Digital meets Culture

The presentation drew upon the work Europeana Space that is concerned with the role of dance within European society.

E-Space at SOIMA 2015 conference

Unlocking Sound and Image Heritage was the theme of SOIMA 2015 conference held on 3rd-4th of September in Brussels, Belgium at the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and Arts, organized by ICCROM (International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property).

Europeana Space Dance Pilot (COVUNI) and the project’s Legal team (Exeter University) presented a paper “Challenges at the Europeana Space Project; Copyright Law and Implications” looked at the role that dance content plays within the records of digital cultural heritage across Europe and how these new tools encourage reimagination, reuse and the challenges that arise in the process. The presentation by Coordinator Prof. Sarah Whatley (Coventry University) and Prof. Charlotte Waelde (University of Exeter) drew upon the work of the European Commission funded project Europeana Space that is concerned with the role of dance within European society. By working with artists, researchers and other cultural industry experts across the European community, the project is exploring the impact of digital technologies on dance and cultural heritage.

Audience was comprised dance artists, graphic and material artists, graduate students, academics and other Arts and Cultural heritage professionals and practitioners from all over the world. The objectives of this presentation were to disseminate Pilot information, materials and tools; to encourage people to learn more about E-Space and Europeana Foundation and to follow on twitter and other social media outlets; to identify local test-users and finally to gather feedback on the E-Space Pilot ideas.

The impact is hard to measure but it is known that all of the individuals understood the nature of the E-Space Pilot, the project and the Europeana Foundation. Attendees were interested and eager to learn more. The dialogue generated was constructive and useful for the Dance Pilot and the participants. It was an occasion to gather information on the digital technologies practicioners are familiar with or currently using, the IPR issues they face and the potential that Dance Pilot prototypes could have on their work. It was possible to share the usability testing results and disseminate about the Dance Hackathon scheduled for Nov 2015.

Conference website: http://soima2015.kikirpa.be/

To integrate the conformance checkers in the Technical Space developed in ESpace

MoU between PREFORMA and Europeana Space

A new agreement has been signed between PREFORMA (represented by the Project Coordinator Borje Justrell) and Europeana Space (represented by the Technical Coordinator Antonella Fresa).

The main objective of this agreement is the integration of the open source tools developed in PREFORMA (that control if a file complies with standard specifications and with other acceptance criteria specified by memory institutions) in the Technical Space of Europeana Space.

This would have the following benefits:

For Europeana Space, the Technical Space could offer to its users a new functionality, i.e. to control if a file complies with the standard specifications and with other acceptance criteria specified by memory institutions. This is very important to ensure the long-term preservation of the digital data, which is a key aspect to be taken into account when creating, migrating and ingesting file into archives.
For PREFORMA, this experiment could represent a proof of concept / test case where to try to embed the newly implemented software into a specific environment, as it is the ESpace web-based technical platform.

Europeana Space (www.europeana-space.eu) is a Best Practice Network project funded by the EC within the framework of the CIP BNP Programme, and its aim is to create new opportunities for employment and economic growth within the creative industries sector based on Europe’s rich digital cultural resources.

PREFORMA (www.preforma-project.eu) is a Pre-Commercial Procurement project co-funded by the European Commission within the framework of the FP7 ICT Programme with the aim to address the challenge of implementing good quality standardised file formats for preserving data content in the long term and to give memory institutions full control of the process of the conformity tests of files to be ingested into archives.

C-DARE Centre for Dance Research of Coventry University seeks for highly motivated researchers

Researchers needed at Coventry University

C-DaRE is pleased to announce that we have been awarded a number of fully funded full-time PhD Studentships available for highly motivated postgraduates wanting to undertake research from January 2016.

We welcome applications that propose topics that align with one of our research themes and which explore different methodological approaches, including practice-as-research.

Applicants will need to complete the application form and submit a covering letter together with a 2000-word expansion of the proposed topic that addresses one of the research themes. Applications are welcomed from home/EU and international students.

Closing date for applications – November 30 2015.

Research Themes:

Dance documentation
Experimental choreographic practices
Choreographic practice with reference to political, social and economic conditions
Performing the (dance) archive
Creative coding and dance (material, design and form)
Screendance
Dance and collective trauma from the 19th century to the present day
Dance dramaturgy
Somatic practices in performance, somatics and cultural context, and the impact of digital technologies on the soma
Transcultural and intercultural identity in dance
Improvisation
Dance and wellbeing
Dance and cultural studies
Inclusive dance practices and pedagogy within the professional dance environment

To apply online, please visit the Coventry University Website.

If you would like to discuss any of these opportunities please contact Sarah Whatley on s.whatley @ coventry .ac.uk

Last chance to submit your ideas in the strands My Local Heritage and My LoCloud Services

LoCloud international competition – deadline 1 November!

LoCloud is a Best Practice Network that brings together a strong group of technical partners with network and regional aggregation service providers, and a number of partners representing specialised museums, public libraries and archives. LoCloud’s overall goal is to support small and medium-sized institutions in making their content and metadata available to Europeana and provides guidance, training and support services to meet the needs of content providing institutions.

Now, LoCloud is launching an international competition focussing on local heritage and culture. The competition has two strands:

My Local Heritage – invites people to explore a favourite place or part of their local history through Europeana and to present their experience online in webpages, a blog or video.
My LoCloud Services – invites developers, aggregators and individual cultural institutions to showcase their use of LoCloud services.

The finalists will be invited to present their entries at the LoCloud final event, which will be held in Amersfoort, Netherlands on 5th February 2016.

Winners of the My Local Heritage competition will receive a prize of a tablet computer; winners of the My LoCloud Services competition will receive a prize of a smart watch. All winning entries will be publicised by LoCloud and Europeana.

Contacts

For any additional information on the LoCloud competition, please contact: competition @ locloud.eu

Find out about the competition in your country.

using the Europeana Digital Library collections to create products for educational or commercial use around the theme of food and drink.

Europeana Food and Drink Open Innovation Challenge – 2D & 3D Product Design

Europeana Food and Drink would like to invite you to get involved in our third and final Europeana Food and Drink Open Innovation Challenge “Reworking Digital Heritage of Food and Drink to Create Material Productions”

We’re looking for creatives and craftsmen all over Europe to use the Europeana Digital Library collections to create 2D or 3D products around the theme of food and drink. This can vary from all kind of objects such as glasses, wine bottles, boxes used for product packaging, tools, stickers & logos or handicraft products for educational or commercial use.

Europeana Food and Drink aims to enhance knowledge and highlight the value of the European food and drink heritage, promoting artisan food productions and their relation to cultural identity. The project is part of Europeana, a database of some 30 million digitised cultural and historical documents, images, sound and video files from Europe’s museums, libraries, galleries and archives. The Europeana API allows you to access most of the collections and incorporate them into objects in many fields such as design, advertising and marketing, digital 3D reproduction tools or other traditional printing techniques.

The call for applications is open now!

How to apply? Create your food and drink product, document the production by a max. 11 minute video and upload this until 20^th December 2015 on http://contest.upeurope.com.

The prize? Each of the two winning products – one for 2D category and one for 3D category – will receive € 2.000,00 in cash, funded by the Europeana Food and Drink Project. Our expert jury will evaluate all video applications and winners will be invited to Sevilla, Spain (29^th January 2016) to present their work at our 3rd Challenge Award Event.

Need some inspiration? Check out these mouth-watering Europeana Food and Drink Pinterest and Europeana Pinterest Boards.. Stay tuned about the project at @foodanddrink_eu and via the Europeana Food and Drink facebook page.

For additional information have a look at our Open Innovation Challenge Factsheet and visit our website to find out more on how to enter the challenge

interesting essay about Open and Hybrid Publishing pilot focusing on the curatorial and editorial sides which endorse the open book

Making of – Photomediations: An Open Book

Photomediations: An Open Book is the most eye-catching result of Europeana Space Open and Hybrid Publishing Pilot, that will be celebrated and empowered within the Hack the Book! Festival organized in Athens in January 2016.

But which had been the challenges and curatorial choices that drove to the concept and realization of this exceptionally beautiful and innovative “virtual” book? One of the Pilot’s member, dr. Kamila Kuc (Goldsmiths), tells more about this in a interesting article published on Photomediations Machine, a online space curated by prof. Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths) about the dynamic relations of mediation performed in photography and other media.

“Remediating a traditional design of the coffee-table book, Photomediations: An Open Book carries numerous implications for contemporary art book publishing. An experiment in ‘open and hybrid publishing’ undertaken in 2015 as part of the Europeana Space project, Photomediations: An Open Book features a comprehensive introduction and four chapters illustrated with over 200 images. The images have been drawn from various open repositories such as Europeana, Flickr: The Commons, Wikimedia Commons and The Public Domain Review. They are tagged with Creative Commons and other open licences.”

The book, or better said the open and interactive platform which constitutes Photomediations: An Open Book, brings together and juxtaposes images and texts, in the form of a living archive rather than as a repository of curated content. This approach fosters in the reader a creative process of knowlegde production and it is based on open access materials or CC-licensed material, which allow and invite the reader to remix and interact with the the various sections of the book.

“Every book, like every archive, library or exhibition, is a curatorial arrangement (see Springer and Turpin, 2015).¹ Photomediations: An Open Book features a number of fixed chapters, as well as three living sections: ‘The Reader’ (to be published as a paper book and a downloadable open access pdf with Open Humanities Press later in 2015), ‘The Social Space’ and ‘The Exhibition’.² These parts are open to continuous experimentation, mutation and transformation so that the book can be constantly reworked and reimagined. (…) Celebrating its different formats and the technologies behind them, Photomediations: An Open Book explores the constantly evolving nature of the book.”

Read the whole essay here on Photomediations machine

Enjoy Photomediations: An Open Book here.

About Hack the Book! Festival event in Athens (22-23-24 January 2016)

Initiative promoted in the occasion of the World Day of Audiovisual Heritage

Audiovisual archives, the next ten years: turning vision into reality and positive change

Last September, over 200 delegates from around the world attended the 1st international SOIMA conference to jointly define a ten-year vision for audiovisual archives. To celebrate the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, the SOIMA community invite the wider audiovisual archive community to provide their feedback on our vision, and how to reach it.

The full text has been published on Medium – a publishing platform that allows you to easily insert your comments, questions, concerns or approval.

Read and comment the vision document at https://medium.com/@johanoomen/soima-turing-vision-into-reality-and-positive-change-fc2388ea953f#.5ek6b72yn.

Dublin (Ireland), 18-20 April 2016

MuseumNext Dublin conference

For the last seven years MuseumNext conferences have focused on the future of
museums and how the sector is forging ahead, showcasing innovative ideas and
delivering thought-provoking insight. We continue to do so with our next conference taking place in Dublin in April 2016. MuseumNext is a major conference acting as a platform for showcasing best practice today to shine a light on the museum of tomorrow.

MuseumNext Dublin will be our 8th European conference and will feature a day of activity with tours, workshops and exhibitions highlighting the city of Dublin followed by two days of curated conference sessions at the Mansion House in the city centre.

With over 60 speakers taking part in our three day conference we’re looking forward to a packed programme full of inspiration in Dublin this April. We have talks, workshops, tours and social events in various venues around the city, including the National Gallery of Ireland, Science Gallery Dublin, Royal Society of Antiquaries Ireland and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

The full programme is now available here: http://www.museumnext.com/conference/schedule/

Website: http://www.museumnext.com/

eCult Skills project organized an International Conference on Digital challenges for museum experts

E-Space at eCult Skills event (22 September 2015 in Athens)

The event was organized in the context of the eCult Skills project, which investigated the emergence of new job roles as a result of the latest ICT developments and their adoption by the museums, and aims to present project outcomes and discuss possible exploitation routes. It provided to scholars, museum professionals, organizations and networks, and ICT researchers and engineers, a forum to meet and exchange experiences, ideas and plans on the interplay between Culture and Technology and the new professional prospects this can lead to.

E-Space was presented during the workshop “Museums in the digital era“. During the workshop, Alexandra Nikiforidou (PostScriptum) presented “Europeana Space” hackathons and demonstrators as best practices for community engagement and digital content re-use, that enable cultural organisations to create value from their collections.

The conference attracted about 100-120 attendees from the scientific community, higher education and research, culture professionals, Policy Makers, ICT, academy, and of course general public; The vast majority was Greek audience but other countreis represented were UK, Germany, Portugal, Slovenia, France.

Leran more on the event: http://ecultskills-conference.eap.gr/

Berlin, 12-13 November 2015

Digital Heritage and Innovation, Engagement and Identity – Civic Epistemologies Final Conference

The project will deliver an International Conference in Berlin (12-13 November 2015) to illustrate and promote the Roadmap and to present results from the project.

The International Conference will be hosted at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.

ABSTRACT: Digital Heritage is linking cultural heritage and information technologies in novel ways that help safeguarding cultural heritage and that help find new ways for cultural heritage to interact with society.

This conference will present research in this area that focusses in particular on the role of digital heritage in citizen engagement and as a means of defining cultural and social identity.

The conference targets a wide audience, including policy makers, cultural managers and curators, association of citizens, representatives of the educational sector, creative and cultural enterprises.

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.

More information with the Programme of the Conference are available here

More information about the CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES project here