual meeting in Barcelona. More than 2000 scholars will attend its scientific sessions. Coinciding with this event, and in collaboration with EAA local organizers, an exhibition on Virtual Archaeology applications will take place. It will be addressed to scholars in archaeology and cultural heritage, but also to wider audiences.

We invite archaeologists, historians, computer scientists, specialists in computer graphics and any scholars related with Virtual Archaeology and the wider Digital Heritage field to send their projects to be exhibited during the Conference. Specifically, we ask for:

Short videos of virtual environments related to archaeological materials, sites, monuments, and ancient landscapes.
Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality or Mixed Reality projects using head-mounted displays, mobile devices or tangible interfaces.
Desktop systems displaying web-based virtual museums.

The organizers will provide the necessary space and arrangements for immersive, tangible and desktop-based installations to be accessible to EAA participants during the whole conference. The exhibition will also be linked to some of the scientific sessions (e.g. #66, #363, #448, #480).

The EAA Organization will edit a 30-minute video displaying short snippets of virtual reconstructions, from early solid-modelling projects to the latest laser-scanned, multi-agent interactive environments. The video session will be open to EAA participants, but we intend to offer it also to Barcelona citizens and tourists in a fully open event aimed at the widest audience possible. This event will be advertised in TV and other media.

Please fill in the application form below and send it to the organization team: Laia Pujol (Laia.Pujol@upf.edu) and Joan A. Barceló (JuanAntonio.Barcelo@uab.es). The deadline for submission is February 20, 2018. The EAA scientific committee will select the final projects to be showcased at the EAA venues during the conference. The final decision will be announced via email until March 20, 2018.

20 years ago, also in Barcelona, we organized the very first exhibition of Virtual Reality reconstructions in Archaeology with a huge success for that time. It is time to revise what was presented 20 years ago, to learn what has changed, and to set our challenges for the future of Digital Archaeology.

More info: https://www.e-a-a.org/eaa2018.

Application Form: .docx, 166 Kb

The ‘Provenance of Knowledge’ is the theme of the next ICOM-CIDOC conference, in Heraklion-Crete-Greece from 29 September to 4 October 2018.

CIDOC 2018 Call for Papers – EXTENDED DEADLINE

Extended deadline until 31st March: proposals for presentations, workshops, case studies, for CIDOC’s annual conference.

Visit the CIDOC 2018 Call for Papers page for submission guidelines and selection criteria: http://www.cidoc2018.com/call-papers.

*About the CIDOC 2018 Theme*

The ‘Provenance of Knowledge’ is a core element of good practice in documentation and so is the theme of the next ICOM-CIDOC conference, in Heraklion-Crete-Greece from 29 September to 4 October 2018.

As an essential aspect of documentation, Provenance of Knowledge refers to the attempt to trace the origins of the information and knowledge about an object, an entity or an idea in order to reconstruct the whole chain of creation, use, interpretation and dissemination of relevant information and knowledge. The ultimate purpose of this reconstruction is to confirm, illustrate, and validate the information and knowledge contained in the documentation in order to facilitate understanding across times and cultures. In this way, it contributes to scholarly citation in information handling while connecting all the material evidence kept in museums and other memory institutions.

The validation of information and knowledge has been greatly helped by the increasing use of digital technologies in documentation. However, this advancement in documentation has created new difficulties as the abundance of the available information makes it difficult to introduce standards and processes to model and maintain the development and validity of documented information.

The 2018 CIDOC conference aims at supporting museums by deepening the understanding of documentation as a means of knowledge preservation, dissemination and exchange.

Berlin (Germany), 18-24 June 2018

Sharing Heritage – Sharing Values / European Cultural Heritage summit

The European Cultural Heritage Summit will take place from 18-24 June 2018 in Berlin, Germany. This Summit, with the motto “Sharing Heritage – Sharing Values”, has been recognised by the European Union as one of the key public events of the European Year of Cultural Heritage (EYCH) and will be supported by the EU’s Creative Europe programme.

The European Cultural Heritage Summit will be co-hosted by Europa Nostra, the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, SPK) and the German Cultural Heritage Committee (DNK), acting as national coordinator of the EYCH in Germany.

The Summit will engage and mobilise a wide range of stakeholders, public and private, for an ambitious European Cultural Heritage Agenda. The Summit will be attended by highest representatives of EU Institutions, Member States and civil society organisations from all over Europe.

The core events will be held by the Summit’s hosts on 21-22 June. Additional events will be organised by European and German partner organisations on 18-20 June and/or 23-24 June.

Website: http://european-cultural-heritage-summit.eu/

Helsinki (Finland), 7-9 March 2018

DHN 2018 Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries

The 3rd conference of the association of Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries (DHN) will be held at the University of Helsinki March 7–9, 2018. The conference is organised by HELDIG – the Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities at the University of Helsinki, the Faculty of Arts.

The overarching theme this year is Open Science. This pragmatic concept emphasises the role of transparent and reproducible research practices, open dissemination of results, and new forms of collaboration, all greatly facilitated by digitalisation.

In 2018, the conference seeks to extend the scope of digital humanities research covered, both into new areas, as well as beyond the Nordic and Baltic countries. This year, the conference welcomes in particular work related to the following themes: History, Cultural Heritage, Games, and Future.

Website: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/helsinki-centre-for-digital-humanities/dhn-2018

In addition to the main conference tracks, the DHN programme includes interesting pre-conference workshops (http://heldig.fi/dhn-2018/programme#section-45496) and a 1,5 hackathon on digitised newspaper corpora and web-archives. The hackathon takes place on 5-6 March, prior the main conference.

Visual representations of the Roma of Romania in the 19th and 20th centuries in the Europeana collections: between stereotypes and truthfulness

The Europeana Research Grants Programme 2017 awards a Roma cultural heritage project

In 2017 the Europeana Research Grants Programme collected research proposals all over Europe connected to the theme of intercultural dialogue.
Three projects has been chosen within more than 60 proposals and one of them is focused on the Roma identity and cultural preservation.

The project creators, Dr.Caterina Preda is an assistant Professor at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest in Romania.
“The project provides a web platform, which includes the visual representations of the Roma of the Romanian territories as they appear in the Europeana collection in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries depictions. This web-platform will be used as a didactic tool in the classroom, in high school and university level courses. The research investigates the ways in which the stereotypical repetitive representations of the Roma help explain the current underprivileged situation of this community in Europe and in Romania in particular. The project argues for a more balanced and comprehensive understanding of a largely unknown history by using visual representations taken from the archives of the libraries, which are included in the Europeana collections.”

More information on
Caterina Preda
The winners of Europeana Research Grants Programme 2017

Upcoming changes to Wikimedia Commons will make it easier to add, update, and find important information about individual files and entire collections.

Research on GLAM use of Wikimedia Commons to understand what to improve and why it matters

by Sandra Fauconnier, Community Liaison for Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Foundation.

I call this piece “Pig’s heart, with metadata”. Photo by Museum of Veterinary Anatomy FMVZ USP/Wagner Souza e Silva, CC BY-SA 4.0.

In 2017-2019, together with the community of Wikimedia volunteers, a team at the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland updates Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia’s media repository, to work with structured data.

This will make it easier to add, update and find important information about individual files and entire collections.

In order to learn more about the needs of users of Wikimedia Commons, we perform quite a bit of design research. This helps us understand what to improve, and why it matters.

In the past months, we have surveyed and interviewed cultural institutions (GLAMs), asking them about their processes, wishes and pain points when they contribute media to Wikimedia Commons.

The research is now concluded and summarized in this blog post:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/01/29/glam-multimedia-metadata-commons/

The full report can be found at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Supporting_Commons_contribution_by_GLAM_institutions

Slides to follow alongside this video: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GLAM_SDC_research_presentation_Jan_2018.pdf

Singapore, 5-8 February 2018

IEEE World Forum on The Internet-of-Things

The theme of the Conference is “Smart Cites and Nations” in recognition of Singapore’s strides in embracing “Smart” — policies, principles, and practices — for which IoT is an important technology enabler. The World Forum on The Internet of Things consists of an outstanding Technical Program featuring the latest advances and experiences with IoT for the Academic and Research Community, a set of Vertical and Topical Area tracks of interest to Industry and to the Public Sector, and is relevant locally to Singapore and the larger Asia Pacific region.

We expect attendance and participation from leading Research Institutions, Government Organizations responsible for IoT from around the World, and practitioners from major International Enterprises that provide products, goods, and services based on IoT.

Hear Minister Yaacob Ibrahim about the technologies, business models, and processes that are transforming the Smart Nation of Singapore
Listen to William Ruh who is the CEO of GE Digital about how IoT is driving the next wave of Industrial Practices
Share the experience with Chris O’Connor, the General Manager of IoT Applications at IBM, of how Artificial Intelligence is changing the landscape for many of IBM’s customers
Let Maciej Kranz, the VP of Corporate Innovation at Cisco take you through the journey that he sees for IoT and the impact of IoT at the World Forum in Davos.
Take a peek at the future as Jan Rabaey, Chair of Engineering and Computer Science at Berkeley shares the vision of IoT and the wonders coming out of today’s laboratories.

If you want to understand IoT and the underlying technologies, take part in the full day of tutorials and workshops on the first day of WF-IoT2018. If you are technical oriented or a researcher listen to any of the 145 papers that will address IoT in depth and give you a glimpse of the future.

If you wish to know how IoT will impact your industry attend any of the five Vertical Tracks where Industry experts and practitioners will share their experiences. For engineers, managers, administrators, and practitioners interested in practical aspects of IoT attend any of the five Topical Area Tracks. Each is populated with experts and speakers from around the world.

Website: http://wfiot2018.iot.ieee.org/

BYZART aims to make 75,000 new digital objects accessible through Europeana Collections, and put into light other content that is already available online

The BYZART project: creating one of the widest online collections of Byzantine art and archaeology

Funded as a part of the 2016 Generic Services call, this new project BYZART, led by University of Bologna, aims to digitize, catalogue and make available rich archive collections about Byzantine cultural heritage in Europeana, the European digital library.

The project aims to make 75,000 new digital objects accessible online through Europeana Collections. During the project photos, video and audio content, as well as 3D surveys and reconstructions about Byzantine history and culture will be digitised. The content and accompanying narratives will capture users’ attention and provide them with a rich online experience. In addition, the digitised data will enhance Europeana’s artistic content by adding to the Byzantine art and archaeology material already available on the platform.

the project group at the kick.off meeting in Bologna

Byzantine culture is one of the milestones of European cultural heritage. For centuries, it spread all over the Mediterranean a homogeneous civilization despite regional diversities with strong influence over later European artistic and cultural expressions. Nevertheless, nowadays the wide heritage of the Byzantine art in Europe is undervalued, even if each Mediterranean region preserves remarkable memories and traces of its Byzantine past.

The BYZART project proposes to raise awareness about this impressive heritage, by showcasing collections of archive photographs, audio-visual materials and 3D reconstructions in Europeana Collections.

More info: https://pro.europeana.eu/post/byzantine-art-and-archaeology

February 8, 2018. Hungary, Budapest. Unmissable event for those who are involved in the preservation and support of Roma minorities heritage. Shaping desired futures by contemplating possible, probable and preferable futures.

Conference: The Future of Roma Cultural Heritage

The conference, organized by the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) and hosted by the Romani Studies Program of the Central European University (CEU RSP), was supported by the contribution of REACH (project theme H2020-SC6-CULT-COOP-2016-2017, EU Research and Innovation Programme, Horizon 2020, Re-designing Access to European Cultural Heritage).
The event was opened by the presentation of ERIAC to the audience, it’s mission and philosophy; participants were invited to actively contribute to the dialogue focused on the main question ‘the future of Roma cultural heritage’ contemplating possible futures and striving to shape the fields in desired directions.
With ERIAC’s headquarters and main office opening in Berlin in Oct 2017, ERIAC started its international activities with the International Cultural Outreach Program. Within the framework of the program, which encompasses seven events in major European cities, it celebrated the large network of Roma individuals and organizations working in the fields of arts and culture.
The conference was held on February 8, 2018, 15.00h-20.00h at CEU Auditorium A
1051 Budapest, Nador u. 15.
Those interested to attend the event had to confirm their participation and RSVP before January 2018 at:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfHm_VMuoPgByENtVWyXhZjLq9J-UAQDcKh3hCtmXEC7UcxSA/viewform
To read more about the program and the organizers of the conference:
https://eriac.nobadkid.org/

Prague (Czech Republic), 4-7 June 2018

ELAG conference 2018: BLEND/DEBLEND

It is with great pleasure to announce that the 42nd International Conference of the European Library Automation Group will be held at the National Library of Technology in Prague, Czech Republic from June 4 to 7 2018.

The European Library Automation Group series of conferences focus on the application of information technology in libraries and documentation centers. For over forty years, the ELAG Conferences have provided library and IT professionals with the opportunity to discuss new technologies, to review on-going developments and to exchange best practices. Moreover, ELAG Conferences are the platform for librarians, IT professionals and other participants to discuss the current situation, challenges and advancements relating to libraries and of information technology.

The meetings aim at in depth discussions of particular library automation topics and at the promotion of informal exchange of ideas and experience. Topics of past conferences have included digital libraries, library portals, institutional repositories, web services, digital preservation, open source software and open access. The topics covered are technical and meant for participants with an appropriate technical background.

The ELAG Conferences are divided into bootcamp, presentation and workshop sessions. Due to this innovative and interactive structure ELAG Conferences provide participants with a way to learn from experts and veterans in a particular domain and to acquire new skills, enhance their knowledge and get a more in-depth view of a specific topic.

Theme of ELAG2018: BLEND/DEBLEND

Nowadays we are used to data being dispersed in different locations, formats and environments. We reference data, linking and blending them to be useful to our users. We started re-using data by harvesting OAI repositories and we ended up copying everything as-is instead of blending data using standard web protocols. The vision is that merging distributed data using web services (microservices) will enable us to better blend and re-use data. Yet, we are still living in a world of monolithic data structures; we need to go forward and try to use standard web data-formats and reconsider library data description rules in light of this. On the other hand, we are faced with monolithic legacy systems which, though moving to the cloud, are pretty hard to ‘deconstruct’. Here we should deblend as well. Our local IT infrastructure is also moving to a blended environment where web services and enterprise service buses are supposed to orchestrate a universal information environment. It is not an easy task to use the existing library systems in this kind of environment.

Call for participation and more info: https://elag.org/

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