Digital meets Culture

Deadline 30th April 2017

Call for PAPERS, VIDEOS and e-EXHIBITIONS in the area of INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE and e-ARCHIVES

MEMORIAMEDIA (MI/IELT) has a peer reviewed e-journal dedicated to promote, communicate and document projects, studies and archives of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH).

Authors are now invited to submit unpublished papers, videos or e-exhibitions about all the domains of ICH: oral traditions, performative practices, celebrations, traditional craftsmanship and knowledge concerning nature and the universe.

The e-journal will be written and subtitled in English and Portuguese. MEMORIAMEDIA can finance the translation of the contents selected for publication (from Portuguese to English or vice versa).

Important dates:
Deadline for submission – 30th April 2017
Publication – 31th July 2017

MORE INFO AND SUBMISSION: http://www.memoriamedia.net/index.php/submission

Specific areas of interests include (but are not limited to) the following topics:
• e-Archives, e-inventories, e-repositories and e-exhibitions of intangible cultural heritage (and associated heritage – tangible and natural);
• Community involvement in safeguarding ICH – e-archives, types of participation and interaction;
• Intangible cultural heritage, e-archives and sustainable development;
• Open access to digital cultural heritage;
• Sharing and exchange of research data;
• Aggregators of digitised ICH within the European and global digital environment;
• Use, efficiency and design of interfaces for websites and applications about ICH;
• Digital storytelling, memory and oral history in e-archives of cultural heritage;
• Issues of the protection of intellectual property and rights in digital content and e-archives.

All papers, videos and e-exhibitions will be peer-reviewed by editors and 2 members of the editorial council. Editors can request the opinion of peer-reviews that constitute an ad hoc list. All submissions are reviewed on the basis of relevance, originality and clarity.

Paper types:
• About 2500 words (5-7 pages);
• Word file (.doc, .docx) or Plain text (.txt) – up to 4MB;
• The paper must be written in English or Portuguese.

Videos and e-Exhibitions:
• Communications/demonstrations of a digital content management system, digital archives, libraries and repositories preserving ICH or Oral History;
• Up to 10 minutes’ video;
• Link to the video with access reserved – YouTube or Vimeo. For e-exhibitions: link to video; Power Point file (. ppt, .pptx) or other format for editors’ consideration – up to 4MB;
• The video and e-exhibition must be subtitled/written in Portuguese or English – Up to 2500 words in subtitles Word file (.doc, .docx) or Plain text (.txt).

ISSN 2183-3753 Memória Imaterial e Instituto de Estudos de Literatura e Tradição (FCSH-NOVA)

Space Archaeologist Funds Citizen Science Platform With $1M TED

A recently launched website is inviting you to become a citizen archaeologist

Screenshot of GlobalXplorer showing satellite imagery of Peru, broken into tiles about the size of a few city blocks (page designed by Mondo Robot; image ©DigitalGlobe 2016)

A year ago, University of Alabama professor Sarah Parcak won a $1 million TED Prize for her work in “space archaeology” — using satellite imagery beamed down from space to search for archaeological sites lost through time. Today, Parcak launches GlobalXplorer, a citizen science platform that encourages people around the world to identify and preserve our collective heritage.

GlobalXplorer, self-described as an “Indiana Jones Meets Google Earth” platform, relies on crowdsourcing and high-resolution satellite imagery to protect and identify archaeological sites around the world that are currently unknown. With a user-friendly interface, it is open to anyone with internet access, it trains users to spot tell-tale signs left by man — from shapes indicative of ancient structures to scars marked by looters — and flag areas potentially in need of exploration.

Satellite image of South Abusir, Egypt. The left image was obtained in 2009. The image on the right in 2011 and lootings are quite visible. Photo, courtesy Sarah Parcak.

Currently, the “looting” module is live for Peru, where users can explore more than 200,000 square kilometers of high-resolution satellite images that come from partner company DigitalGlobe, Inc. Create a login, check out the short tutorial, and you’re on your way to earning “rewards” for your time and effort.

Parcak and a team of archaeologists review all the tiles classified by the community, and ones flagged as potential archaeological sites may eventually be explored and protected. To measure accuracy, every user has a consensus score that is earned and adjusted based on whether people who’ve reviewed the same tiles have arrived at the same conclusion. A low score likely means you should revisit the tutorial video.

This open access, of course, means looters themselves may dig into the resource, but GlobalXplorer is built to ensure land anonymity to prevent any malicious acts: there are tens of millions of small tiles, broken up from DigitalGlobe’s satellite images, and each is displayed to users at random, with no option to zoom or navigate. The tiles are also void of any data relaying their location or coordinates, instead assigned a unique ID that allows GlobalXplorer’s team alone to rematch them with their location information.

According to the project’s numbers, barely one percent of the world’s estimated wealth of archaeological sites has been identified or explored. With Parcak’s novel approach, we can all partake in the mission to ensure that experts reach these first, before looters strike, cause irreparable damage, and feed the blackmarket.

Parcak’s plans include producing tiles for a new country in late 2017, but donations to the project will be key going forward. The TED Prize launched GlobalXplorer, but public engagement and donations will be what ultimately save our history.

To try out GlobalXplorer, click here

Press release - 16 February 2017

PREFORMA Starts Testing Phase

The third phase of the public pre-commercial procurement launched by PREFORMA started on 16 February 2017, with the virtual kick-off meeting of the testing phase.

PREFORMA (http://www.preforma-project.eu/) is an EU-funded Pre-Commercial Procurement project working on one of the main challenges memory institutions are facing nowadays: the long-term preservation of digital data. The project develops three open source conformance checkers that control whether a file complies with standard specifications and with the acceptance criteria of the memory institution. They offer full control of the process of conformity testing of files to be created, migrated and ingested into archives.

After an analysis of the results achieved and of the software released by the three suppliers that completed the prototyping phase in January 2017, the PREFORMA Evaluation Committee decided to award all the three consortia with a contract for the testing phase. This phase will last until end of July 2017.

The three awardees are the veraPDF Consortium (led by the Open Preservation Foundation and the PDF Association), who is working on the conformance checker for the PDF/A standard for documents; Easy Innova, who is working on the TIFF standard for digital still images; and MediaArea, who is working on a set of open source standards for moving images, namely: the Matroska wrapper, the FFv1 video codec and LPCM for audio streams.

To meet the developers and learn more about the tools, the PREFORMA project invites the digital preservation community to attend the Innovation Workshop which will be held in Padua on 7 march 2017.

Suppliers and memory institutions interested in participating in and contributing to the prototyping phase are invited to follow the progress on the PREFORMA Open Source Portal and to join the PREFORMA community.

the tool for multilingual translations of Greek and Roma inscriptions participates to Digital Humanities Awards

EAGLE MediaWiki – vote now!

EAGLE project and network aims to build a multi-lingual online collection inscriptions from the Greek and Roman World. The aim of the network is to make available the vast majority of the surviving inscriptions of the Greco-Roman world, complete with the essential information about them and with a series of peer-reviewed translations in several European languages. These are notoriously unavailable for inscriptions, as photos.

The EAGLE Mediawiki is designed to give a tool to anyone interested in bridging this gap and contributing translations of inscriptions, either by providing groups of translations or providing new ones.

Discover EAGLE MediaWiki HERE.

The EAGLE MediaWiki has been nominated in the category “Best DH Tool” for the 2016 Digital Humanities Awards.

Digital Humanities Awards are a set of entirely open annual awards run as a DH awareness raising activity. The awards are nominated and voted for entirely by the public. These awards are intended to help put interesting DH resources in the spotlight and engage DH users (and general public) in the work of the community.

Vote HERE for EAGLE MediaWiki!

Voting will be open until 25th February 2017.

DH Awards: http://dhawards.org/

Making use of the open licence of the Photomediations book, the Danish journal and website BAGGRUND has translated chapter 1 about optics and light.

Photomediations in Danish language

Photomediations: An Open Book is the major outcome of Open and Hybrid Publishing Pilot of Europeana Space.

Through a comprehensive introduction and four specially commissioned chapters on light, movement, hybridity and networks that include over 200 images, Photomediations: An Open Book tells a unique story about the relationship between photography and other media.

Making use of the open licence of the Photomediations book, the Danish journal/website BAGGRUND has translated Chapter 1, ‘Photography, Optics and Light’ from it and has also published some photographs from the book: http://baggrund.com/fotomediering-lys-optik-og-fotografering/

Joanna Zylinska, We Have Always Been Digital (2009). CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Discover Photomediations: An Open Book: http://www.europeana-space.eu/photomediations-an-open-book/

organized by Cultural Studies, another pop-up exhibition of Europeana Space is taking place for a limited period in Leuven

Pop-Up Museum on the Belle Epoque

KU Leuven hosts the Europeana Space Pop-Up Museum on the Belle Epoque at Agora KU Leuven. It is on display at the TimeOut Zone near the entrance.

Bring your smartphone and earphones for the full experience! Only until Wednesday 15/2!

Wien (Austria), 23-25 May 2017

WikiCite17 – applications open

WikiCite 2017 is a 3-day conference, summit and hack day to be hosted in Vienna, Austria, on May 23-25, 2017. It expands on efforts started last year at WikiCite 2016 to design a central bibliographic repository, as well as tools and strategies to improve information quality and verifiability in Wikimedia projects.

Our goal is to bring together Wikimedia contributors, data modelers, information and library science experts, software engineers, designers and academic researchers who have experience working with Wikipedia’s citations and bibliographic data.

WikiCite 2017 will be a venue to:

* Day 1. (Conference) – present progress on existing work and initiatives for citations and bibliographic data across Wikimedia projects

* Day 2. (Summit) – discuss technical, social, outreach and policy directions

* Day 3. (Hack) – get together to build, based on new ideas and applications

More information on the event can be found here:

How to apply

Participation for this year’s event is limited to 100 individuals. In order to be considered for participation, please fill out the appropriate application form and provide us with some information about yourself, your interests, and expected contribution. Your application will be reviewed and the organizing committee will extend an invitation by March 10, 2017. This application form is to determine the best mix of attendees. Not everyone who applies will receive an invitation, but there will be a waitlist.

Important dates

* February 9, 2017: applications open

* February 27, 2017: applications close, waitlist opens

* March 10, 2017: all final notifications of acceptance are issued, waitlist processing begins

* March 31, 2017: attendee list is finalized

Travel support

Like last year, limited funding to cover travel costs of prospective participants will be available. Requests for travel support should be submitted via the application form. We will confirm by March 10, if we can provide you with travel support.

Contact

For any question, you can contact the organizing committee via: wikicite@wikimedia.org

We look forward to seeing you in Vienna!

The WikiCite 2017 organizing committee

Website: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCite_2017

Grenoble, 26-30 June 2017

Summer school Digital Editing/Digital Humanities

The University of Grenoble-Alpes together with the Maison de Sciences de l’Homme-Alpes with the sponsorship of ITN DIXIT* organises a summer school in Digital Editing and Digital Humanities.

Details will be published shortly, but the summer school is aimed at PhD students, early career researchers and beyond that want to understand what is Digital editing and Digital Humanities by doing it. For this first edition there are no prerequisite, as the the teaching will not assume any previous knowledge.

Courses will be offered in the field of:
– HTML and CSS
– XML
– TEI and EPIDOC
– RDF
– XSLT
– NLP, tree-banking and lemmatisation
– GIS

Participants will attend common classes for the first 2 days and then they will be able to choose between one of the 3 workshops offered every day.
The languages of teaching are: French and Italian.
Many scholarship will be sponsored by DiXiT, particularly for PhD students.

More information will be available soon.

DiXiT website: http://dixit.uni-koeln.de/

*DiXiT is an international network of high-profile institutions from the public and the private sector that are actively involved in the creation and publication of digital scholarly editions. DiXiT offers a coordinated training and research programme for early stage researchers and experienced researchers in the multi-disciplinary skills, technologies, theories, and methods of digital scholarly editing. DiXiT is funded under Marie Curie Actions within the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme and runs from September 2013 until August 2017.

expressions of interest to be sent by Thursday 16 February 2017

EUDAT-EGI-INDIGO Call for Competence Centres and Business Pilots

EUDAT, EGI and INDIGO-DataCloud are joining forces to address the current fragmentation of the data and computing e-Infrastructure landscape and are looking for private and public partners developing and/or providing thematic services that support open science research workflows.

The consortium is now seeking to engage with research communities and business organizations.

COMPETENCE CENTRES

The joint proposal will establish and fund Competence Centers (CCs). Purpose of the CC is to foster the use of the advanced digital capabilities and resources provided by EGI, EUDAT, INDIGO-DataCloud and other relevant e-Infrastructures, service and technology providers, in order to support data- and computing-intensive science.

Early adopters of e-Infrastructure services are invited to send expressions of interest to establish a Competence Centre that will allow them to test, adapt, and integrate the digital capabilities they need to pursue they research, with the support of e-Infrastructure and technology experts.

Selected partners will be invited to join an EGI-EUDAT-INDIGO led consortium preparing a proposal to be submitted as part of H2020 e-Infra-12-2017 topic, Data & Distributed Computing e-Infrastructures for Open Science, subtopic a) Secure and agile data and distributed computing e-infrastructures.
DIGITAL INNOVATION HUB

The proposal will also fund specific pilots to foster innovation between e-Infrastructures and the private sector through building an ecosystem of SMEs, large industries, startups, researchers, accelerators, and investors to become active business partners of e-Infrastructures as customers and/or service providers. These initial pilots will serve as early demonstrators of the project’s Joint Digital Innovation Hub (DIH).

Click here to read the full text of the call.

Please prepare your application by downloading and completing the template that is available here.

You are invited to send your expression of interest in participating to the project proposal by sending the completed template to: editorial-board@mailman.egi.eu by Thursday 16 February 2017, 24:00 CET.

Augmented Reality significantly helps to engage the user with the content, in a performance that gives new meaning to the philosophy of edutaintment and learning by doing.

The magnificent adventure of a ‘Fragment’. Block NXLVI Parthenon North Frieze in Augmented Reality

In this article, appeared on Scires-IT journal, it is presented a case study by Alessandra Cirafici (SUN Second University of Naples, Italy), Donato Maniello (Studio gloWArp, Academy of Fines Arts-Naples, Italy) and Valeria Amoretti (SUN Second University of Naples, Italy), illustrating the application of Augmented Reality to a fragment of the Parthenon, aiming to investigate the role played by the introduction of digital technologies in communication strategies for the enjoyment of cultural heritage and in the formation of a new concept of “sensory environment”, intended as a space where the combination of physical presence with virtual elements generates unprecedented means of experience and education.

The aim of this study is the creation of a multimedia totem with the use of video mapping techniques, representing a particular form of augmented reality, in order to provide new means – different from the existing ones- for museum enjoyment. The object of the totem was the creation of a documentary about the full scale reproduction of block NXLVI of the north frieze of the Parthenon.

With the words “Augmented Reality” we mean the addition of more information than what the observer would normally perceive, mediated by the use of a computer. Thus the human sensory perception is enhanced by information generally manipulated and electronically channeled that would otherwise not be perceived by the five senses.

Three main aspects define the multimedia totem: indoor use of Augmented Reality, its use for the enhancement of cultural heritage, and the digital anastylosis that makes it possible to reconstruct the missing part directly on the element or on a copy of it. These options provide the opportunity to engage different age groups with the expressive potential of Augmented Reality also in terms of performance, with the possible transformation of any surface into a dynamic display.

Download the full article (PDF, 1 Mb)