Digital meets Culture

Digital enactment of crowdsourcing, citizen science and relationship recalibration

weLand connects “prosumers” into a glocal network

Source: Stefano Caneva’s discussion text on the weLand case study, conducted in the framework of Europeana’s task force “Creating Local Europeana-related Networks” (Connecting Digital Initiatives into a Glocal Network. The case of weLand in South Piemonte, Italy, by Stefano Caneva, Vicepresident weLand Association)

weLand Association is a cultural NGO founded in Asti, South Piedmont (Italy), in August 2012. Its aim is to develop a regional network of individuals and groups interested in aggregating, sharing and reusing open data for GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums), education institutions and tourism stakeholders. «The goal – Stefano Caneva, weLand Vicepresident explaines – is to make South Piedmont a smart land: a region with a stronger cultural identity and social cohesion, acknowledging and promoting the potential coming from its history, landscape and environment and able to attract and intercept human and economic resources at an international level».
weLand is in other words a glocal network: «a local network interacting with others at a national and international level» (Stefano Caneva). The idea of the association arises from the firm belief that innovation (and so the elements which innovation is generated by, culture and creativity) should take into account a bottom-up engagement of the community, in order to fully realise its potential and to become a real driver of social and economic development.
Let’s consider the case of Europeana. Since its foundation in 2007, it has been playing a fundamental role in the creation of a collaborative network of cultural/research institutions and public administrations, whose joint work has significantly increased the amount and quality of the available digital cultural datasets and enabled the accessibility, openness and reusability of the European Cultural Heritage for a great variety of end-users. As for the strategic placement of Europeana within the European society, during these years it has become evident the the centralised governance of the organisation, which was a consequence of the circumstances in which the organisation was born, needed to open up to more direct participation by the members of the network.
Yet the development of an increasingly larger network of partners has created the expectation for a more shared system of decision making, which would enhance the constructive feeling of being active part of a global movement.

Until recent time, the Europeana policy has been mainly characterised by a top-down approach towards innovation.

«Ongoing EU-funded projects – Caneva writes – such as RICHES and Civic Epistemologies are embracing an innovative approach, which recognises the importance of matching top-down research flow with bottom-up co-curation of the Cultural Heritage (CH) by citizens.
Centralised governance and a predominant top-down approach can be seen as two interrelated causes of the difficulties Europeana has met 1) to have its brand widely recognised by people outside the (Digital) Cultural Heritage professional sector and 2) to activate a fruitful economic reuse of digital datasets».
weLand sets itself up as local mediator working to connect a local community in a more engaging interaction with broad transnational networks, like Europeana. Among weLand’s initiatives, we want to mention the following.

•WIKI loves Asti
One of the first initiatives of weLand was a collaboration with Wikimedia Italia, responsible for the Italian edition of the Wiki Loves Monuments photographic contest.
Wiki loves Asti is part of a series of local initiatives experimented by Wikimedia Italia for by-passing the national legal restrictions concerning the economic reuse of public CH-related pictures in Italy: during the first edition of the Italian contest (2012), local Public Administrations or associations collected permissions for the monuments they wanted to include in the contest. This, Caneva explaines, «has proven a smart bottom-up solution in the long term, because: 1) it has allowed the Italian Wiki community to be active in an international project, by by-passing the deadlock caused by national legal obstacles; 2) it has spread the Wiki brand through people, making local communities aware of the importance of Open Culture and of the existing legal limits to its implementation; 3) it has built a relationship of mutual trust and collaboration between local communities and Wikimedia Italia».
By its side, since 2012 weLand has never stopped enlarging the list of monuments “liberated” for Wikimedia Italia.

Battistero di San Giovanni in Asti, winner of Wiki Loves Asti 2012. Ranked 5th in Wikimedia Italia 2012 and 15th in Wiki Loves Monuments 2012

•Wikipedia va a scuola @ Asti (Wiki goes to school in Asti)
The initiative, launched in 2014, was aimed at implementing and testing a model of crowd-sourcing and participatory didactics in high-schools and at enabling students to play the role of prosumers, «qualified users who can contribute with their own knowledge and needs to the development of an open platform of knowledge» (Caneva).
In collaboration with Wikimedia Italia, weLand provided a free introduction to the MediaWiki syntax and online tutorship to the involved classes, which contributed so to the digital storytelling of their local CH.

The first product of the project has been recently released: the page dedicated to Asti on the Italian version of Wikivoyage, the free tourist guide administered by Wikimedia Italia. The project has attracted the attention of local stakeholders and on that basis funds will be sought to run a second edition of the project during the school year 2015/2016.

•From the Hills of Europe
in 2014/15 weLand has launched a digital school pilot programme meant to promote European active citizenship. The project has been carried out in collaboration with the Institut für Deutschlandforschung in Bochum (Ruhr Universität, Germany).
Two high-school classes (in South Piedmont and Ruhr) were trained in the effective use of social media and other digital tools for presentations and project management. They learnt moreover the monitoring of administrative Open Data, useful to study the impact of EU structural funds on local CH institutions. The students made large use of OpenCoesione and Monithon.it, two platforms administered by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development. Through these platforms, the youngsters shared the results of their monitoring activity with the whole community.
weLand is planning a second edition of From the Hills of Europe for the school year 2015/2016.

«Starting from these premises – Caneva writes – an ambitious goal of weLand for the upcoming years is to offer regional, small and middle-sized institutions and projects the possibility to join their forces in order to interact with Europeana […] weLand aims to combine the action of a local association with the vision of an international high-knowledge network […] In these first years of activity, weLand has been able to gain and give back a lot thanks to this open, collaborative attitude».

For more information visit www.we-land.com

Douwe-Sjoerd Boschman, concept developer at Waag Society, provides his vision on co-creation within the heritage sector

Co-creation interview series. The first one is online!

The RICHES project is all about the constant change in our society in relation to culture. The goal? Bringing cultural heritage and people together in a changing Europe and finding new ways of engaging with heritage in a digital world.

Sharing visions

The RICHES team just started an interview series in which they ask several museums and team members of the project about their vision on co-creation within the heritage sector. Douwe-Sjoerd Boschman, concept developer at Waag Society, has been the first interviewed.

Within the project, Waag Society thinks about how museums can present their collections in innovative ways in order to benefit all interested audiences and communities, using co-creation to start the dialogue with them, and come together to create great, new ideas.

An interview about co-creation

 Who are you and what do you do within the RICHES project?

I am Douwe-Sjoerd Boschman, concept developer at Waag Society, specialised in interactive storytelling. Within RICHES I am one of the facilitators of the co-creation sessions, held with young adults and museum staff, to design interventions and to enforce a breakthrough in how we can experience our cultural heritage in honest and inspiring ways.

Waag Society 2015

What does the term co-creation mean to you, personally?  
Doing things together, respecting each other. With a diverse group of people from various discipline and backgrounds we can use our collective intelligence and creativity to design wonderful, innovative, solutions for everyone.

Why is heritage important for our society?  
It is the source for our inspirations and the future generations. Life is boring when we are not inspired to do the things we do. Heritage can connect us all.

How could the implementation of new technology affect the heritage sector?
It can connect people to their personal cultural heritage and to other people. It could make our heritage collections accessible and meaningful to each individual in a wide spread audience.

What have you learned so far from the RICHES project?  
We are all experts on our own lives, it is hard maybe almost impossible to think for others. And change takes time.

Do you have any co-creation tips that you would like to share with others? 
Listen to others without inhibition; try to really listen to each other. Besides that, also try to follow your intuition in the creative process. Dare to play!

Keep updated about the outcomes of the co-creation process at the dedicated section on the RICHES website.

The ESpace Dance Pilot was presented and disseminated to dance practitioners, scholars and artists attending the conference

Cut&Paste: Dance Advocacy in the Age of Austerity, conference in Athens

by Rosemary Cisneros, Coventry University.

The ESpace Dance Pilot travelled to Athens, Greece early June 2015 to attend the Society of Dance History Scholars and Congress of Research in Dance conference. The title of the conference Cut & Paste: Dance Advocacy in the Age of Austerity, took place at the Hellenic Centre of International Theatre Institute and worked closely with the Association for Greek Choreographers. The theme of the 2015 joint SDHS/CORD conference in Athens aimed to address the issues surrounding dance advocacy both locally and internationally, but also to actually put that idea into practice by supporting a dance community hit especially hard by the global financial crisis. SDHS and CORD members are actively helping colleagues in Greece to affirm dance as scholarly endeavor as well as a professional occupation.

From June 4th to June 7th, the Dance Pilot engaged with the international dance community and disseminated the Europeana Space Project and its pilot activities. The pilot also presented a paper titled “Cultural Value and the transactable nature of dance” where the Europeana Space Project was discussed and the ways in which we access and transmit dance to the wider dance community, was explored. A fruitful discussion around imaginative things that dance content might suggest and the alternative modes for ascribing value to dance, was debated. Other dance practitioners, scholars and artists not only received the pilot’s work well, but were excited to learn more about the tools being developed.

Slides presented about the ESpace project and Dance Pilot (PDF, 1.1 Mb)

Conference website: http://www.athensisdancing2015.com/

Presented papers: http://www.athensisdancing2015.com/abstracts–bios.html

Cultural value and the transactable nature of dance

by Sarah Whatley

Abstract: This presentation will discuss Europeana Space; a project concerned with creating new opportunities for employment and economic growth within the creative and cultural industries based on Europe’s digital cultural resources, much of which can be accessed via Europeana. Partners from across Europe, including Greece, are exploring new ways to think about methods for ‘monetizing’ cultural heritage. Our work in dance is exploring way to access and transmit dance in new ways for dance practitioners, students, teachers and audiences. It will examine the extent to which doing imaginative things with dance content might suggest alternative modes for ascribing value to dance.

Bio: Sarah Whatley is Professor of Dance and Director of the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry University. Her research interests include dance and new technologies, dance analysis, somatic dance practice and pedagogy, and inclusive dance practices. Her research is funded by the AHRC, Leverhulme Trust and the European Commission. She is Editor of the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices and sits on the Editorial Boards of several other Journals.

On 19 May 2015, the project was reviewed by the European Commission with brilliant results

EAGLE project: excellent progress!

“Excellent progress: the project has fully achieved its objectives and goals for the period and has even exceeded expectations)”. So the European Commission (EC) concluded on 19 May, in Bruxelles, its review of the EAGLE project’s activities.

EAGLE (started on 1 April 2013 and lasting until 31 March 2016) is a Best Practice Network with 19 partners. The project aims to provide Europeana with a comprehensive collection of unique historical sources, approximately 80% of the total amount of inscriptions (mainly Ancient Greek and Latin epigraphic sources) in the Mediterranean area.
«The EAGLE consortium is therefore – the EC report writes – to be congratulated on their continuing success and the reviewers recommend that the project continue its work. The groundwork has been laid for the overall success of the project». And goes on: «the preparations have been undertaken to allow the harmonised materials to be ingested into Europeana, but the proof of the effectiveness of this planning will only become apparent as the practical challenges of undertaking the ingestion of the volume of prepared materials are taken on for real […] the consortium needs to ensure that this final period is well used and in particular that close cooperation with Europeana is maintained…»

The project’s conclusion looks really promising! Stay tuned!

Vienna, 2-4 November 2015

Conference on Cultural Heritage and New Technologies

CHNT 20 (XX Conference on Cultural Heritage and New Technologies), organised by the Department of Urban Archaeology of Vienna’s Museum, is being held in the Vienna City Hall on 2-4 November 2015.

The conference’s call for paper/poster/video expires on 15 June 2015 (deadline extended).

The Vienna City Hall

This year, the event is dedicated to the theme “Urban Archaeology and Public Relations. New Technologies Enabling Archaeological Outreach”.
After five years focussing on the nuts and bolts of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, it is now time to go public with the results: the Department of Urban Archaeology of Vienna aims to present its cultural heritage not just to fellow scientists but also to the public in museums, on internet, in books and videos and to exploit it for tourism promotion.
How can new technologies and new media contribute to improving the communication process between experts and society in general?
The aim of public relations should be to reach people’s interest and make them sensitive for the relevance of archaeology and protection and preservation of Cultural Heritage.

Due to many request, the deadline of the Call for Paper/Poster/Video has been extended to the 15th of June 2015.

Preliminary programme

Keynote Speech “The Digital Heritage Paradox”, by Wim HUPPERETZ, Director Allard Pierson Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Session “Public Relations and Archaeology. Presenting Cultural Heritage in Urban Area”
Chairs: Ingeborg GAISBAUER; Austria; Ann DEGRAEVE, Belgium
Session “Public Appearance. Heritage researchers, stakeholders and public interaction”
Chairs: R.J. VAN LANEN; J.E. ABRAHAMSE, B.J. GROENEWOUDT, M.C. KOSIAN, The Netherlands
Session “New realities: Virtual, augmented reality and other techniques in Cultural Heritage for the general public”
Chairs: Willem BEEX, The Netherlands; Peter FERSCHIN, Austria; Bernhard FRISCHER, USA; Giorgio VERDIANI, Italy
Session “The Use of UAVs in Virtual Heritage”
Chairs: Peter DORNINGER, Austria; Benjamin DUCKE, Germany; Bernhard FRISCHER, USA; Rebeka VITAL, Israel
Session “Disclosing the Dead”
Chairs: David BIBBY, Germany; Ann DEGRAEVE, Belgium; Raphael PANHUYSEN, The Netherlands; Karin WILTSCHKE-SCHROTTA, Austria
Session “Conflict as Cultural Heritage: Cultural Heritage in Conflict”
Chair: Stephen STEAD, UK
Session “Cultural Heritage in Danger”
Chairs: Benjamin DUCKE, Germany; Anita GACH, Friedrich SCHIPPER, Hubert SZEMETHY, Austria
Session “Newbies & Young Scientists”
Chairs: Michael DONEUS, Benjamin STANGL, Austria
Session “Storytelling for Tourism in the Virtual Age. High Tech Travel for the 21st Century”
Chairs: Wolfgang BÖRNER, Austria; Eleni PANAGOU, Greece; Linda POTTER, USA
Round Table on “Digital 3D Reconstruction – Methods, Strategies and Challenges” (Short papers)
Chairs: Piotr KUROCZYŃSKI, Germany; Benjamin STANGL, Austria
Advanced Archaeological Training on “Archaeological Geospatial Infrastructures. A fundament for management and collaboration” (no papers)
Organiser: Markus JOBST, Austria

About the organiser:

The Department of Urban Archaeology is a part of Vienna’s Museum.
Main task of the Urban Archaeology of Vienna is the archaeological research of the past of the Capital City of Austria.
Since 1996 the International Conference “Cultural Heritage and New Technologies” is organised by the department. Starting from then, the conference is an excellent platform for discussion, exchange and presentation. The conference participants come from many fields; they are archaeologists, cultural scientists, representatives from public authorities, institutions and universities, researchers and decision makers from various scientific disciplines. At CHNT you will find the unique chance to bundle synergies in the field of “protection of cultural heritage”, its documentation and preservation with the latest applications and methods.
Up-to-date methods, questions of applicability and future changes are focus of the workshops, lectures and exhibitors of the conference.

For more information about the conference’s call and programme go to
www.chnt.at

A workshop by University of Oxford implements Citizen Science for the Digital Humanities

Crowdsourcing for Academic, Library and Museum Environments

This workshop, run as part of the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School 2015 (20 -24 July 2015), will enable participants to experience crowdsourcing in microcosm all the way from project conception to launch to data analysis. It will be a hands on and fast paced course, but there will be plenty of time to reflect on the process of setting up and sustaining a crowdsourcing project.

Participants will come to the course prepared with a project idea and some sample data, e.g. 50 images of objects or books in their museum or library collection or an academic research dataset. It is absolutely essential that participants come prepared with their dataset and that this dataset is coherent. This means that the same string of questions can be applied to each image. For example, a dataset of medieval manuscripts might be processed in the following steps:

Are there any illuminations on this manuscript image? Yes/no;
If yes, draw a box around the illuminations;
A dropdown list titled “What appears in the illumination?” Choices could include: animals, humans, plants, text, fantastical creatures, music etc.

On Monday participants will share and develop their ideas for their projects and hear from crowdsourcing experts, including “Old Weather” Project Investigator Philip Brohan, of the Met Office. There will be the opportunity to “storyboard” or “wireframe” projects, so participants may want to print out a few images before arriving from their data, in order to draw on them and develop them.

By Tuesday they will have uploaded their data to Zooniverse‘s new Panoptes DIY crowdsourcing site and launched a beta project that they will use for the rest of the week. Participants will have the opportunity to pitch their project to fellow course mates and try to generate interest in their project in order to gain experience in attracting a crowd and communicating the significance of their research or collection. By the end of the week the group will use data generated by their project (or back up sample data) in various data refinement and visualisation tools in order to learn the basics of how to manage and analyse their data.

This course will be of particular interest to academics, librarians and museum professionals who see the potential for crowdsourcing to expedite data extraction from non-machine readable collections. The Panoptes system will be particularly useful for metadata extraction projects and datasets that require a basic decision tree (yes/no answers and dropdown menus) but will not be able to support transcription at this time. Examples of the kinds of data extraction and workflows that will be supported include: www.penguinwatch.org and www.milkywayproject.org.

The workshop will be run by Dr Victoria Van Hyning, Digital Humanities Project Lead at Zooniverse.org (University of Oxford), and Sarah de Haas, a technical specialist from Google with a background in humanities who will help bridge the gap between humanities and technical skills.

The Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School offers training to anyone with an interest in the Digital Humanities, including academics at all career stages, students, project managers, and people who work in IT, libraries, and cultural heritage. Delegates follow one of the 8 workshops throughout the week, supplementing their training with expert guest lectures. Bed and breakfast or en-suite accommodation is available at St Anne’s College, Oxford, on a first-come-first-served basis. Delegates can also join events each evening.

For further info visit http://dhoxss.humanities.ox.ac.uk/2015/crowdsourcing.html and

http://dhoxss.humanities.ox.ac.uk/2015/ml/

Università della Svizzera Italiana takes you on a terrific journey into eTourism and online communication

Massive Open Online Course on eTourism Communication Perspectives

Prof. Lorenzo Cantoni of Università della Svizzera Italiana is glad to announce the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on eTourism Communication Perspectives.
It is the very first MOOC covering the eTourism topic: a most needed one, considering the role plaid by Information and Communication Technologies within tourism and hospitality. Almost all cases discussed in this MOOC are from Heritage sites.
The course, fully free and open, will be delivered in October-November 2015; it will last 8 weeks and will require approximately three hours study time per week. Among the intended audiences: destination managers, people active in the tourism industry, policy makers, students (in particular within tourism and hospitality programmes) academics and researchers.

Prof. Lorenzo Cantoni, Dr. Nadzeya Kalbaska, Dr. Elena Marchiori and Dr. Silvia Matilde De Ascaniis will take you on a fascinating travel into the eTourism world, which crosses both space and time and is always closely connected with communication. The trainers are embarking to create a great study experience, which explores how Information and Communication Technologies do matter for tourism, both for our personal experience and for the tourism industry at large. In other words, they will explore eTourism together with you by using tools and models from the Communication Sciences.

Key concepts and theories covered include: Online Communication Model; Roman Jakobson’s Communication Model; Quality of online contents; User Generated Content; Web 2.0; Reputation in online Media; Intercultural Communication and Localisation; eLearning; Argumentation; World Heritage Sites.

As this is an introductory course, no prerequisite knowledge is necessary to participate.

By the end of the course, learners will know:

what communication is and its major components, ICTs and their relevance to the tourism field
how to be aware of the crucial role played by communication and ICTs within the tourism and hospitality sectors
current eTourism applications, technologies and practices
how to map different communication activities within the tourism sector
what kinds of online training courses can be used for the knowledge upgrade within tourism and hospitality
how to run a usability test and how to make usages analysis of a website or mobile app
how to plan, run and evaluate eTourism related activities, especially when it comes to the analysis of online reputation of a tourism destination.

COURSE STRUCTURE:

Chapter 1. Communication: an introduction to its nature and history (October 5-9, 2015)
Instructor: Prof. Lorenzo Cantoni

① Theoretical part:

The very etymology of communication and its two major components: producing and interpreting messages
The model by Roman Jakobson
The history of media up to ICTs

② Case study:

UNESCO World Heritage Sites and eTourism

Chapter 2. The Online Communication Model (OCM) and the quality of online contents (October 12-16, 2015)
Instructor: Prof. Lorenzo Cantoni

① Theoretical part:

The complexity and richness of online communication
The Online Communication Model (OCM)

② Case study:

Analysis of the content quality in online communication

Chapter 3. Usability analysis and web analytics (October 19-23, 2015)
Instructor: Prof. Lorenzo Cantoni

① Theoretical part:

The usability and usages analysis of tourism websites, mobile apps and other online communication tools

② Case study:

Usability analysis of a hotel’s booking engine

Chapter 4. Localisation of online content (October 26-30, 2015)
Instructor: Prof. Lorenzo Cantoni
Assistant: Emanuele Mele

① Theoretical part:

Cultural translation/localisation of messages for people with various cultural backgrounds and experiences

② Case study:

Localised website for domestic and international visitors of Quito, a Local Tourism Organisation in Ecuador

Chapter 5. B2B activities and eLearning: online educational communication (November 2-6, 2015)
Instructor: Dr. Nadzeya Kalbaska

① Theoretical part:

The notion of eLearning and how it is being used for lifelong learning of tourism and hospitality students as well as of professionals in the field

② Case study:

Ticino Switzerland Travel Specialist online course produced by a regional Tourism Organisation in Switzerland

Chapter 6. User Generated Contents (UGCs) & web 2.0 (November 9-13, 2015)
Instructors: Dr. Silvia de Ascaniis; Dr. Elena Marchiori

① Theoretical part:

Communication opportunities given by Web 2.0
Exploration of User-Generated-Contents (UGCs), by applying Roman Jakobson’s model

② Case study:

Communication strategies for the management of hotel online travel reviews

Chapter 7. Reputation in online media (November 16-20, 2015)
Instructor: Dr. Elena Marchior

① Theoretical part:

The definition of the reputation construct and its relevance in the online domain
Current approaches and tools for the analysis of online reputation, both from qualitative and quantitative perspectives

② Case study:

How to analyse the online reputation of a tourist destination

Chapter 8. Argumentation in online travel reviews (November 23-27, 2015)
Instructor: Dr. Silvia de Ascaniis
Assistant: Jingjing Lin

① Theoretical part:

Definitions of argumentation
How to run an argumentative analysis of Online Travel Reviews

② Case study

Argumentative analysis of Online Travel Reviews of a Chinese National Park.

ENROL NOW!!!

Brussels, BOZAR, 22-23 June 2015

STARTS explores the catalytic role of the Arts

The STARTS (Science, Technology and the Arts) Symposium being held in Brussels on 22-23 June 2015, in the salle Henri Le Boeuf at BOZAR, is aimed at exploring the catalytic role of the Arts for innovation in business, industry and society and how to foster it. Possible synergies will be considered during the meeting from an entrepreneurial, technological, scientific, social and artistic point of view. Already existing collaborations of Science & Technology with the Arts in the framework of European Commission funded projects will be particularly highlighted.

As representative of the Civic Epistemologies consortium Frederik Truyen, Professor at the Faculty of Arts of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (BE), is attending the event to present the project to the delegates.

Civic Epistemologies is an EU-funded project about the participation of citizens in research on cultural heritage and humanities, grounded on considering ICT as powerful drivers of creativity. The project intends to highlight also the “artistic dimension” of the citizen engagement, being both art a possible mean for public engagement in culture and citizen participation a potential input to art creation.

Today, an increasing number of high tech companies and research institutions, world-wide, assert that the critical skills needed for innovation to happen and to be of value for society are, in addition to scientific and technological skills, skills such as creativity and capacity to involve all of society in the process of innovation. In this context, the Arts are gaining prominence as a catalyst for an efficient conversion of Science & Technology knowledge into novel products, services and processes.

Working at the nexus between Science, Technology and the Arts, STARTS is discovering opportunities for piloting cross-sectorial cooperation that enhance and promote innovation. To foster such cooperation, the European Commission is launching its STARTS (Science, technology & the Arts) programme.

Hereafter, the symposium’s preliminary agenda:

MONDAY, 22 JUNE

Location: BOZAR, salle Henri Le Boeuf, Scène and exhibition halls

9.30: Registration

10.00 – 12.00 Setting the scene for STARTS
Opening by Paul Dujardin, Director of BOZAR, and Michel Magnier, Director for Creative Europe, DG EAC, European Commission.

Ralph Dum, DG CONNECT: The STARTS initiative

Gerfried Stocker, Ars Electronica: How Can Artistic Practices Be Best Brought into Innovation in Industry?

Nick Ervink, artist and Fried Vancraen, CEO Materialise: 3D Printing: Technology Breakthroughs and Artistic Challenges

Laura Belloff, Head of Culture and Games ITU Copenhagen (tbc): Innovation at the crossing of the Arts and Technology

Hugues Vinet, Director R&D at IRCAM: Ircam as Innovator In Broad Economic Areas

Roger Malina, Executive Editor of Leonardo Publications at M.I.T Press STEAM programme: The Arts, Science and Technologies in the US

12.00 – 13.30 “Light Lunch” in the HLB Bar

13.30 – 17.30 STARTS topical workshops: TED style talks

13.30 – 15.15 How technologies team up with the Arts: Internet of Things and augmented reality

Rob van Kranenburg – coordinator
Aleksander Valjamae, NEUROCINEMA
Bruno Apollini, SANDS
Carmen Mac Williams, GRASSROOTS ARTS
David Cuartielles, ARDUINO (tbc)
Eric Joris, DREAMSPACE
Laura Belloff, Head of Culture and Games ITU Copenhagen (tbc)
Paul Verschure, UPF
Pavel Smetana, NEUROCINEMA
Rafaella Rovida, PELARS

Data and Society

Jaromil Rojo, D-CENT – coordinator
Domenico Vicinanza, GEANT and Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge UK
Marleen Stikker, WAAG SOCIETY
Oriana Persico, UBIQUITOUS COMMONS
Roel Roscam Abbing, BORDER CHECK
Salvatore Iaconesi, UBIQUITOUS COMMONS
Teresa Dillon, SUPERGLUE

15.15 – 15.45 “Quick drink” in the HLB Bar

15.45 – 17.30 How music stimulates technological innovation

Francois Pachet, Sony Lab, LRN2CR8 project coordinator
Beatrice de Gelder & Antonio Camurri, DANCE
Claudio Allochio, GARR: The Role Of Art In Industrial Innovation
Cynthia Liem, PHENICX
David Worrall, FRAUNHOFER IIS: Sound ways of Understanding
Mike Thompson & Susana Cámara Leret, THOUGHT COLLIDER
Philippe Franck & Jacques Urbanska, TRANSCULTURES
Rolf Gehlhaar, HUMAN INSTRUMENTS: Market Transfer of Artistic Prototypes: SOUND=SPACE
Stefano Delle Monache, SKAT-VG

Creative Cities: ICT, the Arts and the city

Mike Phillips, i-DAT, MODEL CITY – coordinator
Andrea Cancellato, TRIENNALE DI MILANO
Andrzei Novak, NEW NARRATIVES
Annemie Maes, BEEHIVES
David Crombie, JAM TODAY
Josep Perelló, BARCELONA LAB
Manuel Abendroth, LAB-AU
Tim Brooke, FUTURE CITIES CATAPULT

17.30 – 18.00 “Quick drink” in the HLB Bar

18.00 – 20.00 STARTS in action: demonstrations and performances

Opening: MEP Carlos Zorrinho and European Commission (tbc)

Antonio Camurri, DANCE
Bruno Apollini, SANDS
Carmen Mac Williams, GRASSROOTS ARTS
Cynthia Liem, PHENICX
David Worrall, FRAUNHOFER IIS
Domenico Vicinanza, GEANT and Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge UK
Jaromil Rojo, D-CENT
Roel Roscam Abbing, BORDER CHECK
Teresa Dillon, SUPERGLUE

For those interested a guided tour to “Making a Difference/a Difference in Making” (BOZAR exhibition of a series of 3D printed works from the Arts, science, design and engineering) is foreseen

20.00 – 22.00 “Walking dinner” (demonstrations may be continued)

TUESDAY 23 JUNE 2015

Location: BOZAR, STUDIO and/or Henri Le Boeuf

9.30 Registration

10.00 – 10.30 Success Stories from links of technology and the Arts

Pier Luigi Sacco: STARTS Successful Project Stories (20min)

Opening by European Commission, Guenther Oettinger (tbc)

10.30 – 11.40 Creativity is the key: How the Arts can stimulate innovation

Chair: Vladimir Sucha, Director-General, JRC (tbc)

(this roundtable with industrialists, entrepreneurs, technologists and artists will discuss the importance of the Arts for innovation in industry and society).

Panel: 3min statements followed by a discussion

Pérez Dolset, CEO ZED
Albert Heuberger, Director FRAUNHOFER IIS
Joachim Sauter, CEO ART+COM
Lucía García, LABoral
Egbert Lox, Senior Vice-President of UMICORE
Valentina Montalto, Creative SpIN, KEA: Smart Guide To Creative Spill-Overs For Cities

11.40 – 11.50 Break

11.50 – 13.00 Creativity is key: How the Arts can stimulate innovation

Chair: (tbc)

(this roundtable with industrialists, entrepreneurs, technologists and artists will discuss the ways in which the Arts can contribute to innovation in industry and society).

Panel: 3min statements followed by a discussion

Cristian Beza, Founder ARTADYS
Francesco Monico, ST INNOVATION CUP
Gerfried Stocker, ARS ELECTONICA
Jo Libeer, former chairman of VOKA
Laurent Gaveau, director, GOOGLE CULTURE LABS (tbc)
Monica Bello, Head of ARTS@CERN
Tim Plyming, NESTA

13.00 Closing

For those interested a guided tour to “Making a Difference/a Difference in Making” (BOZAR exhibition of a series of 3D printed works from the Arts, science, design and engineering) is foreseen.

For further info visit www.ictartconnect.eu and ICT ART CONNECT’s Facebook Page

ACM TVX2015, the ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for Television and Online Video, was the perfect occasion to showcase Europeana Space TV pilot!

EuropeanaTV pilot succesfully promoted at TVX2015 conference in Brussels

by Kelly Mostert, NISV

During the 2015 ACM TVX conference, hosted by the iMinds Digital Society Department, that took place on the 3^rd – 5^th of June at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Brussels the EuropeanaTV pilot of Europeana Space project was presented during the ‘Social experiences and awareness’ session in the TVX Industry track.

The crowd was interested to learn about the pilot prototypes, the different use cases and scenarios, and the future plans for user testing. Also the EuropeanaTV hackathon held the previous month at the Waag Society in Amsterdam was presented and the future hackathons were announced.

The Culture Derby concept developed by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision got the audience to start using their smartphones and enjoy a cultural derby race – ensuring the ‘X’ in TVX was well represented during this talk!

The response to the pilot and other project activities was very positive. The ‘Rewind’ prototype app targeted at senior users definitely gets the attention of SmartTV producers interested in standalone apps to offer with their TVs.

The toolkit was well received by education professionals especially.

View the PowerPoint slides presented during the speech:

TVX2015: EuropeanaTV Open Up Culture, Enrich Television from Sound and Vision R&D

Questions or comments? Contact Kelly Mostert of the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision:
kmostert@beeldengeluid.nl – @kellymostert

www.europeana-space.eu

Photo taken by Lyndon Nixon of MODUL University.

user testing was organized to improve the two prototypes that the Dance pilot is developing for creative re-use of digitized dance content.

E-Space Dance pilot in Portugal

by Rosemary Cisneros, Coventry University

The Europeana Space Dance Pilot travelled to Lisbon, Portugal mid-May, to hold its first usability test for the two applications it has been developing. A two-day session was organized by FCSH-UNL under the coordination of team members Carla Fernandes and João Gouveia but included all members of the Pilot, Sarah Whatley, Alexandru Stan and Rosamaria Kostic Cisneros. Coventry University, IN2 , and FCSH met at the RE.AL Studios, a company led by contemporary choreographer João Fiadeiro, to evaluate the “DanceSpaces” tool and the “DancePro” tool.

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“DanceSpaces” focuses on the needs of the general public and dance enthusiasts (e.g dance audience/viewers and tourists, dance learners and educators, those who participate in dance as a social and/or recreational activity, etc.) who want to share and explore content about a particular dance aspect. As such, DanceSpaces targets leisure, teaching and learning at the same time.

“DancePro” is an application developed as a new version of the “Creation Tool” software, which is a video annotator working as a digital notebook in real time for dance professionals during creative and compositional processes. It focuses on the needs of researchers and dance experts (e.g. dance artists, choreographers) who need a set of powerful tools for accessing dance content and creating extensive metadata. It allows different types and modes of annotation of video in real time but also with pre-existing videos.

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The two days of testing allowed the developers to gain insight into what its target audience thinks of the two applications using a “think aloud” method. All partners were pleased with the results and gained valuable insight while validating critical assumptions made at the start of the project. There is a real need for such tools and the data supported this claim.

The day was captured by freelance photographer José Ramos and included local choreographers, dancers and members of the general public. Together with João Fiadeiro, other Portuguese choreographers such as Rui Lopes Graça, Ana Trincão and Sylvia Rijmer have had a chance to try the DancePro tool, having offered valuable feedback on additional functionalities they would like to see added to the tool in the future.

Conducting tests is only one part of the project and the usability tests in Lisbon have offered the E-Space Dance Pilot valuable information. The designers are now moving into the implementation of phase of the feedback and look forward to sharing the tools with those Dance Hackathon Participants, scheduled to take place in late Autumn 2015.