Digital meets Culture

Prague (Czech Republic), 15 - 19 November 2015

TRANS(E)MISSION EXPOSED – exhibition in Prague

Towards better human via digital…? – Installations, artist-talk and discussion regarding technologically enhanced life/mind forms in Ex Post Cultural Space in Prague.

Statement 1. The biggest danger for artificial intelligence is the chance, that it will most likely be created and „brought to life“ by average humans.

Statement 2. One of the most false notions of occidental civilization is belief, that technologies are un-human and that those represent chance or threat for new universe bereft of humanity.

Do you agree?

Well one week programme in Expost Gallery Prague will literally be an „installation“ of artificial intelligence. You will have a chance to experience artistic pieces attacking the limits of biological humanity and presenting simulations of personality run by digital engine. Besides, there will be an open discussion panel with experts concerning the ethical limitations of contemporary science research and experimenting, concerning extremity, transgression and actual role of art in this peculiar context.

Exhibiting Artists: IVOR DIOSI (SK) / SILVER (CZ-NOR)

Dates:

Exhibition: 16.-19.11.2015

Meet the artist: 18.11.2015

Final act (critical public discussion and dernissage): 19.11.2015

~ About the discussion

Open expert panel on ethical issues in science reflected and brought to light by art. Shall the scientific ethics restrain the artists of experimenting with certain technologies and challenge their impact?

Panel Members:

Anna Dumitriu (UK, The UK Clinical Research Consortium), Bobbie Farsides (UK, Brighton and Sussex Medical School), Claudia Lastra (UK, The Arts Catalyst), Pavel Stopka (CZ, Charles University Prague), Pavel Smetana (CIANT), Prokop Bartoníček (CZ, Ex Post), Annick Bureaud (FR, Leonardo OLATS), Aleksander Väljamäe (University of Talinn), Marc Boonstra (NL, Waag Society), Espen Gangvigk (NOR, TEKS). Host: Ondřej Cakl (CIANT)

Venue: Ex Post, Příčná 1 st., Praha 1

Organized by:

CIANT – International centre for art and new technologies, Prague, www.ciant.cz

in cooperation with: EX POST – A space for (digital) culture and education, Prague http://www.expost.space

FB: https://www.facebook.com/events/440781706107877/

Details: http://ciant.cz/index.php/en/blog-en/104-trans-e-mission-exposed

Funded by EEA Grants.

The session really highlighted the multitude of ways in which the Pilot's tools might inform and facilitate engagement with dance, both in and out of the studio.

E-Space Dance Pilot: Testing Sessions in Athens

by Hetty Blades (Coventry University), Alex Stan and George Ioannidis (IN2)

The second round of user testing and evaluation of the two Dance Pilot applications, DancePro and DanceSpaces, took place on 27th and 28th September. The event was held at the beautiful Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, and was organised by Sarah Whatley, Rosemary Cisneros and Vassilis Panagiotakopoulos, alongside the Dance Pilot team. Over two days George Ioannidis (IN2) and Hetty Blades (Coventry University) worked with participants from a range of backgrounds including dancers, choreographers, researchers and educators to consider the usability and potential uses of the tools for dance practice, analysis, teaching and documentation. The findings were very interesting and really highlighted the multitude of ways in which such tools might inform and facilitate engagement with dance, both in and out of the studio.

The re-worked DanceSpaces tool offered a number of improvements over the previous versions. Apart from the many behind-the-scenes improvements that the technical team made to the gears that power DanceSpaces, what caught the eye was a friendlier and more polished interface. The people testing the tool found it very easy to re-use existing content around dance and create their own fascinating collections based on specific topics of interest.

In order to analyse DancePro we worked with dancers and choreographers, who were recorded performing both improvised and set material from a range of styles, including hip-hop and contemporary dance. The participants then used the tool to analyse themselves dancing, inscribing through drawing and language to draw attention to features of the movement.

[Show as slideshow]

The use of the ‘think aloud’ methodology, discussion and questionnaires allowed us to gather extensive informative data to contribute to the next stage of development. Generally speaking, participants seemed very interested in the potentials of the tools, demonstrating the relevance and importance of this research. There seems to be an appetite for thinking about how digital technology can interact with dance practice and documentation in innovative ways. The Dance Hackathon, which will take place in Prague in November will further explore this area, providing an opportunity for participants to engage in and experiment with innovative digital dance tools.

The students were asked to explore the Photomediation open book, test its usability and provide a detailed evaluation of their experience.

Open & Hybrid Publishing Pilot: Interactive Student Seminars at Coventry University

by Kamila Kuc, Goldsmiths

On 23th and 30th October 2015 Ross Varney (Coventry) and Kamila Kuc (Goldsmiths) ran interactive seminars for five groups of undergraduate students at Coventry University, in which they introduced the main outcome of the Open and Hybrid Publishing pilot: Photomediations: An Open Book. The students were then asked to explore the book, test its usability and provide a detailed evaluation of their experience.

Coventry University’s BA Filmmaking Students during the session. Photograph: Ross Varney.

These five hour-long sessions were conducted with BA Filmmaking students. The students were first offered a short introduction that highlighted the key features of the Photomediations: An Open Book project, which is part of Europeana Space. They also received information about the use and reuse of Creative Commons-licensed material and about getting involved in editing the book’s open chapters.

In the next half hour the students were asked to browse through Photomediations: An Open Book. Although, as instructors, Ross and Kamila were available for questions throughout the session, they refrained from coaching the students about the book’s structure and overall purpose since their interest was primarily in the students’ immediate impressions and feedback. This approach allowed them to effectively test user experience.

During the final, 25-minute long chunk of the session, the students were asked to fill in an online questionnaire that aimed to test their understanding of the main purpose behind the book and behind the open and hybrid publishing model. Among some of the questions asked were:

How familiar are you with copyright issues with regard to the texts and images available on the Internet?
How likely are you to return to Photomediations: An Open Book and use it on regular basis? What could you use it for?
Has Photomediations: An Open Book clarified any issues about copyright or added to your knowledge of copyright in any way?

The questionnaire results have clearly shown that most students had no knowledge of Creative Commons licences or of the idea of using open resources and open and hybrid publishing prior to looking at Photomediations: An Open Book. The majority were strongly in favour of the book’s open access nature and of its creative use of freely-licensed material. Some of the students are now also considering submitting their work to the open call as for the Photomediations exhibition, which will be held under Europeana’s umbrella in 2016.

Berlin (Germany), 16 – 18 November 2015

E-Space at symposium “Intangible Cultural Heritage and Innovation”

Europeana Space and the Dance pilot in particular was presented by the coordinator Sarah Whatley at this three-day symposium, which discussed the current status of research on recording and visualisation techniques and their application within the field of intangible cultural heritage, while focussing on different expressions of artistic dance.

Different expressions of artistic dance were the main focus: as a volatile art form the preservation of dance – also for future generations – is a tricky, but important question. Thus, looking at the possibilities of its digitalisation and visualisation is a very challenging and fascinating task. Yet, other forms of spatiotemporal movement, dynamics and expressions – as they exist in rituals, liturgies, folklore and other performing arts – were addressed at the event.

While looking at the technical achievements, the symposium also put an emphasis on the applicability of these techniques for artistic processes, forms and languages.

More information and the programme is available here

Cross pilot event in Berlin

E-Space – Presentation and Evaluation of Toolbox

by Beatrix Lehmann, Museumsmedien

On October 29th and 30th the workshop “Presentation and evaluation of the Toolbox” took place in Berlin, at German Resistance Memorial Center.

The memorial is content provider of the Toolbox pilot and hosted the workshop together with E-Space partner and Museums sub pilot leader Museumsmedien. On the first day staff members of different memorials had the possibility to work and test the Toolbox. Day two was reserved for creatives and developers. The participants came from different memorials and small enterprises in Berlin and Brandenburg.

[Show as slideshow]

The partners from RBB and SPK attended the workshop and took the chance to inform about their activities in the project. Their participation enlarged the presentation of the E-Space project and supported the discussions concerning the use of data for different purposes.

The workshop’s atmosphere of testing, learning and discussing, was very inspiring and gave a lot of input for a further development of the Toolbox, after the project time. A questionnaire that was given to each participant, gives a detailed overview over questions concerning the usability and desirable improvements of the Toolbox.

Many thanks to all the participants!

Caption photos: workshop presentation and evaluation of the Toolbox,

photo: B. Lehmann

DPF Manager Monthly Release #2

New release of DPF Manager

About DPF Manager

DPF Manager is an application and a framework designed to allow end users and developers to gain full control over the technical properties and structure of TIFF images intended for Long Term Preservation.

The main objective is to give memory institutions full control of the process of the conformity checks of files. This is a three-step process:

Validation: validating the conformance to a specific normative. These normative can be defined by some standardization organization or specific acceptance criteria based on a locally-defined policy rules.
Modification: modifying the Data Object, preserving the Information Representation, in order to make it more suitable for long term preservation.
Reporting: collecting and submitting the data object structure and metadata as well as validation result with the modification information.

New Release Ready to Download!

The DPF Manager TIFF conformance checker was able to detect the tags inside the TIFF (baseline tags, extension tags and widely used private tags) and handle with embedded metadata as ICC Profiles, XMP, IPTC and EXIF.

The implementation checker validates:

TIFF baseline 6.0
TIFF/EP (Tag Image File Format/Electronic Photography) ISO:12234-2
TIFF/IT (Graphic technology – Prepress digital data exchange – Tag image file format for image technology) ISO 12639:2004E

With policy checker memory institutions can create custom rules to define their own acceptance criteria.

In this release, the metadata fixer is able to manage metadata inside the TIFF adding or deleting tags. Furthermore, the metadata fixer can apply auto-fixes created by developers.

The reporter module now provides a human readable report (PDF and HTML format) and a machine readable report (XML and JSON format) for each file checked. Moreover, the report includes a comparison between the original image file and the new file generated by the metadata fixer module.

This release includes a Command line interface (CLI) and a graphical user interface (GUI) with a wizard to create and save configurations, check files and directories selecting a saved configuration and view the reports generated by the tool.

Download NOW!

Available for Mac OS X, Linux & Windows.

Contribute now!

There’s many ways to join the open source community!

GitHub. All the the code is available on GitHub. If you’d like to add a new feature to DPF Manager, just fork the repository and send us a pull request!

DPF Manager Forums. If you need help or you have doubts on anything related to DPF Manager there is the Users Forum and Developers Forum available for you! Don’t be shy!

IRC Chat. For chat about DPF manager development you can connect on our Developers channel here.

Join the community now!

MediaConch Newsletter No. 2 (2 Nov 2015)

Updates on MediaConch: October release and upcoming events

Hello! Welcome to the MediaConch Newsletter. Here we’ll be providing regular updates on all aspects of MediaConch. MediaConch is part of the PREFORMA (PREServation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives) project, co-funded by the European Commission under the FP7-ICT programme. Learn more about MediaConch here.

MediaConch Release Notes

October’s release of MediaConch (v15.10) features a brand new implementation checker concentrating on Matroska and EBML conformance checks, as well as several illustrative policy sets allowing users to carry out conformance checking on preservation master files, among other workflows. Last month’s release highlighted full user policy creation in the EXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) format. A user can now create XSL-based policies with MediaConch’s selection of conformance metadata and validators, import and export XSL policies for quality assurance across institutions, reformatting vendors, and other community collaborators.

We’ve also added additional output formatting choices for various reports including Text, HTML, and XML. MediaConch’s GUI now includes interactive jsTrees for viewing MediaInfo and MediaTrace reports; a display section for applying XSLs for HTML presentation; policy set editing in both regular and XPath freetext expression; and, refinements to stream and field information for easier policy creation.

MediaConch is available as a command line interface, a downloadable graphical user interface, and a web interface. Download MediaConch on your preferred operating system or try out our online version, MediaConchOnline.

Documentation is available on our website, as well as a follow-along user demo and files for using MediaConch CLI.

Team MediaConch in the News

On October 8, Tessa Fallon presented on FFV1 as a representative of the PREFORMA / MediaArea team at the Fédération Internationale des Archives de Télévision / The International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT/IFTA) World Conference in Vienna. Along with co-presenters Bert Lemmens (PACKED vxw) and Peter Bubestinger (Österreichischen Mediathek), Fallon conducted a 1.5 hour workshop titled “FFV1 for Preservation,” where she discussed some of the technical challenges with FFV1 and the current technical developments, including features and advantages of using FFV1 for preservation.

The Internet Engineering Task Force recently approved the CELLAR (Codec Encoding for LossLess Archiving and Realtime transmission) working group charter to focus on standardizing Matroska, FFV1, and FLAC file formats for archival use. The working group charter is currently under external review with Tessa Fallon appointed as a working group co-chair. Team leads Dave Rice and Jérôme Martinez, who have been actively working with the Matroska and FFV1 format communities to identify and resolves gaps in specifications, will soon move their work into the newly assigned CELLAR working group listserv. Those interesting in following the discussion progress can join the CELLAR mailing list here.

Be sure to also check out this great blog post on MediaArea’s involvement at the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) 46th Annual Conference in Paris.

Upcoming Events

Team leads Dave Rice and Ashley Blewer will be presenting on MediaConch at the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) Conference in Portland, OR, USA (20 Nov). The conference’s schedule-at-a-glance can be seen here.

Feedback

MediaArea is eager to build a community of collaborators and testers to participate in and use the results of the project. You can contact us here for more information.

Best,

The MediaConch team

Heritage photography stimulates creativity: it’s all about telling stories.

Photography Pilot on show at exhibition “Kunst in eigen Huis”

E-Space Photography Pilot was a guest exhibitor at the “Kunst in eigen Huis” (Art at Home) event on 22-23 October 2015 in Leuven, Belgium.

The event was organized by KU Leuven groups of Seniores and students in Cultural Studies and wanted to showcase some of the best examples of creativity. the Photography pilot joined the exhibition exactly because it intends to stimulate “the creative energy that emerges when youths interact with cultural heritage. We decided to show part of the E-Space collection, supplied by Photoconsortium, a beautiful sample of highlights of the photo collection at the City Archive of Leuven, part of the “All Our Yesterdays” exhibition digitized with the help of European subsidies in EuropeanaPhotography.”

All Our Yesterdays: Andere Tijden / Andere Steden – curator Sofie Taes – copyright Stadsarchief Leuven

The exhibition was accompained by opening speeches, including one by Prof. Fred Truyen, coordinator of EuropeanaPhotography and president of Photoconsortium, showing some other top pieces of the All Our Yesterdays collection.

An interesting event follows this one: on the November 27th, at the City Archive Leuven, seniors, students, citizens of Leuven and surrounding towns are invited to a “Bring your own Photos” event, where digitization specialist Bruno Vandermeulen will convert in digital format the photos brought in by the citizens. Moreover, photographer Frederik van den Broeck will do a demonstration about the traditional wet collodion technique.

Read the whole article by Fred Truyen here

Learn more about the upcoming Photography Hackathon.

The latest release of the conformance checker for PDF/A is now available in the PREFORMA Open Source Portal

Complete PDF/A-1b coverage now available in the 0.6 release of veraPDF

The veraPDF consortium is pleased to announce the latest release of the veraPDF PDF/A validation software and test-suite currently under development.

Highlights for this release are:

validation of all conformance criteria for ISO 19005-1 (PDF/A-1), conformance level b;
a complete PDF/A-1b test corpus, including 200 new test-files:
PDF features reporting; and
a cross-platform installer.

Prototype features include:

PDF metadata fixing;
validation model and rules for PDF/A-1a, PDF/A-2 & PDF/A-3;
reporting in XML and HTML.

Download veraPDF 0.6 at: http://downloads.verapdf.org/rel/verapdf-installer.zip

Release notes are published at: https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-library/blob/release-0.6/RELEASENOTES.md

veraPDF’s goal is to deliver the definitive PDF/A validator for memory institutions. We invite you to download and test the software. A guide for the desktop interface is provided to help you get started. If you encounter problems, or wish to make suggestions, please add them to the project’s GitHub issue tracker.

This release marks the one year point since veraPDF first began the design phase in November 2014. The next release will include release candidates of all eight PDF/A validation profiles. Further details are outlined in our development roadmap.

Keep up to date with the latest developments of veraPDF by subscribing to the veraPDF consortium’s newsletter.

Led by the Open Preservation Foundation and the PDF Association, the veraPDF consortium is developing the definitive open source, file-format validator for all parts and conformance levels of ISO 19005 (PDF/A). The software is designed to meet the needs of memory institutions responsible for preserving digital content for the long term.

The veraPDF consortium is funded by the PREFORMA project. PREFORMA (PREservation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives) is a Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) project co-funded by the European Commission under its FP7-ICT Programme.

invited by colleagues of Civic Epistemologies project, a RICHES workshop will complement the final conference on Digital Heritage and Innovation, Engagement and Identity

RICHES workshop session in Berlin: Community-Led Redesign of Cultural Heritage

The final conference of Civic Epistemologies project takes place in Berlin on 12-13 November 2015: Digital Heritage and Innovation, Engagement and Identity.

Two lines will be explored during the Conference:

Digitisation is producing a big change that is impacting cultural institutions, their practices, the way that the heritage is preserved, accessed and made available on the Internet
The participation of citizens in digitisation activities and co-creation experiences, including the artistic dimension, represents a big potential that is demanding to be unlocked.

Integrated in the conference programme, a RICHES workshop will be held on the theme “Community-Led Redesign of Cultural Heritage“.

Date: FRIDAY 13 November 2015 – Venue: Hamburger Bahnhof

09.30 – 09.45 Introduction to the RICHES project: Overview of the project aims and objectives – Neil Forbes, Project Coordinator, Coventry University, UK

09.45 – 10.00 Introduction to the topic of Community-Led Cultural Heritage – Moya Kneafsey, Coventry University, UK

10.00 – 11.30: Sub-session 1: Strategies for the Co-Creation of Cultural Heritage

The Spanish-speaking community in Berlin and the use of ‘diasporic’ media – Swenja Wirtz and Monica Hagedorn-Saupe, SPK, Germany

Co-Creation of Cultural Heritage Strategies – Robin van Westen and Dick van Dijk, WAAG, The Netherland

Plenary Discussion

coffee break

11.30 – 13.00: Sub-session 2: Community-Led Culture Economies

Community-Led Commodification of Food Cultures – Moya Kneafsey, Coventry University

The Commodification of Community-learned Skills in the Digital Age: The Case of Craft – Amalia Sabiescu and Martin Woolley, Coventry University, UK

Community Participation in the Redesign of Urban Built Heritage: the case of Palazzo Pretorio, Italy Antonella Fresa, Promoter, Italy

Plenary discussion

The whole conference programme and registration is available here.