Digital meets Culture

Happy Spring From the MediaArea Team!

MediaConch Newsletter #4 – April 2016

New Release Notes

What’s new in MediaConch 16.03

Local GUI

New page for the results (analyze and update in background, delete/add jobs during the processing of the queue)
GUI usage is saved and restored when it is restarted
Support of plugins (VeraPDF and DPF Manager)
Dynamic selection of the policy and the display format in the policy viewer
Dynamic selection of the display format in the implementation viewer
CAVPP access and preservation policy sets
Update of implementation checker tests, including some FFV1 checks
Expanded REST API of the server
Bugfixes

Online GUI

New page for the results (analyze and update in background, delete/add jobs during the processing of the queue)
Update of implementation checker tests, including some FFV1 checks

CLI

Update of implementation checker tests, including some FFV1 checks
Server
Expanded REST API of the server

Latest Downloads

Download MediaConch’s latest release or a daily build.

MediaConch now supports plugins including VeraPDF and DPFManager!

The Online MediaConch GUI enables accessibility across platforms.

Updates

MediaConch now supports plugins for other implementation checkers such as the DPF Manager for TIFF files and VeraPDF’s checker for PDF files. MediaConch will select the appropriate implementation checker based upon the associated format as determined by MediaInfo.

To facilitate large-scale testing and provide research to efforts in the IETF Cellar working group, we’ve created a website to catalog discovered sample Matroska files in a manner that allows faceted browsing according to their technical characteristics and their conformance status according to the MediaConch implementation checker. See this work in development, which contains a collection of over 64,000 Matroska files.

Upcoming Events

April 7th, 2016, Stockholm, Sweden: PREFORMA’s Open Source Preservation Workshop – Serving the Cultural Heritage at the National Library, Stockholm.

Week of July 17th during IETF96, Berlin, Germany: Save the date for Deutsche Kinemathek, a free workshop hosted by MediaArea. Let us know if you’re interested in attending!

Team MediaConch in the Wild

Take a sneak peak at Jérôme’s upcoming presentation for the Open Source Preservation Workshop in Stockholm, April 7th, 2016.

Dave shared updates at his Code4LibNYC talk at Metro NYC.

Ashley’s MediaConch shout-out was brimming with gifs in her Code4Lib presentation: Free Your Workflows.

Feedback

MediaArea is eager to build a community of collaborators and testers to integrate the software in their workflows and participate in usability testing. Please contact us if you’d like to be involved!

Nottingham (UK), 16-17 April 2016

ART // GAMES // HACKATHON

The ART // GAMES // HACKATHON was an intensive weekend workshop, which will allow artists, coders and technologists to collaborate, team up and develop prototypes of game art projects. This exciting event took place at Game City in Nottingham – home of the National Videogame Arcade on 16th and 17th April 2016.

The ART // GAMES // HACKATHON is part of Europeana Space, a large EU-funded project, which examines the creative reuse of online content across a range of media and art forms.

This is the sixth hackathon to be hosted by the project. Previous events have focussed on a variety of disciplines, including dance, publishing and photography. Building on three game prototypes developed as part of the project, this event explored the gamification of online culture, and considered how innovative new game projects might cultivate new forms of participation.

Event page: http://www.europeana-space.eu/hackathons/games/

Follow the Twitter channel of the event: @ArtGamesHack

Participants entered into a competition, which involved regularly pitching their ideas and prototypes to a jury of experts, over the two days and a final presentation. The three winning projects will now receive further mentoring from Simon Cronshaw from Remix Summits, and the chance to participate in a Business Modelling Workshop to further shape their projects and develop business plans. These three finalists will then compete for three months of tailored business incubation from world-class industry leaders.

The ART // GAMES // HACKATHON organising partners:

E-Space http://www.europeana-space.eu

Coventry University http://www.coventry.ac.uk

Game City http://gamecity.org/

Remix Summit: http://www.remixsummits.com

European Policy Briefs: about Craft and about Economics (April 2016).

RICHES: new policy briefs just published

The RICHES Policy Brief series is enlarged with two new releases:

European Policy Brief. The Economic and Fiscal Dimension of Cultural Heritage. (April 2016). This policy brief focuses on the effects of two forms of government support: VAT regulation for CH goods and services and direct subsidies to CH organisations. It presents the results and outcomes of the research that explores the relation between the characteristics of different European countries and the effects of government support in VAT rates for CH organisations, and it describes the actions that can be taken to stimulate a CH-rich and CH-engaged European society.

European Policy Brief. Towards a Craft Revival: Recalibrating Social, Cultural, Economic and Technological Dynamics. (April 2016). This policy brief makes recommendations for unlocking the potential of the craft sector and craft skills, with a focus on maximising their economic value without undermining their social and cultural value. Policy recommendations are formulated from an holistic perspective, which recognizes the interplay of social, cultural, economic, legal and technological dynamics in determining the standing of craft, and realising its potential.

The growing collection of RICHES Policy Briefs and Think Papers is available at http://www.riches-project.eu/policy-recommendations.html. They are the focus of the RICHES Policy Seminar in Brussels (23 May 2016).

San Francisco (US), 6-7 December 2016

Future Technologies Conference 2016 – FTC 2016

About the Conference

FTC attracts researchers, scientists and technologists from some of the top companies, universities, research firms and government agencies from around the world.

Join us for FTC 2016, the world’s pre-eminent forum for reporting technological breakthroughs in the areas of Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Security, Robotics, Electronics and Communications. The conference is predicated on the successful conferences by The Science and Information (SAI) Organization that have been held in the UK since 2013. FTC 2016 combines a stimulating technical program with an exciting new venue, San Francisco, a city renowned for its steep rolling hills, eclectic mix of architecture, and landmarks including the Golden Gate Bridge and cable cars.

A call for papers, posters and demo was open until 1 May 2016.

Conference Tracks:

Technology Trends

Internet of Things
Cloud Computing
Big Data
Smart Cities
Machine to Machine
High Performance Computing
Mobile Applications
Knowledge Management
Social Computing
Software Engineering and Quality

Intelligent Systems

Artificial Intelligence
Neural Networks
Fuzzy Logic
Expert Systems
Agents and Multi-agent Systems
Natural Language Processing
Data Mining
Support Vector Machines
Ambient Intelligence
Sentiment Analysis

Machine Vision

Human Computer Interaction
Computer Vision
Image Processing
Robotics
Geographic Information Systems
Video Analysis
Medical Diagnosis
Segmentation Techniques
Augmented Reality
Virtual Reality

Security

Privacy
Surveillance
Biometrics
Internet Security
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)
Web Services and Performance
Secure Transactions
Cryptography
Secure Protocols
Cyber Security

Communications

Connected Machines
Networking
Wireless/ Mobile Communication
Quantum Computing
Satellite Communication Systems
3G/4G Network Evolutions
Mobile Adhoc Networks
Open Spectrum Solutions
Communication Protocols
Cognitive Radio

Electronics

Green Computing
Smart Grids
Sensing and Sensor Networks
E-Waste
Digital Circuits
Analog Circuits & Signal Processing
Design Automation
Computer Aided Network Design
Assembly and Packaging
Systems Architectures

e-Learning

e-Learning Tools
Mobile Learning
e-Learning Organisational Issues
Gamification
Collaborative Learning
Curriculum Content Desig
Educational Systems Design
Virtual Learning Environments
Web-based Learning
Delivery Systems and Environments

e-Business

e-Business Ontologies and Models
e-Commerce Application Fields
e-Commerce Economics
e-Commerce Services
Digital Marketing
Enterprise Resource Planning
Data Analysis
Virtual Organisations
Business Intelligence
Web Analytics

Website of the event: http://www.saiconference.com/FTC2016

Call for papers: http://www.saiconference.com/FTC2016/CallforPapers

Colleagues and friends from Europeana Space and other sister projects celebrated the new platform for accessing and experimenting with cultural heritage, developed by NTUA

Repurpose, Experience, Taste and Rethink Culture, event to present the WITH platform

by Vassilis Tzouvaras (NTUA)

The workshop «Repurpose, Experience, Taste and Rethink Culture», was held on March 22, 2016 at INNOVATHENS, Technopolis, City of Athens. The workshop was organized by the National Technical University of Athens and with the support of PostScriptum. The main aim of the event was to generate new perspectives and facilitate the creative re-use of cultural heritage and associated metadata made available through online digital collections within a framework of creative experimentation and novel dialogue between multidisciplinary sectors, explore the potential of crowdsourcing as a means of promoting increased public participation in core tasks such as collecting, describing, categorizing, or curating heritage collections.

The conference gathered speakers from the National Technical University of Athens, the National Documentation Centre, Onassis Cultural Center, the Athena Research Centre, the Europeana Fashion International Association, PostScriptum, the National History Museum, as well as young enterpreneurs from the creative industry, who presented their ideas and and discussed the impact of digital content to sustainable economic and social development. The event attracted an enthusiastic audience with a creative, practical or strategic interest in culture ranging from content providers to producers, exhibitors, artists, curators and makers of cultural/creative content, architects, archeologists, librarians, museologists publishers, broadcasters, telecoms and distributors of digital content, IT experts.

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Photo credits: Katerina Komninou

The event was divided in 4 sessions, each one representing a thematic category. Session “Repurpose Culture: Creative Reuse”, set the scene of the creative reuse of cultural content and the ways in which users can be engagged in the process, and intrduced the collaborative WITH platform for creative reuse through the Europeana Space project activities. Session “Experience culture: A tour in European projects”, explored the experience of digital culture through different paths and European projects such as EuscreenXL, Europeana Sounds, Europeana Food and Drink and Europeana Fashion. Session “Taste Culture: Food and Drink”, drew into focus the example of food and drink in the digital culture, stressing the importance of reuse of European gastronomic heritage. Session “Rethink culture: Museums and Arts” served to identify and promote creative ways of cultural material reuse in the area of museums and arts.

Throughout those sessions, there was a mix of inspiring talks and lively discussions on cultural heritage discoverability and creative reuse, community engagement and the implicit business potential that lies in this. The demonstration of the newly founded collaborative and interoperable WITH platform, showcased via different applications spaces, attacted the audience’s interest and set the field for further discussion.

Learn more on E-Space Technical Space based on WITH platform.

More photos of the event available on Flickr.

Madrid, 18 - 20 October 2016

Cloud Forward Conference 2016

Following the successful CF2015 conference organised by Promoter srl in Pisa October 2015, the Cloud Forward 2016 Conference: From Distributed to Complete Computing took place in Madrid at the Circulo de Bellas Artes from 18 to 20 October 2016.

>> Check out the full programme and the confirmed speakers. <<

The CF2016 Conference gathered experts from industry and academia to present and discuss the future of and beyond Cloud Computing. Based on the HOLA Cloud project and platform – which documents European research, development and innovation in CLOUDs – the conference reviewed experiences and discusses future directions to overcome problems and provide new opportunities for the utilisation of leading edge CLOUD Computing by industry and academia and for ICT developers providing innovative solutions.

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The conference provided the scientific community a dedicated setting for presenting and discussing innovative technologies in the area of distributed computing, as well as new technologies beyond CLOUDs, ranging from architectures over methodologies to new applications and services.

Integral to the conference, the work of the clusters of experts and EC projects working on ‘beyond current CLOUD’ topics was presented.

The event also hosted a dedicated SME event to investigate innovative technologies, promote business ideas and foster current game-changers arising on the market.

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CF2016 was organised under the auspices of AMETIC, CDTI, Chamber of Commerce, EGI, Madrid+d, UNED and IEEE Cloud Computing Magazine.

For further information, visit the event website: http://cf2016.holacloud.eu

CF2016 website: http://cf2016.holacloud.eu

HOLA CLOUD Website: www.holacloud.eu

Twitter: @HolaCloud #cloudforward2016

An interview with Antonella Fresa who explains how the citizen can be actively engaged in the Research processes on Cultural Heritage

“Roadmap for Citizen Researchers in the Age of Digital Culture” presented in Rome

INTERVIEW with ANTONELLA FRESA (Promoter srl, Technical Coordinator of the CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES project)

The CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES project, funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration, ended on November 2015 but has foreseen a very ambitious programme of dissemination of its research and outcomes.

The project was about the participation of citizens in research on cultural heritage and humanities and its main outcome is the Roadmap for the use of e-Infrastructures to support for improved social cohesion arising from the sharing of knowledge and understanding of Europe’s citizens common and individual cultures.

An iterative process started for the development of the Roadmap which received a lot of feedback and contributions during the life of the CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES project (Requirement analysis, Workshops, online activities, direct exchanges with stakeholders). The Roadmap was intended in facts as a living document, open to contributions from researchers, e-Infrastructure providers, cultural managers, artists, students, teachers, and citizens interested in the matter. An online version of the document is published on the project website where visitors can deliver their comments to improve and ameliorate; it is in other words an instrument offered to the community for free use and re-use.

The Roadmap has been presented to a selected number of different italian stakeholders in Rome, 13 January 2016, in the premises of the Italian Ministry of Economic Development (MISE), which is the public body who coordinated the project. Mauro Fazio has succesfully led the project on behalf of the Italian Ministry.

The experts had the opportunity to discuss about the value of engaging citizens in the research, and about the role that artists can have in terms of introducing innovative practices and mediating between sectors of the society, which are not used to work together.

The encounter has been filmed by TG CULTHER, a local newscast specialized in the themes around the Cultural Heritage, and they realized an interview with Antonella Fresa (Promoter srl – Technical Coordinator of CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES).

The interview (in italian language) is available on You Tube channel and embedded above.

More information about the CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES project are available here and on the project website.

Graz (Austria), 23-24 September 2016

“Digital Scholarly Editions as Interfaces” International symposium

Venue: Centre for Information Modelling – Graz University

Conference language: English

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Dot Porter (Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Univ. of Pennsylvania)

Stan Ruecker (Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago)

Scholarly editions intermediate between the texts and their readers, which does not change with their transfer to digital media. Over the past two decades, research on digital scholarly editions (DSE) was deeply engaged with the impacts of the digital medium on the critical representation of texts and the changing conditions for the editor. However, less research has been done on the roles of the readers, or – as they are called in the digital environment – the users. A critical examination of the topic has already been demanded by Jerome McGann in 2001, it was repeated by Hans Walter Gabler in 2010, and was taken up more recently by Patrick Sahle (2013) and Elena Pierazzo (2015). User studies are rare, and systematic considerations of principles of Human Computer Interaction are still marginal in theory and practice of DSE. In addition, the conceptualization of the DSEs as interfaces between machines could be intensified. However, the discourse on DSEs benefits from considering paradigms of interface design, from reflecting on the cultural and historical context of the visual appearance of scholarly editions and their affordances, as well as from examining the interactions between user and resource.

The symposium will discuss the relationship between digital scholarly editing and interfaces by bringing together experts of DSEs and Interface Design, editors and users of editions, web designers and developers. It will include the discussion of (graphical/user) interfaces of DSEs as much as conceptualizing the digital edition itself as an interface. In this context, we are interested in contributions to the following questions and beyond:

How can DSEs take full advantage of their digital environment without losing the traditional affordances that makes an edition ‘scholarly’? What is the role of skeuomorphic tropes and metaphors like footnotes, page turn and index in the design of DSEs and concerning the user interaction?
Do interfaces of DSEs succeed in transferring the complexity of the underlying data models?
Plurality in representation is a core feature of DSE. How do interfaces realize this plurality? Do we need different interfaces for different target audiences (i.e. scholars, digital humanists, students, public)?
How can user interfaces of DSEs succeed in transmitting Human Computer Interaction design principles like ‘aesthetics’, ‘trust’, and ‘satisfaction’?
Citability and reliability are core requirements of scholarly work. Which user interface elements support them? How can we encourage the user to critically engage with the DSE?
What are the users of a DSE actually doing: are they reading the text or searching and analyzing the data?
Can we conceptualize machines as users? How can we include application programming interfaces (APIs) in the discussion on DSEs as interfaces?
Does the development of user interfaces for DSEs keep up with the rising distribution of small handheld devices? Will interfaces on tablets greatly differ from those on computer screens and perhaps encourage a larger readership?

More information: http://dixit.uni-koeln.de/cfp-digital-scholarly-editions-as-interfaces/

Ermoupolis, Syros island (Greece), 27-29 July 2016

IASCC Conference 2016 – Heritage in Transition: Scenes of Urban Innovation

This Conference is hosted by The Culture of Cities Centre and will convene on July 27-29th, 2016 at The Cultural Center in Ermoupolis, on the island of Syros in Greece. It is held in collaboration with York University, St. Jerome’s University and the University of Waterloo. The aim of this meeting is to focus upon how cities create cultural landscapes in which heritage is both tangibly marked by the built environment, by official scripts and policies and also by their seemingly intangible influences of collective memories and collisions in values about the meaning of place that fluctuate over time.

How can the rich and varied approaches of cultural analysis, social theory, and the humanities, arts and social sciences contribute to an interdisciplinary examination of the ground of heritage in the relationship of the city to time and to the complexity presupposed by such a history of official and unofficial legacies?

Topics to be addressed include:

How cities can and do use their past heritage in the present as part of their cultural capital.
The connection of innovative methodologies and emergent practices for engaging the relation of urban pasts to present and future.
Latest advances in the development of technological applications for representing the past in images of the built environment, narratives and the visual representation of local topographies.
Representations of cultural capital that includes official traditional heritage designations, historical neighbourhoods and landmarks, the preservation of art or masterpieces, the contents of museums and deposits of artefacts and the practice of art and artists and the evolving ‘art worlds’ that become part of the aura of the city as its affective infrastructure.
Relations to traditions of any and all kind (from linguistic to aesthetic), including modification, rejection, preservation as in fundamentalist and enlightenment gestures and actions.
Narratives about the urban past produced in any present by descendants, survivors, witnesses, informants.
Redefinitions of work through archival material.
Issues of conservation and preservation.
Ways different societies mark their inheritances whether through mechanistic repetition, vandalism, obfuscation, and innovative reinvention.
Use of heritage criteria for conferring identity of persons and groups through rituals for designating membership such as purity or impurity of blood line, affiliation, citizenship, classification, genre.
Policy discussion relating to cultural identity and memory, cultural regeneration and collective biographies.
Dissonant registers and controversies of historical past(s).

Wolfsburg (Germany), 9-11 June 2016

Collecting and Conserving Performance Art, symposium

The German Association of Conservator-Restorers (VDR) is delighted to announce the major international symposium “Collecting and Conserving Performance Art” to be hosted by the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany on June 9-11, 2016.

The two-and-a-half day event approaches issues surrounding the acquisition of performance art by bringing together conservators, curators, art historians, artists, collectors, researchers, art educators and other professionals, who are involved in the production, distribution, collection, documentation and conservation of performance art. Perspectives on heritage development and documentation in adjacent disciplines, such as theater and dance, are invited to inform the discussion.

Under investigation will be a variety of existing practices for bringing an artist’s live performance into a collection, including the license to re-perform the work based on an artist-provided score; film and video recordings of historic or recent performance iterations; autonomous art installations; documentation created by former audiences, participants and producers; and performance props and other objects that represent the live event.

Programme and registrations: http://www.restauratoren.de/termine-details/2021-collecting-and-conserving-performance-art.html

Locations:

Reception and Life Performance (Day 1): Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Hollerplatz 1, 38440 Wolfsburg/ Germany

Live Performance “Swap” (2011) by Roman Ondak

Symposium (Day 2 and Day 3): Alvar-Aalto-Kulturhaus, Porschestr. 51, 38440 Wolfsburg/ Germany

Image: Gerard & Kelly, “Timelining” (2014), Performance, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Photo: Courtesy of the artists