Digital meets Culture

Sofia (BG) 12 May 2015: Antonella Fresa presents the project to the attendees

Civic Epistemologies at NALIS Forum 2015

On 12 May 2015, in Sofia, at the Ball Room of Radisson Blu Grand Hotel, the 4th international conference organised by the NALIS Foundation was held, under the title “The Challenge to Collaborate in the Digital Age”. The event was realised with the support of the America for Bulgaria Foundation.

As invited speaker, Antonella Fresa of Promoter SRL intervened with a presentation entitled “From digitisation to the re-use of digital cultural content and citizen participation“[download], aimed at emphasizing the sociological impact of digital cultural heritage and technologies.

As one of the most relevant projects in the field of digital cultural heritage, Civic Epistemologies was presented by Fresa’s speech together with E-Space, RICHES and the recently (successfully) concluded Europeana Photography.

View the photogallery of the NALIS Forum 2015

[Show as slideshow]

Download the event programme.

Read the article by Ekaterina Dikova, NALIS Project Manager

For further information visit www.nalis.bg

A Prestigious Conference Gathering Decision Makers in Digitisation and Reuse of Cultural Heritage

Sofia, Bulgaria: NALIS Forum 2015

by Ekaterina Dikova, NALIS Project Manager

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Sofia

The 4th international conference organised by the NALIS Foundation in Sofia this year was dedicated to the large library consortia. It was held on the 12 May 2015 in the Ball Room of Radisson Blu Grand Hotel Sofia under the title “The Challenge to Collaborate in the Digital Age“.
A special guest and presenter was Antonella Fresa, Director of Promoter SRL, the established company for management of international projects. Her talk [download the slide-presentation] focused on digitisation, creative re-use of cultural content and citizen participation by stressing on facts and numbers and emphasizing the sociological impact of digital cultural heritage and technologies. She presented some of the successful projects Promoter and NALIS were involved in (e.g. EuropeanaPhotography) and added some words about the ongoing EU projects E-Space, Civic Epistemologies and RICHES).

Traditionally, the members of the NALIS Board of Experts are the key speakers of every annual NALIS conference. This year, one of them wasn’t able to participate: Robert Darnton, Professor and Director of the Harvard University Library. Ann Thornton, Andrew W. Mellon Director of the New York Public Libraries, presented the library as a digital co-laboratory and stressed the importance for librarians to collaborate with technology community through hackathons and other convenings. Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian at The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, shared best practices in cooperating with other institutions in Oxford and on international scale – with libraries in the US, Italy, Germany and China. He also presented some issues related to the UK national digital library, more precisely the collaborative efforts around the electronic legal deposit.

Another panel gave the floor to two managers of the leading library consortia in Europe. Wolfgang Hamedinger, Director of OBVSG, the Austrian library network, shared his experience of the close cooperation between the OBVSG member institutions and presented the structure of the network, the historical reasons for its development and future perspectives. In addition, Jo Rademakers, Director of LIBIS, the Belgian library network, spoke about the consortium he manages and the new opportunities for the providers of library services. Any difficulty that a library network encounters in the digital era is seen as an opportunity to adapt to the new reality by these important decision makers.

The founders of the National Academic Library and Information System Foundation (NALIS Foundation): the Central Library of BAS (CL-BAS), the Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” (SU) and the American University in Bulgaria (AUBG).

Opening remarks were by Sabina Aneva, Executive Director of NALIS, who presented the achievements of this Bulgarian consortium of academic and public libraries and shared her views for the future. Also some important figures from the America for Bulgaria Foundation, so far subsidising the NALIS intiative, and the Ministry of Education and Science welcomed the event. Decision makers from other Bulgarian ministries and important cultural institutions attended too .

The date chosen was within the library week in Bulgaria and straight after the official Day of the Librarian celebrated in the country (11 May). In fact, May is the month of culture for any Bulgarian worldwide as 11 May (according to the Julian calendar), respectively 24 May (according to the Gregorian calendar), is before all the day of Saints Cyril and Methodius, the creators of the first Slavonic alphabet, and it was subsequently accepted as the national Day of the Bulgarian Education and Culture.

Download the event programme

For further information visit www.nalis.bg

Copenhagen, 13 May – 2 August 2015

Tomorrows and Yesterdays exhibition feat. Mads Nissen

Photographic exhibition Tomorrows and Yesterdays: Mads Nissen Meets Europe’s First Photographers is opening on 13 May 2015 and running till 2 August 2015 at the premises of Arbejdeermuseet, one of the founding members of PHOTOCONSORTIUM. Here, award-winning (World Press Photo of the Year 2014) Danish photographer Mads Nissen will juxtapose the original selection of around 100 early photographs from the All Our Yesterdays show (digitised and printed on canvas in high quality and with state-of-the art techniques during the EU project Europeana Photography) with his own vision and reflections.
In 50 photo commentaries, Nissen will echo the impressions left by his encounter with Europe’s first photographers, which has triggered a heightened sense of the determination of the men/women behind the camera to document the present and their courage to reflect upon tomorrow.

Left: Emil Mayer | Prater – Vienna (Austria): A lieutenant and a needlewoman, ca. 1910. Silver gelatin print. Christian Brandstätter Collection © IMAGNO/Austrian Archives
Right: Mads Nissen: Calling home from the War

With this extraordinary stop-over, the travelling exhibition All Our Yesterdays proves to be one of the most important photographic events in the year: launched in Pisa in Spring 2014, a second, expanded version of the expo was presented in Heverlee/Leuven in February-March 2015. This third edition in Copenhagen, featuring the cooperation with Mads Nissen and special lessons on art and history organised by the hosting Museum, gives a new spin to a proven concept.

For further info visit

www.photoconsortium.net

www.arbejdermuseet.dk

www.madsnissen.com

Coventry University (UK), 27 April – 1 May 2015

The Roma in Coventry: Digital practices and identity expression

Start: Tue April 28 at 13:00/End: Fri May 1 at 19:15
Where: Coventry University Ellen Terry ETG34

In the Romani Week (April 27 – May 1, 2015), Amalia Sabiescu of Coventry University shares insights from the RICHES European project research: how a Romani community is finding ways to preserve and express its unique identity at a time of cultural change and how the arts, culture and technology can be used as bridges towards intercultural communication and dialogue.

With this exciting week of events, that will both challenge perceptions of Gypsy people and entertain, Coventry University seeks so to promote a better awareness and understanding of the lives and culture of the Romani/Gypsy/Traveller people.

You’re invited to the press launch of the Romani Week and private view of an exhibition of outstanding photographs, taken at the Romani Family Picnic Day. Come and join us at 19.00 on Monday 27 April at Coventry University’s Alan Berry Atrium Gallery opposite the Cathedral, where there will be interview opportunities.

The Romani Week will be launched by the celebrated film maker Jasmine Dellal, who influenced perceptions worldwide with her film When the road bends: Tales of a Gypsy Caravan, winning numerous awards.

We are also proud to feature Ramón Flores, from the Council of Europe’s Forum of European Roma Young People Programme. Ramón is making a special visit from Seville to talk about his work with the European Commission.
Hardly a day goes by without a negative story appearing in the media concerning the Gypsy and Traveller communities. To put this in context Coventry University welcomes inequalities expert Professor Margaret Greenfields to discuss health and social care engagement and ways to improve the situation.
Romani Week offers a rich mix of dance, music, talks and film screenings, culminating in a spectacular Gala “OPRE ROMA” at CU’s Lanchester Gallery on Thursday April 30th, 2015.

The festival schedule is downloadable here. If you have any further details, please contact Marcos Young on 07835 089 811 or email ab4928@coventry.ac.uk for interviews with directors Rosamaria K. Cisneros and Andrew Beck.

Visit the event’s facebook page for staying update day by day!

Workshop in Ankara (Turkey), Turkish National Library, 13-14 May 2015

The context of change and the move from Analogue to Digital

International experts met in Ankara (Turkey) on the 13-14^th May to attend the workshop “The context of change and the move from analogue to digital” organised in the framework of the European project RICHES (Renewal, Innovation and Change: Heritage and European society).

In the 21st century, the world faces epochal changes which affect every part of society, including the arenas in which Cultural Heritage (CH) is made, held, collected, curated, exhibited or simply exists. The workshop provided a framework to understand this context of change and the impact of the move from analogue to digital. Participants had the opportunity to discuss and answer key questions as:

How can CH institutions renew and remake themselves?
How should an increasingly diverse society use our CH?
How may the move from analogue to digital represent a shift from traditional hierarchies of CH to more fluid, decentred practices?
How, then, can the EU citizen, alone or as part of a community, play a vital co-creative role?
What are the limitations of new technologies in representing, promoting and transmitting CH?
How can CH become closer to its audiences of innovators, skilled makers, curators, artists, economic actors?

The workshop was organised around three main sessions, where best practice examples were presented, including open discussion with the audience. During the third, completely interactive session, the participants addressed specific aspects linked to the workshop topics in parallel discussion groups.

Session 1: The move from analogue to digital

Session 2: Cultural Heritage transmission in a changing world

Session 3: Discussion groups

TRANSMITTING CULTURAL HERITAGE: preserve & curate in a context of change
TALKING CULTURAL HERITAGE: communication and connectedness in the digital age, user engagement, mediated and un-mediated culture
THE MOVE FROM ANALOGUE TO DIGITAL: main risks and opportunities

Download the full programme here.

Event organised by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism in the framework of the RICHES project.

Questions about this event? Contact RICHES project: info@riches-project.eu

This event was posted on the European Commission website. Click here to see the EC post.

Symposium in Coventry (UK), 15 May 2015

Memory ^ sentiment ^ body ^ space ^ object

Memory ^ sentiment ^ body ^ space ^object – Dialogues across and between dance and art is an interdisciplinary symposium that emerged from Body Space Object Roundtables at the School of Art and Design at Coventry University. It aims to consider how performative and material practices have articulated the embodied nature of memory and sentiment in relation to objects and space. Where is the common ground between dance and visual art? Does this common ground create a radical space for new thinking, making, performing and writing? How can the different ideas and practices of dance and art add richness to an understanding of memory, sentiment, body, space and object?

Contributions are invited that respond to these questions and address but are not limited to the following themes:

Hand and digital
Materials and making
Memory and loss
Displaced meaning
The body and autobiography
Moving image and the haptic
Dyspraxia and disorientation
Translocality
Virtual and augmented spaces
The intersection of mind and body in acts of dwelling
Permeability and porosity in arts practice

Guest speakers will be confirmed closer to the event and will be drawn from international practitioners and researchers in the field.

Registration for the event will cost £20 concession/£30 full price.

Convenors: Imogen Racz, Sarah Whatley and Emma Meehan

Date and venue: Friday 15 May at 10-6 ICE Building, Coventry University Technology Park, Parkside, CV1 2NE

Registration for this event is now open, please click here to proceed to booking

The organising committee includes: Imogen Racz, Sarah Whatley, Emma Meehan, Lily Hayward Smith, Jill Journeaux, Caroline Molloy, Sara Reed, Natalie Garrett Brown, Matt Johnston, Hetty Blades, Karen Wood, Liselle Terret and Rosamaria Cisneros

Visit the C-DaRE (Centre for Dance Research in Coventry) website

Brussels, 26 May 2015

iMAL digital fabrication workshop

FabLab.iMAL presents its next workshop on laser-cutting, 3D printing & CNC milling, being held at 34 Quai des Charbonnages – Koolmijnenkaai, 1080 Brussels on 26 May 2015, from 10.00 to 13.00.
In 3 hours, you will get introduced to the basics and the safety instructions that will make you able to use the laser-cutter, 3D printers and CNC milling machine.

The workshop is held in French language, but you can always ask questions in English. Price: 40€ (or 30€ for members).

workshop at iMAL

During this workshop, you will discover:

Laser-cutting – thanks to a powerful yet precise laser, the laser-cutter cuts and engraves quickly materials like wood, plexiglas, cardboard, … The laser cutter only works in 2D and can either follow vector paths (as you can draw in Illustrator, etc.) or engrave black&white bitmap pictures.
This workshop is an introduction to the software driving the machine, the different file formats and conversions; it will moreover explore software allowing to create 3D objects by assembling cut parts.

3D printing – a 3D printer, unlike the laser-cutter, adds material instead of removing it. The process is very simple, somewhere in between the working of an inkjet printer and that of a pastry bag. The 3D model to be printed gets converted into a series of very thin layers that the printer will lay one by one, on top of each other. The “ink” in this case is a very thin thread of fused plastic that comes out of the printer head.
This workshop will introduce the participants to the various 3D printers of the iMAL FabLab, their related software and file formats and will quickly explore a few 3D modeling software.

CNC milling – The CNC (computer numerical control) milling machine allows to machine solid materials. The main difference from the laser cutter is that it allows to work in 3D, for example to sculpt wood from a 3D model. The milling machine also excels in 2D and allows for example to engrave your own circuit boards.
This workshop will introduce the participants to the principles of machining, the tools and software to drive the machine and generate 2D and 3D toolpaths.

For registration and further information visit www.imal.org

Engineering applications of Artificial Intelligence - Deadline for manuscript submission: April 30, 2015

Mining the Humanities: Technologies and Applications

The nature of humanistic data can be multimodal, semantically heterogeneous, dynamic, time and space-dependent, and highly complicated. Translating humanistic information, e.g., behaviour, state of mind, artistic creation, linguistic utterance, learning and genomic information into numerical or categorical low-level data is a significant challenge on its own. New techniques, appropriate to deal with this type of data, need to be proposed and existing ones adapted to its special characteristics. The purpose of this special issue is to bring together interdisciplinary approaches that focus on the application of innovative as well as existing data matching, fusion and mining and knowledge discovery and management techniques (like decision rules, decision trees, association rules, ontologies and alignments, clustering, filtering, learning, classifier systems, neural networks, support vector machines, pre-processing, post processing, feature selection, visualization techniques) to data derived from all areas of Humanistic Sciences, e.g., linguistic, historical, behavioural, psychological, artistic, musical, educational, social, etc.. Research in this area is important to combine the fields of semantics and knowledge engineering within artificial intelligence framework, mainly because of the overwhelming amount and different types of disseminated information. High quality contributions addressing related theoretical and practical aspects are expected.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following aspects:

Humanistic Data Collection and Interpretation
Ubiquitous Computing and Bioinformatics
Data pre-processing
Feature Selection
Supervised Learning of Humanistic Knowledge
Clustering
Fuzzy Modelling
Heterogeneous Data Fusion
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
Knowledge Processing and Acquisition
Expert Systems
Linguistic Data Mining
Historical Research
Educational Data Mining
Music Information Retrieval
Data-driven Profiling/Personalization
User Modelling
Behaviour Prediction
Recommender Systems
Web Sentiment Analysis
Social Data Mining
Visualization Techniques
Integration of Data Mining Results into Real-world Applications with Humanistic Context
Data Mining Techniques for Knowledge Discovery
Ontology Matching and Alignment
Virtual-World Data Mining
Game Data Mining
Mining Humanistic Data in the Cloud
Speech and Audio Data Processing
Ontologies
Biomedical Data Mining

Submission Procedure

All manuscripts should follow the submission guidelines available at the journal’s website. During the submission process, please select the “SI: Mining the Humanities” as article type. Prospective authors are encouraged to indicate their interests any time before the submission deadline. After submitting a paper, please also inform guest editors by e-mail about the specific paper ID assigned by the submission system. If a submission is based on a prior publication in a workshop or conference, the journal submission must involve substantial advance (a minimum of 60%) in conceptual terms as well as in exposition (e.g., more comprehensive testing/evaluation/validation or additional applications/usage).

Important Dates

Deadline for manuscript submission: April 30, 2015

Notification of the first review: June 30, 2015

Revised paper submission: July 31, 2015

Notification of acceptance: September 15, 2015

Final accepted manuscript due: October 15, 2015

Estimated publication date: December 2015

Guest Editors

Spyros Sioutas
Ionian University
sioutas@ionio.gr

Lazaros Iliadis
Democritus University of Thrace
liliadis@fmenr.duth.gr

Katia Lida Kermanidis
Ionian University
kerman@ionio.gr

Phivos Mylonas
Ionian University
fmylonas@ionio.gr

For further info visit the journal website.

Rome, 27-29 January 2016

EAGLE 2016 International Conference on Digital and Traditional Epigraphy in Context

EAGLE

Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy

presents

EAGLE 2016 International Conference on Digital and Traditional Epigraphy in Context

January 27-29, 2016

Rome, Italy

Information Technology has brought many significant changes in the field of Cultural Heritage and continues to be a dynamic and exciting field for the emergence of new opportunities. This wave of change has had particularly significant consequences in the field of Epigraphy and Classical Studies where the vast potential for digital content and new tools continues to reveal itself, opening doors to new and as-yet-unexplored synergies. Many technological developments concerning digital libraries, research and education are now fully developed and ready to be exported, applied, utilized, and cultivated by the public.

In the spirit of this vibrant environment, EAGLE is pleased to announce the EAGLE 2016 International conference on EAGLE 2016 International Conference on Digital and Traditional Epigraphy in Context.

Co-funded by the European Commission under its Information and Communication Technologies Policy Support Programme, EAGLE aims to create an e-library for Digital Epigraphy of unprecedented scale and quality for ingestion to Europeana.

EAGLE is also aiming at creating a network of experts and people interested in Epigraphy and Cultural Heritage. This event is intended to be a forum for anyone willing to share and discuss experiences and current general best practices for digital editions. It is open to researchers, archivists, industry professionals, museum curators and others seeking to create a forum in which individuals and institutions can find a place to collaborate.

The EAGLE 2016 conference will confirm a keynote-speaker lineup consisting of some of the most salient voices in the field, including Charlotte Rouche (King’s College, United Kingdom) and Werner Eck (University of Cologne, Germany).

FURTHER INFORMATION

Conference Web-Page: www.eagle-network.eu/about/events/eagle2016/

Call for Participation: www.eagle-network.eu/about/events/eagle2016/call-for-participation/

Registration: www.eagle-network.eu/about/events/eagle2016/registration/

The event will be held in English.

If you have any questions or need additional information, please contact:

Francesco Mambrini: Francesco.Mambrini@dainst.de
Pietro Liuzzo: pietro.liuzzo@zaw.uni-heidelberg.de
Raffaella Santucci: raffaella.santucci@uniroma1.it

Follow EAGLE on Facebook and Twitter!

Knoxville, Tennessee, USA, 21-25 June 2015

Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2015

“Large, Dynamic and Ubiquitous –The Era of the Digital Library”

The ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2015) is a major international forum focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, organizational, and social issues. JCDL encompasses the many meanings of the term digital libraries, including (but not limited to) new forms of information institutions and organizations; operational information systems with all manner of digital content; new means of selecting, collecting, organizing, distributing, and accessing digital content; theoretical models of information media, including document genres and electronic publishing; and theory and practice of use of managed content in science and education.

Big Data is everywhere – from Computational Science to Digital Humanities, from Web Analytics to traditional libraries. While there do exist significant challenges in other areas, for many the biggest issue of all is a digital libraries one.

How do we preserve big data collections?

How do we provide access to big data collections?

What new questions can we pose against our big data collections?

These are all digital libraries questions.

How can we, the digital libraries community, stand up in the face of these challenges and inform collection builders, curators, and interface developers how to best solve their challenges?

What assumptions have we been working under that no longer hold in light of Big Data?

These are some of the timely questions that will be addressed at JCDL 2015.

For further information visit the Conference website.