Digital meets Culture

Kungliga Biblioteket, Stockholm, 7 April 2016

PREFORMA Open Source Preservation Workshop – Serving the Cultural Heritage

Open Source Preservation Workshop – Serving the Cultural Heritage is the first in a series of international events planned by PREFORMA.

The event will feature keynote presentations by representatives from the PREFORMA project and the open source community, live demonstrations of the three conformance checkers for electronic documents, images and AV files by the suppliers working in the project (veraPDF, Easy Innova, MediaArea) and an informal networking event where all the attendees can share experiences, meet the PREFORMA developers and learn about the tools.

The workshop will take place in Stockholm on April 7, 2016, and will be hosted at the National Library of Sweden.

This event is aimed at anyone interested in digital preservation and cultural heritage: developers who want to contribute code to the PREFORMA tools; memory institutions or other cultural heritage organisations involved in (or planning) digital preservation initiatives; standardisation bodies maintaining the technical specifications of preservation file formats; any other person interested in cooperating with us in defining open digital preservation standards.

REGISTER HERE BEFORE 31 MARCH 2016

Participation in the event is free of charge.

EVENT WEBSITE

http://opensourceworkshop.preforma-project.eu

FURTHER INFORMATION

The event will be held in English.

If you have any questions or need additional information, please contact Claudio Prandoni (prandoni@promoter.it).

Leuven, 27 November 2015: voyage in time through photography

Photographic Memories Workshop in Leuven

On Friday, November 27th the E-Space Photography Pilot in collaboration with the Leuven City Archive hosted the “Photographic Memories Workshop”. Seniors, students, citizens of Leuven and surrounding areas were invited to join for a voyage in time, through the stories hidden in our photographic heritage and a Wet Collodion demonstration, and back to the present with the most modern digitization techniques.

Welcomed by the introduction of the Photography Pilot leader Fred Truyen, participants had the possibility to have their family photos digitized in high quality by digitization specialist Bruno Vandermeulen, to know better the City Archive and its photographic collections, and to enjoy a demonstration of the traditional Wet Collodion technique by photographer Frederik Van den Broeck. Throughout the day more than 210 photographs were collected and digitized under the licenses CC-BY-NC, CC-BY or Public Domain. Support about licencing was provided by colleague Barbara Dierickx of Packed.

The day included the exhibition “All Our Yesterdays” that was again set up, featuring some of the images that had been digitized during the EuropeanaPhotography project and shown to the public only once before and for a very limited time (February-March 2015).

This event is part of the activities to prepare the Photography Hackathon taking place in Leuven in February 2016.

Unanimously, the elephant in the room for Europeana Space was acclaimed to be IPR.

Also, the project and the TV pilot were presented in detail during a panel workshop including other EU projects and initiatives. The objective of the Panel, entitled From Digitisation to Preservation, Creative Re-use of Cultural Content and Citizen Participation, was to discuss the effects of the impressive amount of digitized cultural heritage (DCH) now available in Europe, in terms of:

making cultural heritage more accessible and generating benefits to the content owners and to the citizens, in a more participative approach to cultural heritage and research

assessing the sociological impact and the context of change brought in by digitization and digital technologies, and the changing role of cultural institutions

determining solutions for re-using digital cultural content to unlock its business potential fostering economic growth

Crucially, generating new employment and economic rewards by leveraging on DCH needs the development of strategic alliances between sectors and actors which are not used to work together. Next to that, we see examples of how the accelerating pace of IT developments and its usage by ordinary people is going far beyond society’s ability to make sense (and make sensible decisions) of what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’ within the context of existing legal and moral codes. For Europeana Space, Lizzy Komen of NISV and Bart Bonnevalle of Noterik presented the overall framework of the project and then went in details about the TV pilot. The slides of the panel workshop are available here. The panel was set on the first day of the conference 7th December in the Track 1 Lose your Modesty! http://www.dish2015.nl/programme/workshops/lose-your-modesty/

The evaluation phase is very valuable for finding and fixing bugs and further improvements to the tool.

SPK testing Blinkster App for E-Space Museums pilot

by Sarah Wassermann, SPK

The Blinkster app offers additional information about selected objects in the permanent exhibition of the Museum of European Cultures (MEK) and the Ethnological Museum (EM), content providers of SPK. For now, not all exhibition objects are part of the app. The Institute for Museum Research – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (SPK) therefore had to plan the visual implementation of the app within the exhibitions. The question was: How to point to the Blinkster objects for the testing? After consultations with the graphic designer and museum director, it was agreed to create Blinkster spots and put them on the museum floor or showcases to point to the objects that are part of the app. An informational text was written and installed in front of the exhibitions to inform visitors about the evaluation phase.

A questionnaire was designed by the museum pilot partners as a basis for an overarching evaluation of all three participating content partners (SPK, LAM and EVK). First user testings were conducted with participants from the working group “Multimedia” during the “Berliner Herbsttreffen zur Museumsdokumentation” (Annual Berlin Autumn meeting – museums documentation, 12-14/10/15). and with MEK and IFM staff (curators, museologists, conservators, researchers) on 18/11/15.

The participants were very interested in the technology and gave productive input. Most users agreed that the information accessed via the app made their knowledge of the exhibition more complete. But of course there is still work to be done. We gained insights about the user’s expectances of the app’s performance, e.g. concerning the display of results and the image recognition. The evaluation phase is very valuable for finding and fixing bugs and further improvements.

[Show as slideshow]

Additional testings in Berlin are planned for December 2015 and the beginning of 2016 with museum professionals and young researchers from the museum and cultural heritage field. The next possibility to test Blinkster in general will be at the conference “Creative reuse of cultural heritage and contemporary practices: challenges and opportunities in the digital world“ on 11/12/2015 in Tallinn.

a social media campaign to raise awareness about the destruction of heritage by extremist groups.

#faces4heritage

Launched by USI Università della Svizzera italiana (a Swiss cantonal university based in Lugano, Canton Ticino, Switzerland), this initiative is endorsed by UNESCO and intends to promote peace through heritage preservation. USI recognizes together with UNESCO that “Heritage is our legacy from the past, what we live with today, and what we pass on to future generations”, and strongly believes that to build peace it needs to preserve and value Heritage. This is something that violent extremist groups know well. In fact, heritage sites are often in their sights and become targets of destruction. To sensitize society about the importance of preserving and defending heritage as a means for promoting culture and enhancing mutual understanding, a social media campaign was launched to spread knowledge about World Heritage Sites endangered by violentextremist groups, and call for an individual standing up against such violent actions, because: who destroys the past, has no future!

Get involved with your Facebook profile! More information, and the app, is available here: www.faces4heritage.org

GLAMURS investigates the complex issues involved with sustainable development and green economy

GLAMURS project joins RICHES network

A Cooperation Agreement was recently signed between RICHES and FP7 project GLAMURS. Coordinated by University of A Coruna, GLAMURS started in January 2014 and will support policymakers, businesses, and citizens to make the right decisions on the way towards a sustainable future. GLAMURS will create communicative contexts on European and regional levels to investi
gate how such transitions are possible. Methods such as knowledge co-production, agent based modelling, macro and micro economic modelling along with the highly integrated view of the interdisciplinary GLAMURS team will help to find greater insights into the complex issues involved with sustainable development.

Between January 2014 and December 2016 GLAMURS will focus on six lifestyle domains: energy use, housing, work-leisure-balance, food-consumption, mobility and the consumption of manufactured products. Seven case studies will help understanding of how transition to sustainable lifestyles and green economies are possible. GLAMURS will point out how lifestyles of sustainability pioneers could inspire regional actors to change political settings so that transitions to sustainable regions will become reality. At the same time, the regional and case study analyses will provide an insight into the upscaling to transitions beyond the regional levels.

The cooperation with RICHES, next to cross-dissemination and cross participation to events and initiatives, is particularly interesting for synergies, collaboration and exchanges between researchers in different domains.

Learn more: http://www.glamurs.eu/

Warsaw (Poland), 3-4 December 2015

EUscreen Conference Content in Motion: Curating Europe’s Audiovisual Heritage

The EUscreenXL project is holding an international conference on curation of audiovisual heritage. The conference takes place on December 3 and 4 in Warsaw at the National Audiovisual Institute (NInA). It is organised by the best practice network for Europe’s audiovisual heritage, EUscreen. The network is delighted to announce that the full programme for the conference, titled Content in Motion: Curating Europe’s Audiovisual Heritage, is now available.

During the 2015 international EUscreen conference, we want to discuss the benefits and challenges of memory institutions in making available online their AV collections. In six plenary sessions and three workshops, we will present various forms and models of collaboration between archives and users. In order to outline the importance of reaching audiences with digital archival collections we will start the event with a session on impact with Harry Verwayen from Europeana, Liam Wylie from RTÉ Archives and Alicja Knast representing Muzeum Śląskie in Katowice.

During the two days of discussions we will highlight experiments and projects from various collection holders, academics and researchers. We will discuss topics such as online engagement and draw into focus the topic of curating and reusing content – including the Warsaw Uprising which is probably the world’s first war documentary film made entirely from original archive materials. We will also take you on a brief tour through a 1000-year history at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews to show how the use of tools and strategies can enable visitors to come into intimate contact with the exhibition.

One of the sessions will discuss the role of AV material in scholarly research and education, other, with case studies from James Davis Google Cultural Institute and Casey E. Davis from American Archive of Public Broadcasting, will focus on contextualized and innovative forms of presentation.

In a special VIEW Journal session researchers will confront their findings on the way archives have been and are used in fresh productions and for what purpose.

The closing keynote from Dean Jansen at Amara – the world’s most popular crowdsourcing platform for subtitling video, will look at some of the benefits and challenges of bringing together individuals, communities, and organizations in the name of greater accessibility.

The aim of the conference is to identify shared goals and necessary ingredients. These should enable efficient and long-lasting partnerships within the audiovisual sector and between archives and users – be they scholars, educators or creative industry partners. We want to improve the online presence and user interaction of our audiovisual collections, detail policy making processes and identify the most efficient dissemination channels and tools for reaching audiences across Europe and the web.

The full conference programme is available under the link.

Registration for the event is still open and free of charge. Places will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis. For more information and registration for the conference please visit www.euscreenxl2015.eu and follow on Twitter: @EUscreen #EUscreen15.

Open source tool that makes it easy to use Amazon’s cloud - and Google’s

Netflix’s new Spinnaker tool

NETFLIX STREAMS TV shows and movies to more than 60 million people worldwide. It’s one of the most popular Internet video operations on earth, delivering about 10 billion hours of the stuff each month. And for the most part, it delivers all that video from hundreds of computers that belong to someone else. It runs the Netflix video empire atop Amazon’s cloud computing service—a service that lets anyone rent nearly unlimited amounts of computing power over the Internet.

The world of cloud computing is a complicated one, both technically and politically, and today, Netflix showed just how complex—and how intriguing—this new world order can be.

Over the past year, the company has built a new tool for quickly and continuously deploying its latest software code to machines running in the Amazon cloud, and this morning, it open sourced that tool, known as Spinnaker, sharing it with the world at large, so that anyone else can use it. Netflix has done something similar in the past. But Spinnaker is a little different. Netflix built the tool in tandem with Google, one of Amazon’s biggest competitors in the cloud computing market. And Spinnaker is specifically designed to deploy software to not only the Amazon cloud, but, yes, to Google’s cloud as well. Google spent a year working with Netflix to ensure this was the case.

Netflix’s Andrew Glover, who oversaw the development of Spinnaker, says that the company has no intention of moving its online empire off of the Amazon cloud and on to Google’s—even in part. Inside Netflix, engineers only use Spinnaker in delivering code to Amazon. But it’s telling that Netflix has worked closely with Google in creating Spinnaker—and that it’s publicly joining hands with Google in open sourcing it. It highlights the seemingly strange but enormously effective way that open source software helps drive the world of cloud computing. And though Netflix says it’s completely committed to running its empire on Amazon, the partnership also shows that cloud computing provides a certain freedom to move operations from place to place, and from vendor to vendor. Today, Amazon dominates the cloud computing market, pulling in an enormous $6 billion a year from cloud computing, but there’s always room for competition. No online business is stuck on one cloud, including Netflix.

Joining Forces

Google joined forces with Netflix on Spinnaker because it wants businesses to use the tool with the Google cloud. And Netflix joined forces with Google because it wants to ensure that it can take advantage of any improvements Google makes to the tool. According to Glover, Netflix has also worked with engineers at cloud computing company Pivotal to make sure that Spinnaker can also deploy code to Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry software. And Netflix plans to work with Microsoft engineers so that the tool will dovetail with the Microsoft Azure cloud service. All of this, Glover says, will help ensure that Netflix can benefit from the work of the wider community.

It’s worth remembering, however, that Amazon also offers a service called Amazon Prime Video, now a significant competitor to Netflix. Yes, that’s right: Netflix runs its empire on machine that belong to one of its biggest competitors. The modern Internet is a place where this kind of thing happens quite often, particularly in the world of cloud computing. Sure, an arrangement like this comes with risks. But it also comes with ways of mitigating those risks. Glover is still adamant that Netflix isn’t planning to use Spinnaker to spread its empire across services other than Amazon. But at the very least, Spinnaker shows that doing so is a possibility.

Would Amazon somehow mistreat Netflix for competitive reasons? There are so many reasons it wouldn’t. This would hurt Amazon’s reputation with other customers, for one. And in the long run, Netflix, one of its biggest customers, would leave its cloud entirely. But consider how Amazon has treated competing products that show up on its online store. The world’s largest online retailer recently nixed Apple TV and Google Chromecast hardware from being sold on its site. Amazon, you see, sells its own Fire TV video hardware—hardware that helps deliver the Amazon video service that directly competes with Netflix.

“This certainly makes sure that Amazon treats them well,” Rob Mee, the CEO of Pivotal, says of Spinnaker and Netflix. “Over time, this gives them a really great migration strategy, the ability to mix and max clouds, and arbitrage one against the other.”

Source: Wired – Read the full article here

The RICHES associate partner project MEMOLA just produced an interesting document

MEMOLA – European Policy Brief ” The impact of European Water Policy on the Water Cultural Heritage”

This document summarises MEMOLA project findings with regard to the impact of the European Water Policy on the cultural heritage associated with historical irrigation systems and presents suggestions for policy interventions.

MEMOLA is associated partner of RICHES project for a nice collaboration and cross dissemination of the respective areas of research, which insist on different, yet connected aspects of Cultural Heritage.

The document is available on the new RICHES RESOURCES website.

Since antiquity, irrigated agriculture has had a significant impact on ecosystems in the
Mediterranean basin, where water resources are limited and irregular in time. Furthermore, the ‘historical irrigation systems’ (HIS) have played a particular role in the ecological history of landscape, not only in southern Europe, but also in very different environmental regions across Europe.

The HIS should be understood as complex land and water management systems, which use the water gravitational potential through distribution networks with simple structures, operated on a small scale and managed by local farmer communities. They work as a socio-ecological constructs which have been able to survive during centuries, thanks to a relevant resilience capacity and a sustainable use of the natural resources. The water cultural heritage associated with these systems relates not only to the technology, items and architecture developed, but also to practices, based on traditional environmental knowledge, which have generated intangible heritage values.

In this policy brief, the impact of the EU water policy on the HIS, as well as on the values
associated with them, are analysed and some policy implications and recommendations are derived. All the findings presented here were drawn from meetings with stakeholders and from the detailed assessment of water policy documentation corresponding to the study area of MEMOLA, ‘Sierra Nevada’.

Casablanca, Morocco, 7-8 December 2015

e-AGE 2015: Revealing and Harvesting Knowledge

Integrating Arab e-infrastructure in a Global Environment, e-AGE, is an annual international event organised by the Arab States Research and Education Network, ASREN. This year, the event is being held in Casablanca, Morocco, on 07-08 December 2015, under the title “Revealing and Harvesting Knowledge”
Since its launch in December 2010, at the League of Arab States, it was decided to move every year the forum from one Arab country to another.

e-AGE 2015 is about “Revealing and Harvesting Knowledge”; it offers an Intensive program with rich sessions on various interesting topics:

Research collaboration in energy, environment, health, climate, water, agriculture, biology, economy, medicine and other pressing global issues and problems.
Perspectives on NRENs, including challenges, operation, sustainability, funding, governance, business models, security and services.
Access to research and education resources, repositories, libraries and contents, clouds, grids and HPCs.
Connectivity options including technologies, services, cables, circuits and equipment.
Internet developments and impact on R&E networks.
e-Services like e-Science, e-Government, e-Libraries, e-Learning, e*…
Virtual Research Environments, Science Gateways, Federation of Identities, eduroam, eduGAIN …

e-AGE, which intends to be the launching pad for R&E (Research and Education) connectivity and cooperation, is in line with ASREN’s major objectives, related to creating awareness, promoting R&E collaboration and joint activities and establishing human networks in order to facilitate cooperation among researchers and academicians of the Arab region and the rest of the world. The event brings together stakeholders representing regional e-Infrastructures, R&E networks and National/Regional/International organisations in order to discuss and debate new models of innovation, integration of R&E networks, policies for sustainable development in education, means of knowledge sharing and dissemination, capacity building programmes, region-wide e-infrastructure deployment to tackle today’s issues pertaining climate change, global economy, food, water scarcity, alternative energy and environmental matters.

The forum aims to fulfil the dream of a global e-infrastructure for R&E, based on real life inclusiveness beyond any political protocols.

The e-AGE platform has established itself as an important venue for networking among experts and scientists from all over the world. e-AGE 2015 will keep the focus on Intercontinental Connectivity of the Pan Arab Network. e-Infrastructures now evolving in the Arab region at both national and regional level (in more than 15 Arab countries) created or are creating important National Research and Education Networks (NRENs). At a regional level, ASREN announced the operation by the Arabian Global Educational Open PoP (AGE-OP) in London, carried out in cooperation with GEANT Association; Ankabut announced the operation by the first Arab Global Educational Open Exchange (AGE-OX) in Fujairah, carried out in cooperation with Internet2.

It is now time for e-AGE 2015 to pay more attention to users, applications, services and involvement of stakeholders in development of R&E services fostering growth and knowledge sharing. The forum, providing several sessions, panels, meetings and workshops, will be an important occasion for exchange and debate. During the conference, attendees will have moreover the possibility to personally test existing applications and services.

Following on the success of e-AGE in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014, e-AGE 2015 will include events, workshops and meetings focusing on:

8th Event on Euro-Mediterranean e-Infrastructure
5th annual meeting of ASREN
AROQA 7th Annual Conference
EUMEDCONNECT3 and AfricaConnect2 Project Meetings
Technical Workshops on R&E networking on Clouds, Science Gateways and more

Language

English will be the event language; the opening ceremony will be in Arabic and English.

About ASREN

Arab States Research and Education Network (ASREN) is the association of the Arab region National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), as well as their strategic partners. It aims to implement, manage and extend sustainable Pan-Arab e-Infrastructures dedicated to Research and Education communities and to boost scientific research and cooperation in member countries, through the provision of world-class e-infrastructures and e-services.
The goal is to connect institutions in Arabia and worldwide through high-speed data-communications networks. Such networks will enable sharing of and access to a variety of research services and applications in addition to utilisation of highly sophisticated and technologically advanced computing resources, available only to very few institutions in the world. ASREN aims to foster pan-Arab collaborative research and education projects and activities and to promote scientific research, innovation and education across the Arab region.