Digital meets Culture

Brussels, 22-23 October 2014

APA Conference – Launch of the Centre of Excellence

The 2014 APA conference launches the APA Centre of Excellence (CoE).

The programme details are available here.

The CoE is a membership organisation, built on the existing Alliance for Permanent Access (APA), supplemented greatly by the APARSEN and SCIDIP-ES FP7 EU projects, which provide expertise about digital preservation and obtaining value from digitally encoded information. Our members have demonstrated this capability with their own data, supplemented with tools, services and techniques which have been proved through extensive research and accelerated lifetime testing, and which has been applied most recently to long term preservation for a number of space agencies.

The CoE provides training, consultancy, tools and services to support organisations which need to ensure that their digital resources remain understandable and usable. It can also help to create the business case to justify the resources needed in order to provide sustainable digital preservation.

The unique selling point is that CoE offering is coherent and consistent and should be applicable to any type of digital object and it is backed by the combined experience of the DP pioneers both in the research field and, more importantly, as worldwide earliest adopters of DP practices. While there are specific data areas such as documents or audio-visual which have community recognised preservation techniques, the CoE believes that most, if not all, repositories will be called on to preserve many different types of information.The services offering comes from members, experts in their fields, as well as from the APA office. Members obtain benefits including, but not limited to, being able to access additional, non-public material, discounts on access to the offerings and to present a unified voice to policy makers and funders.

The conference is organised around examples from members showing how they have tackled and overcome their preservation problems. The examples are further grouped around the integrated view of digital preservation which APARSEN has brought together.

EUDAT Conference and EUDAT Training Session at ISC Big Data 2014

EUDAT News bullettin – September 2014

A common vision of sustainability for research and e-infrastructures…

Sustainability lies at the heart of EUDAT’s mission of designing, implementing and offering common data services and infrastructures. However, to date, there is no common vision of what sustainability for research and e-infrastructures should encompass. The topic of sustainability will be framed in the overall context of the conference theme, ‘Bringing data infrastructures to Horizon 2020’.

The Opening Plenary at the 3rd Conference (Amsterdam, 24-25 September 2014) sets the scene and outlines the policy perspectives on bridging national, European and international solutions in the area of data infrastructures and data management, with a focus on EU-US cooperation. Presentations from Ed Seidel, Director, US National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Carl Christian Buhr, Member of the Cabinet of Ms Neelie Kroes, Vice-President for Digital Agenda, European Commission, and Kimmo Koski, Managing Director, CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland, and EUDAT Coordinator, will address the data infrastructure divide between disciplines, communities and countries, and explore how European cohesion can be fostered as we go forward.

Sustainability has many strands, ranging from ensuring funding for the maintenance and upgrading of the physical networks and servers, to data storage and curation, and the development of ontologies for annotating data and enabling the integration of data sets – both within and across academic disciplines. It is also necessary to scope future timeframes – does sustainability mean keeping data secure and available for five years, or ten, or longer?

In his presentation entitled “What could possibly go wrong?”, David Rosenthal, leader of the LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) Program at the Stanford University Libraries, will outline their intense work to preserve web-published academic literature and other types of digital content for more than 15 years. What lessons have they learned that apply to the preservation of scientific data?

The success of Europe’s €77 billion science programme, Horizon2020 (which runs from 2014-2020), hangs not only on the quality of the research and the depth of collaboration, but also on adequate curation and management of the outputs, to make the results widely available and support the creation of new knowledge from existing data. Since most R&D funding in the EU occurs at member state level, this is obviously a topic of broader significance.

A panel discussion with representatives from BioMedBridges, CRISP, DASISH, ENVRI, EUDAT and iMarine will debate the road ahead, in particular looking at how they see the landscape evolving and what sustainability plans and models they envisage will be needed. The era of big data, the Internet of Things, the digitisation of biology and the increasing number of large scientific infrastructures in Europe are generating volumes of data that are moving beyond the capacity of physical storage systems. All of this i s transforming the discipline of data management.

In the face of this disruptive change, current approaches to sustainability are fragmented. Worse, the topic of curation and preservation of digital archives (to conserve the data generated by publicly-funded research) is frequently overlooked and ignored when grants are awarded. Policies need to be consistent from the bottom up – from individual institutions through to the national research level and also at a pan-European level.

The parallel sessions continue the theme of policy and sustainability of data infrastructures, as well as detailing how EUDAT is rising to the challenges faced by researchers who still lack a comprehensive data infrastructure allowing them to share raw data and research findings. Working closely with researchers, the project has created a suite of data services – the B2 family – which enables European researchers and practitioners from any research discipline to find, store, share, replicate, compute, preserve and process data, thus making it possible for them to carry out research effectively. The involvement of research communities from the early stages has led to user-friendly services that meet real-life needs.

Not all business takes place in the boardroom: the conference offers two special networking opportunities for participants to continue discussions in an informal atmosphere: the networking cocktail and poster session on Wednesday 24 September (with over 300 participants) – an ideal setting to showcase your initiative, and Come Dancing on Thursday 25 September – a chance to relax after the event.

We invite you to join us at the EUDAT Conference on 24-25 September 2014 in Amsterdam. Participation is free of charge, but you will need to register on the EUDAT website.

Have a look at the posters submitted so far for the poster session and submit your own poster via the EUDAT website until 15 September.

Prepare yourself for the challenges of big data – attend our exclusive EUDAT training session at ISC Big Data 2014

The programme for the EUDAT data-infrastructure training on 30 September, co-located with ISC Big Data 2014, is now available on the EUDAT website. Join us in Heidelberg to find out what EUDAT is working on described in the context of the three Vs of Big Data (volume, velocity and variety). You can find out what our services have to offer you and how they can help you to do research in new ways, as well as learning about the crucially imp ortant legal aspects of data sharing. Attendance is completely free of charge, but registration is necessary – register via the event web page today.

We’ll also be at the annual supercomputing conference SC14 in New Orleans, so if you’re attending, make sure you drop by to find out more about what EUDAT can do for you.

their vision is to "create, make, connect" through creative practice and professional arts performance.

E-Space friends: Remnant Dance

by Rosemary Cisneros, Coventry University

Among the dance-related content that will be used for experimenting within the framework of the Europeana Space Dance Pilot, very valuable material was provided by a Dance Collective from Australia.

Remnant Dance is a Perth-‐based collective of performing artists with a vision to “create, make, connect” through creative practice and professional arts performance. Established in 2011, the collective members have generated innovative contemporary dance works; making dance films, site-specific installation works, as well as short and full length contemporary dance pieces to connect with each other and a broader audience. The core members of the collective have professional backgrounds in ballet and contemporary dance and enjoy collaborating with artists from other creative disciplines, including visual art, fashion design, music, photography and film. Remnant Dance has toured extensively throughout Australia as well as internationally to Vietnam, China and Myanmar.

Official website: www.remnantdance.com.au

Image taken by Alix Hamilton of performers Ellen Avery, Lucinda Coleman, Andrew Haycroft & Charity Ng in rehearsal for the Adelaide Fringe Festival (2013).

Dance Maker: Lucinda Coleman dancemaker @ remnantdance.com.au

Community: Katie Chown community @ remnantdance.com.au

Networking: Esther Scott networking @ remnandance.com.au

Projects: Ellen Avery projects @ remnantdance.com.au

Music: Julie Valenzuela music @ remnantdance.com.au

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/RemnantStoriesDance

Facebook: Remnant Dance

two EU projects are dealing with photographic digital heritage and content: Europeana Space and Europeana Photography

Experimenting with photography

Photography is both a means of personal expression and a witness of present and past days: therefore it’s about cultural heritage and about creativity, and it is a wealth of possibilities for experimentations. There are two EU projects dealing with photography and they are closely linked to each other.

photo courtesy © TopFoto.co.uk

Europeana Space is about the creative re-use of digital cultural heritage. It includes 6 thematic pilots which will experiment novel ways to boost creativity and the business potential that are implicit in the big amount of digital cultural data available on the internet. One the themes that Europeana Space intends to address is Photography. The pilot dedicated to photography is led by KU Leuven and it is developed also thanks to the cooperation with Europeana Photography project (where KU Leuven is project coordinator). Some of the images that belong to that project, in facts, will be re-used for the Photography pilot of Europeana Space, and some tests of innovative applications will be carried on in 2015 on the occasion of the Leuven’s edition of All Our Yesterdays exhibition (the successful event of Europeana Photography which was launched in April 2014 in Pisa, Italy).

About the Photography pilot, Sofie Taes of KU Leuven says: “We want to demonstrate a range of possibilities offered by apps, Europeana API’s, and a multitude of tools developed by the open source community, to come up with innovative models involving historical and present-day photography, boasting with monetizing potential and investment appeal!”

As for the Leuven edition of All Our Yesterdays, it is going to take place in February-March 2015. While, for the greater part, it will re-use the content and material of the Pisa expo, an extra accent will be added to enhance its Belgian/Leuven flavor in collaboration with the Leuven City Archive, to recount some particular belgian ‘Yesterdays’.

Learn more about the Photography pilot of Europeana Space in the project’s blog

Learn more about the exhibition All Our Yesterdays: www.earlyphotography.eu

photo courtesy © KU Leuven

Workshop organised by the FP7 projects SCAPE and APARSEN

PREFORMA presented at JCDL/TPDL 2014

PREFORMA project has been hosted in the DCH-RP stall at the workshop on digital preservation sustainability on the EU policy level organised by the FP7 projects SCAPE and APARSEN in London in the frame of the JCLD/TPDL 2014 Conference.

The event, which was hosted by the City University on September 8th, 2014, brought together various EU projects/initiatives, among which PREFORMA, to present their solutions and approaches, and to find synergies between them.

Real time visualization of the panel discussion by Elco van Staveren

Aim of the workshop, which was attended by decision makers, managers, researcher, practitioners, librarians, publishers, developers and data managers from all over Europe, was to provide an overview of solutions to challenges within Digital Preservation Sustainability developed by current and past Digital Preservation research projects.

For more details please visit the event page on Digital Meets Culture.

The HbbTV application includes videos related to the Berlin Wall, and will be available on RBB’s television channel from the 3rd October 2014.

Europeana TV pilot application showcased at IFA 2014 Berlin

by Annette Wilson, RBB

At the IFA 2014 event, held in Berlin on 5^th -10^th September, partner RBB showcased the Berlin Wall Smart TV application developed for use in Europeana Space. The HbbTV application is a dossier of 250 archive videos ranging from events leading up to the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 to German re-unification in 1990.

This application will be available to Smart TV viewers on RBB’s television channel from the 3^rd October 2014. Via the red button, users can start the application on their TV and watch any of the videos and read the accompanying information. The application is available in both English and German.

In Europeana Space TV Pilot RBB will investigate ways to include Europeana content in this and similar applications and acceptance by end-users.

The initial reaction of visitors to the RBB’s IFA booth was very positive. In the next few weeks activities will concentrate on fine-tuning the app before it is publically available from the 3^rd October.

Looking forward to showing the app in the Europeana Space Opening Conference in Venice (16-17 October 2014): http://veniceconference2014.europeana-space.eu !

http://www.digitalmeetsculture.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/RICHES-Project-Poster-70X100.pdf

RICHES Poster

http://www.digitalmeetsculture.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/RICHES-Taxonomy-Flyer_off.pdf

RICHES Taxonomy Flyer

Among the themes Europeana Space tackles and experiments with, there is Photography

Europeana Space – Photography Pilot

by Sofie Taes, KU Leuven

the digitization lab at KU Leuven

Thanks to the digitization work of libraries, museums, archives and other collection owners throughout Europe, and to online data sources such as Europeana and Flickr Commons, nowadays a vast number of photographic images of high historical, artistic and cultural heritage value has become widely available. In contrast to other and older images on the web, those made accessible by portals such as Europeana can be guaranteed to be authentic, unaltered and correctly digitized renderings from trusted sources.

Now why not combine the qualities of such photographic treasures with the dynamics of current photographic practices – think: the selfie, or other types of user-generated content by which billions of people feed the web on a daily basis…?

Selfie mania for everybody

With the Photography Pilot, we’re definitely in for the mix!

We want to demonstrate a range of possibilities offered by apps, Europeana API’s, and a multitude of tools developed by the open source community, to come up with innovative models involving historical and present-day photography, boasting with monetizing potential and investment appeal!

Specific demonstrators running along 3 scenario’s, will help create new ways to interact with our visual past and present. We endeavor for users worldwide to explore these new tracks of engaging with their personal and shared history, and to rediscover the world of their ancestors in a dynamic dialogue with their own day-to-day reality. Moreover – as this is the ultimate “Return on Investment” for any digitization effort – Cultural Heritage Institutions will hereby be able to engage with their public in novel ways.

In the hackathon that will be organized against this backdrop, developers with a pedigree in producing innovative applications involving cultural photographic heritage will meet, exchange ideas and look for commonality and interoperability to build larger functionalities.

a Blinkster app will be used to experiment within the Photography pilot

The featured applications will be grouped around 3 ideas, qualified as commercially relevant by our market research:

Museum applications providing access to Europeana and similar resources can yield new types of visitor-experiences;
Storytelling web applications and apps allowing for users to create new stories by mixing historical images from Europeana and other public sources with user-generated content, will encourage a more widespread individual and joint interaction with cultural heritage items;
Augmented reality applications enabling historical images to be layered with actual experiences and other material, such as maps and social user data, will provide a personal angle to every tranche of world history.

The best ideas and proposals stemming from the hackathon – together with a compendium – will be tunneled through a monetization event in London. Developers will be able to showcase their work to selected investors, with a real perspective to clinch a deal.

In this way, the Photography Pilot will contribute to Europeana Space’s main goal: to demonstrate, by means of actual, funded and innovative applications hitting the market in all the right spots, that for the creative industries, open cultural heritage can be the fabric added value in the digital economy is made of.

Learn more about the Photography Pilot on Europeana Space’s website

photo source: courtesy of KU Leuven, and Internet

Prins reminds of her trip to Africa and announces RICHES’ co-creation session

News from WAAG’s blog by Janine Prins

In 2010 I stumbled upon a nice topic for a documentary film or so I thought – Janine Prins writes. Now, four years later, the original plan has developed into a research project using digital technology and design thinking. Together with Dutch-based partners Waag Society and Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde it became embedded in a larger consortium under the acronym RICHES. Let’s go back to where it all began…

Photo: Janine Prins 2014

When on holiday in Marrakech I visited Museum Tiskiwin and found that some Dutch students were to arrive for an internship, to investigate the Amazigh components of their multicultural backgrounds. Born in the Netherlands, from Moroccan descent, they wanted to – literally – get in touch with the world their parents grew up in. They felt part of that world, albeit too ephemeral: it had dropped out of sight due to migration. I returned during the internships, with a camera, and made sure to be filming when the mother of one of the students also came over to visit. She was invited to tell her daughter about some of the objects on display. At once, she shed many years. The objects in turn also came alive, like in the room where a tent is exhibited: the old lady immediately sat down and stirred in a bowl as if she was preparing couscous. Her body automatically remembered the accompanying movement. Latifa took a picture of her mother. Why did Latifa choose this moment to freeze? I still need to ask.

In any case it is a moment in time when cultural heritage is transmitted, elicited by material objects: stuff that disappeared from view due to migration but has fortunately been collected. Many families, including mine, are not so lucky and need to find other ways to fill various gaps in our heritages. Few of us inhabit the same world our parents lived in, but migration creates a bigger divide in time, space, and culture. Not everything will be gone: intangible heritage such as food, customs and values travel with us, although in another place they are surrounded by different heritages. Many migrants end up as ‘minority’ elsewhere.

Janine goes on, reflecting upon the condition of new generations lacking a continuity bond with their origins. The place they live in expect assimilation rather than mutual integration and their generation gap actually deepens. Part of their personal past risks remaining unknown or denied and this seems to be an important cause of chronic stress, cause in turn of psychotic disturbances. The problem can be defined as a lack of cultural self-recognition or self-identity.

Museums and museum curators can help young people to get in touch with their cultural heritage, but they surely should do more than preserve objects in glass cases. How? How can museums become more engaging and participatory?

New (media) technology and theory may come in handy, especially when combined with participatory approaches – Janine observes. Digitalisation can improve accessibility and interactive platforms (of whatever kind) can facilitate so-called third spaces or ‘living labs’. Museums may become fertile grounds for “experience curators”. In such carefully designed spaces and processes, both relative newcomers and more settled inhabitants might enter into different intercultural dialogues than they usually do.

Such are the direction explored in the RICHES project, which among its activities includes three upcoming sessions, called co-creation sessions, being held in the Netherlands in the period end of September – mid-November 2014. Such co-creation sessions aim to demonstrate how heritage professionals and users can work in strict, mutual cooperation, with the last ones becoming producers, besides consumers, of cultural contents.

This time – Janine observes – I won’t be the film director deciding who and what is being portrayed and presented to an audience. Apart from observing as a researcher at meta-level, I will at best become a fellow moderator of designed processes in close collaboration with the intended visitors. This method will be new to me and is described as users-as-designers. Will my role as a visual anthropologist change and if so, how? Will creative methods add something to the existing toolkit of anthropology? We are about to find out: let the co-creation sessions of the RICHES project begin…

Read Janine Prin’s article and visit WAAG’s blog!

RICHES on Twitter: #richesEU