Digital meets Culture

Vivl.io is one of the projects supported and incubated by Europeana Space after a series of hackathons and business modelling workshops

E-Space presents… Vivl.io

Books are utterly intriguing characters. They tell stories, share knowledge, make arguments, and they fondle, poke and jab our feelings. We love reading them because they let us become part of their stories and, in their turn, they become part of our understanding of the world. At Vivl.io, we work on refining the experience of reading and exploring books, focusing on what we consider one of the greatest cultural heritage: the literary classics.

In the age of reading abundance, we believe that it is time to reinvent and rediscover the classics. By creating the best digital edition available. By offering them a cozy online home that combines a clean and seamless reading experience with unique contextual information. By putting together fine and well-crafted print editions, with attractive new covers, outstanding typography, and editorial excellence.

Vivl.io is a team that combines expertise in editorial, design, development and marketing for books. We have been working in supporting publishers in design and technology for the past 7 years and we now are launching our own digital imprint combining our knowledge and love for books and the experience of reading.

Learn more: http://vivl.io/

Vivl.io was one of the winner projects of the E-Space Hack the Book Festival in Athens (January 2016) and was further developed during the E-Space Business Modelling Workshop series.

Discover the 7 projects incubated by E-Space

How can we make better use of our digital heritage within other sectors? Expert speakers and discussions tried to find the answers.

Upcycle Digital Heritage – workshop in Derry

Over the past decades much effort has gone into the digitisation of our rich and varied cultural heritage, producing vast amounts of high quality digital data, ranging from images, video, sound and 3D. However, this valuable resource is not being fully exploited and repurposed for the benefit of many. By collaborating with several different sectors including: creative arts, community, tourism and education we can construct, reclaim, and reutilise cultural heritage data for a wide range of socially, culturally and economic activities.

This event explored some of the challenges and opportunities which are present in reusing digital heritage data with each section introduced by an international expert in this field, followed by discussion amongst the event attendees to explore potential solutions and opportunities.

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The event was aimed at not only those in the cultural heritage sector but also those sectors discussed during the day. participants represented the sectors of Tourism, ICT, Community, Education, Enterprise, Arts.

Morning Session:

10:15 – Registration and refreshments
10:45 – Welcome and introduction
Anthony Corns (The Discovery Programme, Dublin)

11:00 – Creative Industries
How can we ensure that our digital heritage is exploited by new sectors and industries?
Introduction by Dr Antonella Fresa (Europeana Space Project) – 20 minutes
Followed by 40 minutes of discussion

12:00 – Communities
How can communities use digital technologies to make the most out of their heritage?
Introduction – Dr Stuart Jeffries (Glasgow School of Art/Digital Design Studio) – 20 minutes
Followed by 40 minutes of discussion

Afternoon Session:

14:00 – Tourism & Museums
How can utilise digital heritage to improve our experiential tourism products?
Introduction – Daniel Pletinckx (Visual Dimension bvba, Belgium) – 20 minutes
Followed by 40 minutes of discussion

15:00 – Education
How digital heritage be used to improve our understanding of the past?
Introduction – Dr Danielle O’Donovan (Irish Heritage Trust) – 20 minutes
Followed by 40 minutes of discussion

16:00 – Refreshments

16:10 – Summary, discussion and close

Speakers:

Antonella Fresa

ICT expert, General Director at Promoter Srl. Antonella has been working on European cooperation projects since 1994. Technical Coordinator and Communication Manager of several national and European projects in the domains of digitisation of cultural heritage, access and creative re-use of digital content, long-term digital preservation, smart cities, citizen science, e-Infrastructures and cloud technologies. From 2002 to 2012, advisor of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities. From 1999 to 2002, Project Officer at the European Commission. Previously, researcher in the industry, and in particular at Olivetti in Pisa, Ivrea and at the Olivetti Advanced Technology Centre in Cupertino (CA, USA). She regularly serves as independent expert for evaluations and reviews by the European Commission and national research programmes. Enterprise Fellow at Coventry University. Project Manager of Digitalmeetsculture.net, the online communication platform powered by Promoter Srl.

Stuart Jeffrey

Stuart Jeffrey is Research Fellow in International Heritage Visualisation at the Digital Design Studio of The Glasgow School of Art. Stuart studied a combined honours degree in Computer Science and Archaeology at the University of Glasgow and completed his PhD in three dimensional modelling of early medieval sculpted stones in 2003, also at the University of Glasgow. Following posts with the West of Scotland Archaeology Service and subsequently as Deputy Director of the Archaeology Data Service, Stuart took up his current role with the GSA where his work covers all aspects of heritage visualisation and the use of new technologies to create records, analyse, interpret, re-interpret and represent every form of heritage from built to intangible. Current and recent research activities include major projects funded by the AHRC researching community co-production of archaeological research data (ACCORD), educational re-use of large 3D Heritage datasets (REVISIT) and the forthcoming Scottish Community Rock Art Recording Project in partnership with Historic Environment Scotland (SCRAP). Stuart is also co-director of an historical and archaeological research project with the National Trust of Scotland working on the isle of Staffa and Fingal’s cave in particular (HARPS). Stuart has published extensively on diverse topics in archaeology and computer science, including, medieval sculpted stones, archaeological informatics, community co-production, contemporary social value, visualisation techniques, digital preservation, digital authenticity, natural language processing, and the use of social media in archaeology. Stuart is a member of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists and a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland

Daniel Pletinckx

Daniel Pletinckx was trained as a civil engineer, with specialisation in information technology. He gained extensive experience in system design, quality assurance, digital image processing and synthesis, 3D and virtual reality through a career of 15 years in private industry. Currently, Daniel Pletinckx is director of Visual Dimension bvba, a SME dealing with ICT based innovation in cultural heritage, education and tourism. Visual Dimension specialises in new, efficient ways for creation of and interaction with 3D digital heritage assets. The company has been active in European projects, such as the European Network of Excellence V-MusT.net that focuses on virtual and digital museums, and 3D-ICONS that provides 3D content of World Heritage monuments and sites through Europeana.

Danielle O’Donovan

Danielle holds a Ph.D. in Architectural History and an M.Sc. in Information Technology from Trinity College Dublin. At the heart of Danielle’s experience is engaging people with art, architecture, history and heritage. Danielle has taught history of architecture at third level, she has worked as a tour guide for second, third level and elderly learners. She has designed learning in the historic environment for second and third level learners, both with and without the use of digital technology.
Engaging users with heritage through digital technology has formed a large part of Danielle’s experience in recent years. This has ranged from designing interactive maps and timelines, curating blogs, crowdsourcing intangible heritage stories from diverse audiences and sharing all of these in a meaningful way that places transaction (rather than transmission) at the core of people’s relationship with history and heritage

Organized by The Discovery Programme / CARARE/ FABLAB Derry
Wednesday, October 12, 2016 from 10:15 AM to 4:30 PM (BST)
Derry/Londonderry, United Kingdom

Start of the course will be in October 2016: enroll now and learn how to creatively reuse digital cultural content from professionals of the Europeana Space network.

“Creative with Digital Heritage” – E-Space MOOC is accepting enrollments right now

How can you engage with and reuse the wealth of digital cultural heritage available online in many repositories such as Europeana? How can you become an active user of this content, using, remixing and reinventing it for your research, lessons, and development?

Whether you are a student or teacher with an interest in cultural heritage, a GLAM professional, a developer or simply a cultural heritage enthusiast without prior technical knowledge, this MOOC is for you.

The course is free and requires an effort of 2-4 hours per week, over a 8-weeks lenght. The course is available on KU Leuven section at EdX platform.

What you’ll learn:

How to become creative with digital cultural heritage
What repositories, tools and APIs are available online
How to access and use them
How digital cultural heritage can be effectively and successfully reused
How to deal with Intellectual Property Rights in the context of reuse of digital cultural heritage

As the online availability of digital cultural heritage continues to grow, it becomes more and more important that users, from passive readers, learn to become active re-users. The mission of this course is to share the creative ways with which people use and re-use Europeana and digital cultural content, to demonstrate what Europeana can bring to the learning community, and to bring about the essential concept that cultural content is not just to contemplate, but to live and engage with.

The educational idea behind the E-Space MOOC is to lower barriers to the access and reuse of cultural heritage content on Europeana and similar sources, providing tutorials and trial versions of applications and tools alongside reading materials, useful tips and best practices gathered throughout the course of the project.

More details and information, and link to enrolling is available here: http://www.europeana-space.eu/education/mooc/

Earlier this year a call for artworks was launched, and a jury deliberated on the best works that creatively reused open access digital cultural heritage

Winners of Open& Hybrid Publishing Pilot competition / Photomediations

After much deliberation, the Photomediations team (Open&Hybrid Publishing Pilot of E-Space project), together with guest curators Katrina Sluis (The Photographers Gallery), Karen Newman (Birmingham Open Media), and Pippa Milne (Centre for Contemporary Photography), are proud to announce the overall winner, curators’ choices and commendations for the Photomediations open call competition.

“We were looking for still and/or moving image works (as well as post-digital collages, installations and sculptures), that creatively reuse – in the form of mashups, collages, montages, tributes or pastiches – one or more original image files taken from the Europeana repository of cultural artefacts. We ultimately had 537 people engage with the exhibition site during March and received 300 creative submissions via social media & our submission form/email. We would first of all like to thank everyone one who contributed work. The sheer quality, diversity and creativity evident in each submission made the judging process hugely satisfying for us but equally challenging to agree on our final selections.” said the curators.

Every qualifying (licensed & attributed) image submitted to the call will be showcased on the Photomediations website and a selection will be part of the physical exhibition at E-Space conference in Berlin.

The overall winner of the Open&Hybrid Publishing Pilot Competition is:

Mark Murphy, Storm in a Teacup (CC BY-NC-SA)

“By deftly selecting and splicing together two remarkably different images, Mark asks us to imaginatively ponder the physical impossibility of a ‘storm in a teacup’”. (Katrina Sluis)

“Just really beautiful”. (Karen Newman)

Discover the other winning projects (Curators’ choice and Commendations awards) on the Photomediations website.

“We hope will continue to inspire and provide the foundations for others to produce new remix creations and showcase the benefits of open licensing within the creative sector.”

Picasso Cat is one of the projects supported and incubated by Europeana Space after a series of hackathons and business modelling workshops

E-Space presents… Picasso Cat

“Rembrandt’s use of chiaroscuro heightens the sense of …”, — oh, ok, I’ll learn about art tomorrow, right after I open this book on quantum mechanics and start preparing for a marathon… And yet another day for the ivory tower of art to be unassailable.
That’s a simple fact that people on the street don’t know much about art. It is not like we don’t want to know about. It is simply not that easy if you already devote your time to work, friends, sport or have to commute for hours during the day. Life in cities leaves its traces on our habits and the way we do things, that’s why the key idea of the Picasso Cat is to integrate art into our daily routine.

If you are on a bus or in the tube, you have five or ten minutes to kill. Would you read an analysis and critique of The Scream by Edvard Munch or play Candy Crash Saga? But what if we combine the fun component of games with art?
We want to combine people’s devotion to cats into a game that takes five or ten minutes to play. It’s fun, it’s visual, it’s entertaining. You browse cat’s pictures and you notice that they resemble something. Hm, maybe that’s a famous painting? “Oh, yes, that’s the famous Picasso’s self-portrait, btw” — says the app. So while on the tube, why don’t you do something useful? Like browsing cat’s pictures.

Our goal is turn learning about art history and famous paintings into a game, based on cats, of course: imagine you are given two cats pictures (on the left in the first figure), can you figure out which one resembles the style of Van Gogh? Or maybe you can have a look at a series of cats pictures and find a pattern (the pictures on the left in the first figure)? Does it resemble a famous painting? Like someone carrying flowers maybe?

What we know for sure: people love cats. So come for cats, stay for art.

Picasso Cat was one of the winner projects of the E-Space Photography hackathon Hack Your Photo Heritage in Leuven (February 2016) and was further developed during the E-Space Business Modelling Workshop series.

Discover the 7 projects incubated by E-Space

New York City, 26-28 October 2016

Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) conference

The Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG), among the preeminent international conferences on Digital Preservation, is coming to NYC. Now in its ninth year, PASIG is a practical, solutions focused conference that places a strong emphasis on the following:

Comparison of high-level OAIS architectures, services-oriented architecture work, and use cases
Cooperation on standard-based, open-source and commercial digital repository platforms
Software as a Service solutions for digital preservation
Review of storage architectures and trends and their relation to preservation and archiving architectures and research data set management

PASIG is a place to learn from each other’s practical experiences, success stories, and challenges in practicing digital preservation. Join us at the Museum of Modern Art this Fall as the international digital preservation community gathers for three days of exchange and sharing.

For more information visit the Conference website.

Pisa (Italy), 6-9 October 2016

INTERNET FESTIVAL 2016

In the age of the “Internet of People and Things”, the dematerialisation of digital innovation creates real and solid links. An interconnected digital fabric that is ubiquitous, collaborative and adaptable, that supports the new information-based competitive and technological ecosystem.
The so-called “things” are nodes that are able to create signals that can then directly interact with cars, electric appliances, intelligent platforms and systems.

The Internet Festival explores “forms of the future” that relate to this phenomenon. These digital “nodes and links” redefine the work of art and its audience, the economy and its agents, technology, sport, security, personal identity, conflicts, the media, education,…
People and things are at the centre and data and relationships all around: a digital, but very real fabric, that will be unravelled and explained at the Festival, in Pisa, from the 6th to the 9th of October.
The timeline of events and activities for the 2016 edition goes back and forth along the years, re-interpreting certain pivotal societal, political, economic and technological contexts.

What was it like 30 years ago, when the first Italian “ping” was sent by the CNUCE (the National University Centre for Electronic Calculus) to the American Arpanet, the ancestor of the current Internet? What kind of political resolve allowed for the take-off of the Internet as we know it today? What were the main focuses in academics and research? How, if they did at all, did the worlds of big business, research and institutions communicate between themselves? The IF2016 will be looking back at all aspects of the 1980’s, its music, radio and television, before attempting to imagine the future: what will the next “forms of the future” be in, say, 2048, in politics, sociology, technology and culture?

http://www.internetfestival.it/

We Make Known is one of the projects supported and incubated by Europeana Space after a series of hackathons and business modelling workshops

E-Space presents… We Make Known

We Make Known – we vivify archive experience, we spot hidden treasures, we empower the audience.

We Make Known provides easy and inspiring access to digitized archives. It’s a semantic search engine that aims to revolutionize the way we experience our digital memories. We focus on the joy of discovery, the possibility of wandering around to find hidden treasures.

Digitization creates a whole new world of possibilities for audiences and institutions. We’re challenged by a vast amount of cultural data – both fascinating and frightening. How can we cope with the complex cosmos of our cultural heritage?

WMK tackles three problems:

Existing search engines let us only find what we already know

For the user, WMK is an interface and search logic that empowers the audience to explore archives beyond their existing knowledge in an intuitive and fun way.

We make it easy and low cost for institutions to showcase their digitized collections online

For the institution, WMK is a service that enables promotion, analysis and optimisation of their archives with little effort, cost or technical know-how.

Different standards in archive digitization aggravates knowledge transfer

WMK is a powerful hub to standardize and manage various archive systems. This enables a archive overarching link of knowledge with great future opportunities for institutions and users.

WMK was one of the winner projects of the E-Space Hacking Culture Bootcamp in Amsterdam (May 2015) and was further developed during the E-Space Business Modelling Workshop series.

To find out more about WMK check: wemakeknown.com

Discover the 7 projects incubated by E-Space

Create you own masterpiece and win € 10.000

Rijksstudio Award now open / deadline 15 January 2017

The Rijksstudio Award design competition is now open for entry! Be inspired by the Rijksmuseum’s collection and create your own personal masterpiece. Anyone can take part and all art forms are allowed.

The Rijksmuseum will be awarding the Rijksstudio Award for the third time. Draw inspiration from the Rijksmuseum’s collection, download images from Rijksstudio and use them to create your own artwork.

Anyone can take part and all art forms and interpretations are allowed, from design, decorative arts and applied arts to fashion design, photography and video. The winner will receive a prize of €10,000. Please submit your work before 15 January 2017.

More info and entry form: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio-award

Practical planning and strategic objectives to improve Europena website and infrastructure.

Europeana DSI-2 kick off in Vienna

Hosted by the Austrian National Library in the prestigious location in Vienna, on 7-8 September the kick-off meeting of the Europeana DSi-2 project took place.

The aim of the DSI-2 project is to ensure the continued operation of the Europeana Digital Service Infrastructure (DSI) and to facilitate the transition of the Europeana website from a portal to a multi-sided platform, offering a variety of services to data providers, end users and re-users. Key objectives are to innovate the aggregation infrastructure to make it easier for providers to add their content to the Europeana site; improve the quality of metadata and the quantity of digital objects available; increase the amount of objects with open licencing conditions; develop more thematic channels; and to create a series of ‘Expert Hubs’ across the Europeana network.

About 60 attendees convened in Vienna to discuss with the WP leaders both practical details of the project activities and objectives, overview and strategies. The kickoff included plenary sessions and parallel thematic meetings on specific areas of the project, and it was opened by Max Kaiser (Austrian National Library, technical project manager) and Jill Cousins (Europeana Foundation).

In the wrap up session at the end of the kickoff the participats together made a wordcloud and it is notable to see the word “direct” as the most important one, as it expresses the objective and direction of the new Europeana aggregation infrastructure that is under development.