Digital meets Culture

Nice success for the event organized in Venice, with many interesting speeches

Title of the event was “Digital Cultural Content Re-imagined: New Avenues for the Economy and Society”, and it was held in the historical setting of Auditorium Santa Margherita in Venice. The core topic of the conference was how to enable a creative re-use of digital cultural content thus unlocking the business potential of cultural heritage and fostering the creation of new jobs and economic growth. A very interested audience almost fulfilled the parterre of the former theater, now conference venue.

The event was opened with a warm welcome to all the participants by Leonardo Buzzavo, teacher of Strategy at the department of management of Ca’ Foscari University – the hosting partner; then it followed an interesting speech by the University Rector Michele Bugliesi, on the importance of the digitization activity for cultural heritage.

After an introduction speech by the project coordinator Sarah Whatley, about the vision behind Europeana Space, the first keynote speaker was Harry Verwayen, deputy director of Europeana Foundation, who widely presented important lessons learnt during the project Europeana Creative and other initiatives, such as a nice example of winner of Apps for Europe project, the Europeana Beacons app exploring the city of Siena.

The second keynote speaker was Piero Attanasio of AIE (Italian Association of Editors) who talked about copyright and its relationships with digitization programmes, also providing an interesting economic interpretation on the current legal debate on IPR. After him, Antonella Fresa of Promoter described how Europeana Space is addressing the core issue, by trying to lower those barriers that limit the creative re-use of digital cultural data.

The show then began, with the 6 themed pilots presented in pitch-style and lively talks by their representatives: Dance, Photography, Open and Hybrid Publishing, Museums, Games and Europeana TV are developing nice prototypes which the conference audience could have a glimpse of.

At the end of day 1, a networking session was held with aperitif in a near bar.

[Show as slideshow]

On the second day, Charlotte Waelde from University of Exeter opened the discussion with a speech entitled “This contested space” which again introduced the topic of Intellectual Property Rights, and the conference continued with an hands on talk of Prodromos Tsiavos about using open and hybrid licenses, and with Simon Cronshaw and Peter Tullin who spoke about digital cultural content as a plenty of new opportunities for growing audiences and income.

An interesting moment was offered then by Daniel Okeloen (Noterik), who showed the current state of multiscreen applications, examples of multiscreen applications under development and an open source multiscreen toolkit. The conference was closed with a panel discussion moderated by Antonella Fresa and including Harry Verwayen, Leonardo Buzzavo, Prodromos Tsiavos, Fred Truyen (KU Leuven): the panelists discussed around the theme of missing, so far, a real leveraging on digital cultural data: despite the constantly growing availability of digital content and the movement about public domain and rights licensing for re-use, the actual exploitation of such content is in facts not happening on the market.

[Show as slideshow]

As a side activity, the registered participants could in the afternoon visit the Venice incubator H-Farm, an inspiring environment for creativity and technology.

deadline 24th October 2014

Survey about Bratislava plenary

London (UK), 2-3 December 2014

REMIX – Global Summit on Culture, Technology & Entrepreneurship

Join creative pioneers from across the globe at REMIX Summit London, 2nd-3rd December 2014. This is the flagship chapter in a series of global summits on Culture, Technology and Entrepreneurship. REMIX Summits are produced in collaboration with worldwide partners Google, Bloomberg & Dubai Design District, and media partners The Guardian, Time Out & The Art Newspaper. The 3rd REMIX Summit London follows sell-out events in Sydney and New York.

REMIX Summits tackle the big ideas shaping the future of the cultural industries and the creative economy. Uniting creative leaders from different sectors including technology, media and arts, they provide a ground-breaking forum for exchanging insights, growing ideas and working together towards common goals.

REMIX Summit London 2014 takes place at Google’s incredible Town Hall event space in their London HQ just off Tottenham Court Road.

More information can be found at www.remixsummits.com

Over 50 world class speakers will take to the stage over 2 days, including:

Amit Sood, Director, Cultural Institute, Google // Justine Roberts, Founder & CEO, Mumsnet // Sir Nicholas Kenyon, Managing Director, Barbican Centre // Fergus Linehan, Festival Director, Edinburgh International Festival // Fabien Riggall, Creative Director and Founder of Future Shorts & Secret Cinema // Stuart Trevor, Co-founder, AllSaints & Co-founder, Bolongaro Trevor // Tim Arthur, CEO, Time Out // Michael Morris, Co-Director, Artangel // Ruth Mackenzie CBE, Interim CEO / Launch Director, The Space // Simon Walker, Chief Strategy Officer, Rightster // Chris Wild, Director, Retronaut // Helen Marriage, Director, Artichoke // Chris Michaels, Head of Digital, The British Museum // Maddy Carroll, Campaigns Director, 38 Degrees // Kelly Sawdon, Chief Branding Officer, Ace Hotels // Lindsay Miller, Managing Director, Dubai Design District // Mike Sarna, Director, Programming & Exhibitions, Royal Museums Greenwich & many more…

Munich (Germany), 25 November 2014

“Building Effective Creative Clusters” Conference

This conference will address practical ideas to unlock the economic value of the Creative & Cultural Industries: expert speakers and panelists will be discussing practical ideas to unlock the economic value of the Creative & Cultural Industries.

The Conference programme includes sessions on:

Developing strategies and services within creative clusters
Effective co-working and Incubation Centres for Creative Clusters
How Creative Industries can add real value in your city or region
Cross-sectoral and Cross-cluster collaboration – a catalyst for real growth

Register now!

About the European Creative Industries Alliance (ECIA)

ECIA is an integrated policy initiative that combines policy learning with 8 concrete actions on innovation vouchers, better access to finance and cluster excellence & cooperation. It is an open platform that brings together policy-makers and business support practitioners from 28 partner organisations and 12 countries. Its overall aim is to shape a community in Europe that actively supports creative industries as a driver for competitiveness, job creation and structural change by developing and testing better policies and tools for creative industries.

The conference is free of charge and is organised by the Cluster2020 and European Creative Cluster Lab Partners. To attend this conference on 25 November, please register here.

Other events taking place at the same venue the days before and after this conference.

– 24 Nov: ECCL pilot training on cross-sectorial innovation and collaboration among creative clusters (contact MFG directly about this at acheson@mfg.de);
– 26-27 Nov: EBN #TechCamp, with a special focus on creative industries.

This event will be organised by the Cluster2020 and European Creative Cluster Lab Partners and showcases the final results and findings from both of these ECIA actions.

Highlights from Europeana Photography at ICA congress 2014

Conference Girona 2014 Archives and Cultural Industries

by Sofie Taes, KU Leuven

The program of the monumental, multi-disciplinarian conference on archives and cultural industries held in Girona’s Palau de Congressos (13-15 October), and co-organized by EuropeanaPhotography-partner Ajuntament de Girona (CRDI), featured several members of our consortium: Antonella Fresa presented the PREFORMA-project, Nacha Van Steen led a double workshop connected with the EuPh-vocabulary, and my KU Leuven-colleague and project coordinator Fred Truyen was scheduled for a talk about All Our Yesterdays in the afternoon of day 1.

Accompanying Fred, I took the opportunity to immerse myself in the wave of inspiration that oozed from the enthusiasm, the creativity and the out-of-the-box solutions to manifold challenges that younger and older professionals from both sectors presented. After an impressive plenary session with Joan Roca, in which the essence and value of creative excellence were made tangible through some mind-blowing video-footage, I chose to continue the day with one of the parallel conference sessions devoted to novel ways of opening up city and university archives – with cases from Vienna (where a semantic Media-Wiki was produced), Stockholm (focusing on the marketing potential of archival/historical city projects) and Emporia State University (augmented reality apps to engage students in discovery the university archive and library collections).

All speakers illustrated with vigor and panache, that tight partnerships at the basis of a broader network (one person of the Wien-Wiki-team is sponsored by the city’s waste and sewer services!), a bit of money, a persistent attitude and a lot of conviction can go a long way. They also proved that trying to re-invent the wheel in search for highly innovative solutions, has more chances of shipwrecking a project, than a more down-to-earth, trial-and-error, step-by-step approach: different ambition, better result.

[Show as slideshow]

In the afternoon, I attended the session devoted to early photography, featuring not only a fascinating research project on fascist undertones in Spanish war photography, thoughts on international metadata standards from a Brazilian point of view, and 19^th century image collections online, but also EuropeanaPhotography’s own Fred Truyen: filled to the final seat, the bursting conference room took in his thoughts on “All Our Yesterdays: Europeana and the Phenomenology of Photographic Experience through the Framing of Digitization”, reflecting upon intermediality, deframing/reframing and enhancing the image – from’ original’ to digital.

The 30’ discussion round closing the session was insufficient for all questions and statements from the crowd, which left me with a double conclusion: our adventures with early photography are definitely – and luckily – not over yet; and many, many enthusiasts from all over the world share our passion and fascination for this part of our cultural heritage.

Girona, 13 October 2014

PREFORMA presented at ICA 2014 Conference in Girona

The 2nd Annual Conference of the International Council on Archives, hosted and organised by Girona City Council, through its Municipal Archive, was a great success with almost 1000 registered participants.

PREFORMA was presented to the attendees in one of the parallel sessions in the afternoon of Monday 13th of October by Antonella Fresa, Technical Coordinator, and Peter Pharow, Responsible of the first design phase.

In the morning of the same day, the PREFORMA partners took the opportunity to meet together to analyse the results of the evaluation of the bids that have been submitted and to plan the next steps, in the light of finalising the negotiation of the contracts with the awarded suppliers by the end of the month.

Download the presentations of PREFORMA at the ICA Conference: general presentation (Antonella Fresa), technical presentation (Peter Pharow).

Download the abstract of the PREFORMA paper here.

View all papers at http://www.girona.cat/web/ica2014/eng/comunicacions.php.

The Hague, 2 October 2014

PREFORMA at SUCCEED interoperability workshop

Bert Lemmens from PACKED represented PREFORMA at the Interoperability Workshop organised by the SUCCEED project to discuss best practices and possibilities for cooperation on a technical level between European Centres of Competence and Digital infrastructures.

The aim of the workshop was to discuss best practices and possibilities for alignment and cooperation on a technical level between European Centres of Competence and Digital infrastructures.

Each of the invited attendees presented their experience with interoperability.

Download here the PREFORMA presentation.

Venice hosted the plenary meeting of the project ahead the grand opening of the Conference

Europeana Space plenary meeting, 15th October 2014

The plenary meeting of the project took place at the beautiful location of Ca’ Foscari University, one day ahead the Opening Conference of Europeana Space. After the welcome speeches by Sarah Whatley (Project Coordinator) and Leonardo Buzzavo (representing the hosting partner Ca’ Foscari), the project manager Tim Hammerton (in the photo below) and the technical coordinator Antonella Fresa illustrated the main activities carried on so far, and anticipated about the next steps for the progress of the project.

Then the discussion became very lively about the 6 themed pilots (Dance, Photography, Games, Open & Hybrid Publishing, Europeana TV, Museums) and their digital content, to be re-used within the Content Space developed by the project for experimenting with new applications. “Pilots are certainly the major strenght of the project” said Antonella. Coordinating and monitoring the pilots is a task for wp4 co-leaders Promoter and iMinds: Frederik Temmermans described the monitoring methodology that will help keeping an alignement among the pilots and their interconnected activities. The discussion then went rather “technical” about the infrastructure and technical framework of the project, presented by Nasos Drosopoulos.

After a lovely lunch with view on Canal Grande, the plenary got into the discussion of hackathons, monetization and incubation activities, which are intended to drive the pilots output to the real market: Gregory Markus provided a good overview of the tasks, while Christine van den Horn got the ball rolling for the hackathons that are planned for each pilot starting from Spring 2015, in different locations. A very inspiring speech by Simon Cronshaw and Peter Tullin about cultural entrepreunership made everybody very enthusiast and forward-looking to the monetization activities which will make very concrete the general aim of the project (“to unlock the business potential of digital cultural heritage”).

But Europeana Space is not composed only of the 6 pilots and related activities: some demonstrators, with educational purposes, are part of the project and their status was presented by their reponsible partners: Thodoris Chiotis for the application dedicated to the greek poet Cavafy; Ruth Montague for the Irish Folktales and Poetry demonstrator, Frederik Temmermans for the demonstrator about photographic investigantion of works of art.

An interesting and interactive moment of the plenary that involved all the participants was the debate, drove by Charlotte Waelde, reflecting upon project activity and planning related to Intellectual Property, open content and creative licenses.

Final speech by Antonella Fresa with participation of Fred Truyen was about communication & dissemination and educational training.

[Show as slideshow]

Rome, 17 October 2014

RICHES at the EUROPEAN WORKSHOP ON REFLECTIVE SOCIETIES

The European Commission, Directorate General for Research and Innovation, unit B6 Reflective Societies, in cooperation with the FLASH-IT project kindly organises the workshop “Bridge over troubled waters? The link between European historical heritage and the future of European integration” being held in Rome, on the 17^th of October 2014.

The Horizon 2020 Research Framework Programme provides funding for research that aims “to contribute to an understanding of Europe’s intellectual basis, its history and the many European and non- European influences, as an inspiration for our lives today”. The research domain is located under the “reflective societies” part of Societal Challenge 6: Europe in a changing world – Inclusive, innovative and reflective societies.

The workshop on “reflective societies” revolves around the problematic of the interconnectedness of the past, present and the future in the current European societies. It initiates a discussion about the potential meaning of “reflective societies” as societal challenge for current European societies in general and for setting the European research agenda under Horizon 2020 in particular.

The workshop brings together specialists of history, cultural heritage and identity studies (fields that cover a large and intimately related part of the research area under “reflective societies” as defined by the H2020 Research Framework Programme) and policy makers and managers from the European Commission and national funding bodies.

In the workshop’s afternoon session, RICHES Coordinator Prof. Neil Forbes of Coventry University will chair the Round Table on Cultural Heritage, discussing the topics and aims of the project.

The results of the workshop will contribute to define future research topics on European history, heritage and identities that will respond to the needs of contemporary European societies and that will reinvigorate the link between interpretations of the past and the willingness to share common European objectives.

For the programme of the event and the registration, please visit this link

RICHES on Twitter: #richesEU

RICHES on YouTube: www.youtube.com/richesEU

It will provide support and tools about the possibility of re-use of public domain and open content

Open Knowledge Foundation joins Europeana Space

by Lieke Ploeger and Marieke Guy, Open Knowledge Foundation

Open Knowledge is a nonprofit organisation that promotes open knowledge, including open content and open data. Open Knowledge hosts over 20 working groups: domain-specific groups that focus on discussion and activity around a given area of open knowledge. OpenGLAM is an initiative run by Open Knowledge since 2012 for the promotion of open cultural content. The OpenGLAM working group is a global network of people who work to open up cultural data and content held by GLAM institutions. The OpenGLAM community provides documentation for cultural institutions wanting to open up their data and content and regularly organises events and workshops bringing together groups that are committed to building an open cultural commons.

With such great OpenGLAM credentials it seemed natural for Open Knowledge to participate in the Europeana Space project to cooperate on WP3 – The Content Space.

Open Knowledge will be providing a ‘Knowledge Base’ on ‘Open Content Exchange’ known as the ‘OpenContent Exchange Platform’ for the Content Space. This platform will comprise of collated public domain and open content materials related to the value of digital public domain and best practices around open licensing. One particular area of focus will be the monetising of Europeana open content by creative industries and the challenges this poses related to IPR.

The OpenContent Exchange Platform will help answer, in an accessible, user-friendly way, the question “What would those working in creative industries want to know or to happen to enable them to reuse Europeana content?”. Questions from those working in creative industries may include:

What is the license of the content? What does the license mean? What can I do with the content? Can I make money from this content?
Do licence rules for what I can do differ by country? Do licence rules vary for the type of content I want to use? Are there differences between the licence for physical work or a digital work?
How do label my own content correctly? What is rights labelling?
Is IPR content embedded within content? What technical standards are there around embedding IPR content?
How can I get legal advice on IPR issues? How can I get content cleared to reuse?

It is anticipated that results from the platform will inform further research and policy making in the cultural heritage sphere, specifically around business models for open cultural content. Any poorly covered areas in the currently available materials will be identified with the intention of ‘filling in the gaps’.

Handing over a book from the Institut für Realienkunde. This image is Public Domain marked and available on Europeana portal.

The OpenContent Exchange Platform will be an online, publicly accessible platform consisting of:

Links to open content to be made available through the exchange platform both from partners of the Europeana Space project and from the wider cultural heritage community;
Blog posts and articles on open content being provided by Europeana Space partners and the wider cultural heritage sphere presenting this material thematically and in a highly curated way to maximise interest in it;
Documentation on open licensing for both suppliers and users of open content so that both parties fully understand the technical and legal implications of their work and make best use of its open character;
Materials on the re-use of openly licensed materials targeted at the creative industry, including manuals on how to source public domain works from other repositories

A first version of the OpenContent Exchange Platform will be ready in early 2015: the full version is planned for February 2016.

About the authors:

Lieke Ploeger is community manager of the OpenGLAM initiative and project co-ordinator of the DM2E project at Open Knowledge. OpenGLAM is focused on promoting free and open access to digital cultural heritage held by Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums, while DM2E is building the tools and communities to enable humanities researchers to work with manuscripts in the Linked Open Web. Before joining Open Knowledge, she worked at the National Library of the Netherlands, where she was involved in several large-scale European research projects, such as IMPACT in the area of digitisation and SCAPE in the field of digital preservation.

Marieke Guy is a project co-ordinator at Open Knowledge. She is just completing work on the LinkedUp Project through which she supported a series of competitions aiming to get people to reuse open and linked data relevant to education. Many of the LinkedUp Catalogue datasets have come from the GLAM community and many of the tools developed have been museum related. Prior to working for Open Knowledge she spent 13 years at the University of Bath based at UKOLN, where she worked on a variety of Cultural Heritage projects including Cultivate, Exploit and IMPACT – a mass digitisation project which aimed to improve access to historical text. Marieke is co-ordinator of the Open Education Working Group and writes a blog about Remote Working.