Digital meets Culture

The retable of Hermen Rode, preserved in Niguliste Museum in Tallinn, is the focus of a educational demonstrator developed by Estonian Ministry of Culture

Young Art Detectives – students engagement with the Rode Altarpiece Demonstrator

As a part of Europeana Space educational work, for the creative re-use of digital cultural heritage also for teaching and learning, partner EVK developed a demonstrator based on high resolution imaging of the retable of Hermen Rode, the great masterpiece hosted in the Niguliste Museum in Tallinn.

Now the tool is used for an educational programme for kids from pre-school to twelve years old. The “Rode Altarpiece in Close-up” lesson plans is:

• Actively engaging, exploratory-creative

• Connecting (provides cooperation between various subject fields)

• Created for five age groups from pre-schoolers to the upper secondary school level

• Based on contemporary educational trends and connected to the national curriculum of the Republic of Estonia, and is adjustable to other curricula

The educational programme is based on scientific studies of the Rode altar retable and primarily showcases interpreting and conceptualising of historical sources to pupils of different ages. The educational programme is consistent with modern educational trends, and transfers students from factual learning to exploratory and creative learning integrating various subjects. The educational environment is extended beyond the classroom to a museum or the virtual environment of the Rode altarpiece science web in order to conduct the class and pass on knowledge. This provides substantial added value as the learning process can be based on directly analysing and interpreting the authentic source.

The focus and subject of assignments vary for each age group; each assignment can be adjusted for an age group one stage younger or older. The age groups are as follows: pre-schoolers, grades 1–3, grades 4–6, grades 7–9 and grades 10–12. Similarly to the various humanitarian and science fields involved in conducting scientific research, the developed study activities integrate different subjects: history, arts, religious studies, Social Studies, native language, mathematics, and chemistry. As an exciting and playful aspect, the children will operate as art detectives while solving the assignments. The used methods are based on active involvement of students and teach visual thinking, critical observing and analysing of historical pictures, conceptualising of depicted subjects from both historical and modern perspectives, and, based on this, analysis of self; the creative assignments also develop fine motor and art skills of the students. Each stage of the study activities uses a multimedia app as the starting point (the object of research and analysis) – younger students will be guided by their teacher and grade 7–9 students will conduct independent work.

The assignment descriptions contain the topic of the class together with elaborating keywords, list of included subjects and compliance of the topic with the subject syllabi of the curricula, expected learning outcomes, overview of used methods, list of necessary materials and tools, descriptions of conducting the study activities, photo and video presentations, and recommendations for feedback and assessments. The assignments have been planned to be carried out on a test group during February–March 2016, this will be the basis for clarifications and improvements, if necessary.

E-Space for Education website: www.europeana-space.eu/education

Apply now! Deadline is 24th February 2016!

EUscreenXL invites you to its online Video Competition

EUscreen.eu is giving the editorial control over the collection of unique 60 000 items to its users by hosting an open competition that will run from February 12, 12:00 CET to February 24, 12:00 CET.

EUscreen is the best practice network for Europe’s audiovisual heritage that actively promotes awareness of audiovisual heritage in various domains, including education, research, media production and towards the general public. Its unique collection on Europe’s television heritage is made accessible on Europeana.eu and EUscreen.eu. EUscreen’s editorial team is constantly creating new and interesting collections to highlight rich European heritage. Today more than 60,000 exquisite items are accessible on the EUscreen portal to pick from, representing 22 European broadcasters and archives.

To celebrate the achievement, EUscreen is announcing a Competition for its community to find out which EUscreen videos they like the best. Interested participants are invited to go to Competition Page at www.euscreen.eu/contest and send in their suggestion, together with a short text explaining why their video should be chosen.

12 favourite suggestions will be rewarded by Amazon gift-cards (30 EUR each) and will be showcased in the next EUscreen Video Collection, to be published on blog.eusreen.eu.

Criteria for entry:

Participant must be aged 18 or over to enter the Competition.
Participant may submit only one Submission of a favourite video enriched by a justification of his/her choice (no shorter than 20 words in English)
The deadline for submission is 12.00 CET on Wednesday, February 24, 2016.
Participant must agree to the terms and conditions before entering.

xxx

About EUscreen:

EUscreen is a dynamic and expanding network. Its aim is to improve the online presence of and engagement with audiovisual archival collections across Europe. It invites broadcast and audiovisual archives from Europe to work together with academic and technical partners to create public access to thousands of film clips, television programmes and supporting information. EUscreenXL aligns audiovisual collections by connecting them to Europeana’s online collection, which consist of millions of digitised materials from Europe’s museums, libraries and archives. The network was established in 2006 and is now made up of 31 partners and 13 associate partners from 22 European countries. More: www.euscreen.eu.

Contact for media:Maria DrabczykEUscreenXL Communications Leadmaria.drabczyk[at]nina.gov.pl

contest[at]euscreen.eu

cooperation agreement signed between the two Best Practice Networks

Europeana Food and Drink & Europeana Space

A new member of E-Space BPN is another Europeana BPN: it is Europeana Food and Drink with which a cooperation agreement was just signed!

Europeana Food and Drink focuses on the subject of Europe’s food and drink’s culture, with a specific emphasis on 3 themes:

My Food and Drink Life – focusing on the personal and domestic aspects of food and drink;
Food and Drink in the Community – focusing on the social and community aspects of food and drink;
The Food and Drink Industry – focusing on the cultivation, manufacture, production and distribution of food and drink.

Europeana Food and Drink wants to learn from the food and drink how they might be interested in engaging more with their heritage.

Under the common umbrella of Europeana and with several partners in common, joining forces is always important in order to foster synergies between sister projects.

http://foodanddrinkeurope.eu/

call for entries, two prizes 20.000 euro each will be assigned

STARTS prize 2016: deadline 4 March 2016 / Science, Technology and the ARTS.

20,000 euros await the winners of the STARTS Prize 2016. Appointed by the European Commission, Ars Electronica is launching an international prize to select the most pioneering collaborations and results in the field of creativity and innovation at the crossings of science and technology with the arts.

This is an open call for entries in conjunction with an initiative launched by the European Commission: STARTS. The name stands for innovation at the nexus of Science, Technology and the ARTS.

Two prizes – €20,000 each – will be bestowed this year:

One for artistic exploration and projects in which the artistic approach has significant potential to influence or change the way technology is deployed, developed or perceived, and
One for innovative cooperative ventures teaming up industry/technology and art (and cultural & creative sectors in general) in ways that open up new paths for innovation.

This competition specifically seeks:

Trailblazing forms of collaboration and projects essentially characterized by both technology and art; strictly artistically or strictly technologically oriented projects are not what STARTS is looking for.
Any and all artistic works and practices having to do with innovation in the areas of technology, business and/or society. This competition is not limited to a particular genre such as media art and digital art.
All forms of technological and scientific research that are inspired by art or in which artists are integrated as catalysts of new ways of seeing things. This includes but is not limited to information & communications technology.
Artists or artists’ collectives, creative professionals, researchers and companies throughout the world. This competition is not limited to citizens of EU-member states.
A project may be submitted for prize consideration simultaneously to the STARTS competition as well as a Prix Ars Electronica category (Computer Animation/Film/VFX, Digital Communities or Interactive Art).

Several special events are being planned to honor and showcase the projects singled out for recognition with a STARTS Prize:

Awards ceremony at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria September 8-12, 2016
Exhibition featuring the prizewinning projects at the 2016 Ars Electronica Festival
STARTS Forum at the 2016 Ars Electronica Festival
Exhibition featuring the prizewinning projects at the BOZAR Electronic Art Festival in Brussels, Belgium September 23-25, 2016

STARTS INITIATIVE:https ://ec .europa .eu/digital-agenda/en/ict-art-starts-platform
STARTS PRIZE: http ://starts-prize .aec .at

The entry deadline is March 4, 2016.

The main objective of the SQuAT Fest is to assist European open source projects to bring their software into the AppHub European Open Source Marketplace.

PREFORMA @ AppHub SQuAT Fest 2016

Benjamin Yousefi from Riksarkivet represented the PREFORMA project at the AppHub SQuAT Fest on January 26, 2016 in Brussels.

The main objective of the SQuAT Fest is to assist European open source projects to bring their software into the AppHub European Open Source Marketplace. In addition, we would like to understand the current state of open source software as developed by EU funded projects, and how we can support them to improve their quality assurance and governance processes.

The main recommendation that came out from the workshop were that PREFORMA should encourage the PREFORMA Suppliers to use AppHub as an additional channel to distribute the PREFORMA Conformance Checkers, documenting the possible deployment as an example of integrating the Conformance Checkers with other platforms.

The community behind AppHub is also working on best practices, code quality and OSS (Open Source Software) risk management, producing documents, such as the AppHub Charter, OSS and tools, such as, GitHubAnalyzer. The PREFORMA project should evaluate and incorporate these documents and tools where appropriate.

Download here the presentations delivered during the workshop.

About AppHub

AppHub is a non-profit marketplace aimed at facilitating the dissemination of open source software with the purpose to help European collaborative projects to implement an efficient dissemination and market outreach strategy, it helps SMEs reach a global market by providing a marketplace where business users can discover, deploy and run quality open source software packages for their information systems. The project is an H2020 project, funded in part by the European Commission, which promotes EU-funded technologies through a combination of knowledge, resources and expertise from the OW2 open source community, the Fraunhofer Fokus research institute, and UShareSoft an independent software vendor.

Heverlee (Belgium), 25-27 February 2016

Hack your Photo Heritage!

Europeana Space Photography Pilot and the Pilot coordinator KU Leuven invite you to a 3-day event targeting developers, cultural heritage professionals, designers, creative entrepreneurs, photographers and photo-amateurs: hack the massive photographic heritage content on Europeana, E-Space and other public repositories to mash them up with user-generated smartphone photos and stories, creating a new environment to experience our cultural past, using apps, websites and virtual environments.

During the Hackathon developers will have access to the vast public photographic heritage now available on resources such as Europeana (see the API’s at Europeana Labs), Wikipedia and Flickr, while at the same time having access through the Europeana Space API’s to copyright protected content to experiment with. Through the E-Space Technical Space environment API, users can login and user data can be stored together with the data from other sources. Also the JPSearch API will be available and support for similarity-based search will be provided. At the FABLAB KU Leuven, 3D-printers, laser cutters and a small joinery will be available for use, together with Oculus, Google Cardboard, Moverio and Kinect.

Learn how to tap the power of huge resources such as Europeana and Europeana Space, Flickr Commons and Wikimedia to build innovative apps re-using photographic heritage. Mix images from the past with smartphone selfies. Connect old and new generations by making apps bridging centuries. Develop web environments for teachers, educators and museum curators to bring true public access to photographic cultural heritage. Learn how to convert photo imagery to 3D-prints and new materials.

The 3 best concepts will win a trip to London for the Business Modeling Workshop! There they’ll have their ideas and business models strengthened by the expert team at REMIX, one of Europe’s leading cultural and creative entrepreneur agency and the organizers of the REMIX Summits. (Travel, accommodation and attendance fee is covered.) The team with the strongest concept and business model after the Workshop will win a 3-month intensive incubation package from REMIX and the Europeana Space Network.

Registration are still open.

Learn more:

Hackathon Website

Photography Pilot Blog

Amsterdam (The Netherlands), 14-15 April 2016

Identity Matters: enriching heritage to meet a new era / RICHES final conference

Borders blur. Disciplines merge. Barriers come down. The 21st century is a time of repositioning, and there is a key role to play for heritage. How do we (re)present ourselves, our public, our archives, our countries and our institutes?

This was the liet-motiv of RICHES final conference, presenting the project results together with inspiring keynote speakers who reflected and explored collaboratively future visions of heritage. Participation was also central, with experience of inspiring examples first hand in the city of Amsterdam: through urban safaris and visits to heritage sites, all conference participants could see best practices in action.

#IAMRICHES

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Photos courtesy of Waag. More photos on Flickr.

International keynote speakers were complemented presentations, demonstrations and workshops, all organised around themes such as connecting, self expression, participation, power, skills and crafts, food and festivities and citizenship.

Day 1: Identity Matters: How do we represent our changing selves in/with heritage?

Day 2: Matters of Identity: dissecting identity – what are the building blocks? How do we construct and reconstruct our identity through heritage?

Download the detailed Programme Booklet (PDF, 4 Mb)

See the RICHES website: http://riches-project.eu/amsterdamconference2016.html

14-15 April 2016

Volkshotel – Wibautstraat 150, 1091 GR Amsterdam

Preparations for the festival were ongoing for more than three months and the atmosphere of the event was never less than jovial and electrifyingly creative.

Hack The Book Festival: Celebrating the future of the book and cultural heritage

by Thodoris Chiotis, OCC.

The Hack The Book Festival was held on January 22-24 2016 at the Onassis Culture Centre in Athens and it was a roaring success. The Festival was twofold: it comprised of an educational workshop held under the auspices of the Europeana Space project which took place on the morning and afternoon of 22^nd of January; the titular hackathon of the Festival was inaugurated with talks by Joanna Zylinska, Gary Hall and Chris Meade on the evening of the 22^nd and unfolded throughout the 23^rd and the 24^th of January.

hack_the_book_1_Athanasios_Deligiannis_900x750

ph. Athanasios Deligiannis

Preparations for the festival were ongoing for more than three months. Participants to the event were selected from a wide pool of applicants who were invited to submit concept notes in the months leading up to the festival; the festival itself was preceded by a well-attended pre-hackathon event in which designers, programmers and artists shared their expertise and offered their mentorship to potential participants. At the hackathon itself, ideas on the concept of the book as a repository of ideas and affect, as a distribution model, as an artifact and as an interface were exchanged, tested, refined and implemented in dazzling prototypes.

The participants were asked to pitch their projects to the judges, both in public and in private, and the feedback provided helped streamline their pitches and their projects even further. The participants were also ably aided throughout the weekend by a dedicated genius bar consisting of content experts, designers, programmers and artists. The atmosphere in the festival even when time for the contestants was running out was never less than jovial and electrifyingly creative. The final prototypes displayed a significant degree of imagination, creativity, social conscience and a healthy amount of irreverence: the final prototypes presented at the pitching stage made use of open source digital cultural assets while simultaneously rethinking existing interfaces and platforms. The final results showcased not only the diversity of participants and projects, but also a real need to create spaces where creative endeavor can flourish.

#photomediations

Hack the Book website: http://www.europeana-space.eu/hackathons/open-hybrid-publishing-hackathon/

Learn even more on OCC website: http://www.sgt.gr/eng/SPG1611/

Next, it is planned a wider event with an educational focus, possibly including European Commission speakers and representatives from Europeana and other relevant organisations.

E-Space for Education: stories from the Athens workshop

by Barbara Dierickx (PACKED)

On January 22nd 2016, the EuropeanaSpace Education team gathered in Athens. The day leading up to the Hack the Book event our partner Onassis Cultural Centre (OCC) co-hosted a public workshop, focussing on educators.

Within E-Space, bridging the gap between heritage and education is a main project focus. The project as a whole offers a wide range of services to the educational sector through its activities:

5 examples of creative re-use of digital cultural content for education
a MOOC, Massive Open Online Course, to learn what you can do with digital cultural heritage, for your research, your studies, your classrooms
6 thematic Pilots developing prototypes, that can be utilized also for educational purposes
thematic events on education and digital cultural heritage
a review of existing projects, environments and best practices dealing with digital cultural heritage content in an educational context

In this first educational workshop, we focussed on the five educational demonstrators that have been developed. These applications put theory into practice, and look at how (digital) cultural heritage may be turned into a valuable asset than can be used in a classroom. An overview of the different demonstrators is given on our thematic website: http://www.europeana-space.eu/education/.

We should make a small correction, as ‘classroom’ may actually be a too narrow description; these demonstrators may also prove functional in other settings. The team behind the demonstrator on Irish poetry and folk takes for example is looking at local libraries as a scene for the programme’s use. Sometimes public readings of said stories take place here, and the group of attending children could very well be exposed to the demonstrator application to interact more with the stories’ texts and illustrations.

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These different applications have been developed in an almost-ready modus. During the workshop, feedback on them was gathered so that the developing teams could upgrade them over the next project weeks. In order to introduce this work a bit more, the day was started with a couple of introductory keynotes that set the scene. We had project partner Thodoris Chiotis, who introduced the Cavafy Archive and its step into the digital realm. Next Prodromos Tsiavos discussed the difficulty in maintaining openness and diversity in the global MOOCs environment, and how this was handled within OCC. The story of MOOCs continued with Ignasi Labastida (University of Barcelona) who talked about the meaning of ‘open’ in education. And to close this session, Alek Tarkowski proposed a Polish project approach to going open in education (and using Creative Commons licenses).

In the next part, the focus shifted to the five E-Space demonstrators:

Photographic investigation of art works: Frederik Temmermans, Post Doc Researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel – iMinds
Irish poetry & folk tales: Ruth Montague, LGMA
Cavafy Archive demonstrator: Thodoris Chiotis, Project Manager at Cavafy Archive, Onassis Foundation
3D archeological demonstrator: Marinos Ioannides, Digital heritage Research Lab – Cyprus University of Technology
Rode altarpiece: Hembo Pagi, Estonian Ministry of Culture

They were all pitched by their developing team in terms of scope, functionality and their practical application in an educational setting – ranging from specified arts history masters to less formal interaction with primary school children. During lunchtime there was the possibility to interact with the demonstrators, and provide feedback to the teams.

In the afternoon some time was reserved for the presentation of the plans on a MOOC, created in and based on the findings of the E-Space project. This MOOC, under supervision of Professor Frederik Truyen, Faculty of Arts KU Leuven, will be released in the coming project months. The day was closed by a couple of short best practice presentations; successful examples of how heritage is used in educational settings in Europe. E-Space partner Barbara Dierickx (PACKED vzw) presented the Flemish platform Testbeeld whiwh is giving access to audiovisual heritage for teachers; Dr. Balaouras Pantelis from the Greek Academic Network showed the Greek Open Courses Program.

On May 13 2016, E-Space is planning a wider event with an educational focus. We aim to include Commission speakers and representatives from Europeana and other relevant organisations. Should you be interested in the event as a contributor or participant, do not hesitate to contact us.

a conference in Llandudno (Wales) hosts prof. Forbes as keynote speaker.

RICHES presented at Digital Past 2016 – New technologies in heritage, interpretation & outreach

Organised by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, Digital Past is an annual two day conference which showcases innovative digital technologies and techniques for data capture, interpretation and dissemination of the heritage of Wales, the UK and beyond. Bringing together individuals from the commercial, public, academic, third sector and voluntary sectors, the conference aims to promote learning, discussion and debate around a range of digital technologies in current use, or in development, to record and understand the historic environment.

2016 edition takes place on 10 and 11 February.

Prof. Forbes (Coventry University), the coordinator of RICHES, will deliver a keynote speech to discuss some of the important changes which are impacting on cultural heritage in the contemporary world; research based on the work undertaken by RICHES project.

Event website: http://digitalpast2016.blogspot.co.uk/

The programme (PDF, 352 Kb)