Digital meets Culture

Grenoble, 26 January 2015

Towards a new social contract between publishers and editors

NeDiMAH, the Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities, is delighted to announce this one-day seminar, which will bring together publishers and scholarly editors in order to discuss how best to produce digital editions which are at the same time both economically viable and in keeping with scholarly standards.

In the pre-digital world, publishers and editors normally collaborated: the editors would produce the edition, following the guidelines provided by the publishing house, which for its part would take care of marketing and distribution, as well as essential scholarly services such as peer review.

Digital scholarly editions, on the other hand, tend to be self-published by scholars within their own universities, most often without any connection with a publishing house – an arrangement which is hardly sustainable, for various reasons, and often not available to younger researchers producing their first editions and without access to suitable funding. At the same time, publishers are increasingly engaging with the digital, in particular in connection with tablet distribution. But the majority of such eBooks are generally not up to the standards expected by the scholarly community: in many ePubs, for instance, basic features such as footnotes are a luxury – to say nothing of a proper critical apparatus.

How can be we best address these issues, to the mutual benefit of all involved parties – editors, publishers and the scholarly public?

Organizers:
Elena Pierazzo (University “Stendhal” Grenoble 3, France)
Matthew Driscoll (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

Confirmed speakers:
Editors
Marjorie Burghart (EHSSE, Lyon, France)
Caroline Macé (Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main, Germany)
Hilde Bøe (Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway)
Espen Ore (Oslo University, Norway)
Gabriella Ravenni (University of Pisa, Italy)
Manuel Portela (University of Coimbra, Portugal)

Publishers
Brad Schott, Brambletye Publishing
Pierre-Yves Buard, Presse Universitarie de Caen
Rupert Gatti, Open Books publishers, Cambridge
Pierre Mounier, Open Editions

Venue: Maison de Science de l’Homme – Alpes, Grenoble

If you are interested in participating, please send an email to Andrea Penso: andrea.penso@u-grenoble3.fr
Registration is free of charge but obligatory (deadline 16 January 2015).

More information: http://www.nedimah.eu/

the photos digitized from the visitors during the exhibition of last April-June 2014 are on show

“Ricordi dai nostri album di famiglia”, All Our Yesterdays once again in Pisa

From 11th April to 2nd June 2014, the Museum of Graphics in Pisa at Palazzo Lanfranchi hosted a great exhibition of early photography, entitled All Our Yesterdays (1839-1939), Life through the lens of Europe’s first photographers, organized by company Promoter and realized by the EU-funded project Europeana Photography.

The room in Palazzo Lanfranchi ready for the Riches Conference, with the photos of the exhibition on the walls

During the All Our Yesterdays exhibition, all the visitors were invited to bring their own vintage family photos, to be digitized and included in a virtual collection.

The citizens’ feedback was enthusiastic and about 1,000 photos were provided for digitization. The digital images are preserved in the Promoter’s Digital Gallery to be re-used for cultural and dissemination purposes.

The photographic association Imago curated a selection of 80 of them, again displayed in the rooms of Palazzo Lanfranchi, on 6-14 December 2014. This is a truly crowdsourced exhibition, born thanks to the citizen of Pisa and near towns, who provided their vintage photos to be brought back to life through the digital technologies.

The opening of the exhibition was organized during the International Conference of RICHES project, hosted in the same venue on 4-5 December. A dedicated desk was also at disposal for the visitors to explore and enjoy the virtual exhibition of All Our Yesterdays (available at www.earlyphotography.eu and in AppStore).

Next to traditional shoots of individual and group portraits, in this selection we can discover other recurring themes: many bicycles and still a few horses, the most popular means of transport of the rich and the poor; the motorbike, proudly showed off as a symbol of progress; panoramas of Pisa and the Arno; celebrities visiting the city; the war in the north with snow and the war in the south in the African colonies; day-trips, early swimming suits, the hunt.

The desk for the virtual exhibition

Early photography is considered cultural heritage to be preserved for the future generations (also thanks to the digital technologies), and re-used for teaching, for education, for historical and anthropological research. Next to the big archives which hold thousands and thousands of early photography items, a large part of this particular kind of cultural heritage is also widespread in the vintage photo-albums held in any family. Here we can find precious evidences of our grandfathers’ lifestyle, thanks to which we are able to retrace the memory of our territory.

[Show as slideshow]

As shown in this selection, family albums do not contain only the classic photos of weddings, holy communions and portraits. They often include other images showing aspects of life that we still can feel near from an emotional point of view, but which are irremediably far from a concrete point of view: poetic, dramatic, unusual, exotic, humoristic, and in any case always interesting and fascinating.

Two presentations delivered by Anna Kasimati (Greek Film Centre)

PREFORMA presented to SMEs and creative industries in Greece

Thanks to the Greek Film Centre, the first results of the PREFORMA project are being widely disseminated in Greece.

On September 9th and 10th, 2014, Anna Kasimati delivered a presentation entitled “The 1st PCP/IPC project in Greece: The PREFORMA Project” during the transnational Conference “Access to finance SME Innovative Entrepreneurship Support Tools”, organised by the Regional Development Fund of Western Macedonia in Kozani.

Furthermore, Anna Kasimati will present the project also at the forthcoming workshop on Creative Economy and developments in Greece, organised by the Regional Development Institute (FTE) – Panteion University of Athens on December 12th, 2014 in Athens. The title of the presentation is “Creativity and culture in action. Innovation and new technologies”.

The two events contribute to raise awareness of the opportunities offered by PREFORMA to the SMEs and to the cultural and creative industries.

Call for Participation

OPF Digital Preservation Community Survey

The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) has launched an online survey to assess the current state-of-the-art in digital preservation practices. The survey explores the adoption of digital preservation approaches and technology.

Both the findings and data from the survey will be published openly; the findings will enable peer institutions to benchmark their practice with others, and the data will allow others to carry out their own analysis of the results. However, the information in both the findings and data will be fully anonymised so that individual organisations cannot be identified.

We are interested to hear from a broad range of institution types and sizes to allow analysis of trends across the sector.

‘We recently ran a similar survey among our members to identity shared priorities and inform our strategic planning’ explains Ed Fay, OPF Executive Director.

‘The community survey will help to build a picture of the current digital preservation landscape and to raise awareness of effective tools and approaches that are being used in institutions around the world. The results will focus where OPF can support the community and foster open collaboration’.

About the survey

There are 20 questions in the survey. It should take approximately 20 minutes to complete.

We ask that you only provide one response per organisation. We have put together a printable guidance document to explain the purpose and format of each question, should you wish to consult with others.

Guidance document

http://openpreservation.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/OPFCommunityDigitalPreservationSurvey-GuidanceNotes.pdf

Survey

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/opf-digital-preservation-community-survey-2014.

The closing date for the survey is Friday 23 January 2015.

Pisa, 4-5 December 2014

PREFORMA at the RICHES International Conference

The first international conference of RICHES project took place in Pisa on 4-5 December 2014. The whole event was organized by Promoter, communication manager of RICHES and of PREFORMA, in the aristocratic venue of Palazzo Lanfranchi, a patrician palace on the riverbanks of Arno river, that hosts the collection of the Museum of Graphics of the city.

PREFORMA poster and roll-up banner ware displayed in the poster session of the event and booklets were distributed to the over 100 attendees of the conference.

The posters are also showcased in the Digital Exhibition web page associated to the Conference.

For further information about the event visit the RICHES blog.

Coventry (UK), 9 - 12 July 2015

Dance & Somatic Practices Conference 2015

Ethics and Repair: Continuing Dialogues within Somatic Informed Practice and Philosophy

Venue: Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE), Coventry School of Art & Design, Coventry University

The third international Dance and Somatic Practices Conference invites somatic practitioners, dance artists and scholars from a range of subject domains to continue, extend and debate investigations in the field of somatic informed dance practices.

The 2015 conference will consider the ways in which somatic informed dance offers answers to a number of questions: How might the corporeal or material (Grosz, Bradotti, Bennett) enable change through what has been termed ‘small acts of repair’ (Hinson) or what might be understood as ‘cellular consciousness’ (Bainbridge Cohen)? Then what are the ethical dimensions of this way of being in the world? How do we articulate these understandings and what does the field not yet know? And how might the legacy of somatic informed dance practices shape future understandings of ethics and repair in the 21st Century?

Keynote Speakers:
Emilyn Claid – Professor of Choreographic Practices Roehampton University
Susan Kozel – Profesor, School of Art and Culture, Malmo University

The conference seeks to offer a space for discussion, engagement, debate and experimentation and invites proposals in a range of modes and formats including but not limited to: papers, workshops, lecture demonstrations, posters, round tables, working parties, provocations, curated panels and performative interventions.

Learn more: http://jdsp.coventry.ac.uk/Conference.html

Photo: Copyright of Fresh@CU and C-DaRE

in Pisa, a very important conference of associate project RICHES included a poster session where the E-Space posters were displayed

Europeana Space poster at RICHES International Conference

On 4-5 December 2014 in Pisa it was held a very important international conference of project RICHES, with which Europeana Space has signed a cooperation agreement. Sarah Whatley and Tim Hammerton participated in the conference, that was organized by partner Promoter (also partner in RICHES).

Europeana Space poster was displayed in the poster session of the event together with the 6 Pilots posters, and booklets were distributed to the +100 attendees of the conference. The big roll-up banner of the project made a very good impression in the corridor of one of the rooms.

[Show as slideshow]

The posters are also showcased in the Digital Exhibition web page associated to the Conference.

Below, Antonella Fresa talking with attendees in the room devoted to the poster session, and in the backgroud the Europeana Space poster and some of the pilot posters.

Website of the conference: http://pisaconference2014.riches-project.eu/

Official website of RICHES: http://www.riches-project.eu/

By Franklin BOUMDA M.

The CINES and its archiving platform PAC

The Centre Informatique National de l’Enseignement Supérieur (CINES – www.cines.fr), based at Montpellier (France) is a public establishment under the administrative supervision of the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research. Its main activities rely on HPC (High Performance Computing) and digital preservation.

By means of high quality equipments, the CINES offers to its users the opportunity to take up great challenges. These equipments are useful for extreme simulations of infrequent or unrepeatable phenomena. The centre has in its premises the most powerful French supercomputer dedicated to research, named “OCCIGEN”, capable of over two million billion operations per second. Various applications from different scientific fields such as climatology, combustion, astrophysics, quantum chemistry, seismic, medicine and biology run through it. The CINES is also part of European projects such as PRACE or HPC-Europa that advance the European HPC.

In addition to this HPC mission, the CINES is directly involved in the development of digital information long-term preservation activities for all research domains including human and social sciences. Since 2006 the CINES’ Archiving Platform called “PAC” (Plateforme d’Archivage du CINES) has known two versions. The first version (PAC v1.0) was built in order to be used for digital thesis archiving. In 2008, came the second version (PAC v2.0) with much more infrastructures and means for extensive projects. Thus, the digital preservation activity has evolved and has become so important that a whole department of twelve people has been devoted to work on the development of this area. Among them are, a project manager, archivists, file formats experts, programmers, systems and infrastructures administrators and high qualified technicians.

The PAC system has been conceived as a set of three logical servers, inspired from the model that was proposed by the ISO 14 721 (OAIS – Open Archival Information System). In order of use, there is:

The transfer server that receives the documents from the producer
The storage server that stores the documents
The access server through which the authorised users can visualize their archives and get a copy.

When the transferring agency sends its files through the network or removable media, the PAC system proceeds with a series of checking. This ensures the validity of files formats, the structure of the deposit. Then, the files can be sent to the storage server with a metadata file which is added to the deposit, containing a unique identifier which will be used to find the archive when needed.

Logical view of the PAC system

One of the great achievements of this project is the creation of the FACILE service. A tool for validating the quality of files formats by ensuring that a file is valid and well formed according to the format selected from a choice list. This check is a required step in the process of long term preservation of digital objects based on format migration strategy. This service is mainly used by the PAC users among which you can find French national libraries, CNRS, French universities, scientific laboratories, etc. FACILE is accessible via internet (www.facile.cines.fr) and there you can also find the list of file formats that can be archived on the PAC platform, with the tools which were used to achieve the validation process.

Europeana Photography final step is a conference in Heverlee/Leuven and a Belgian edition of the exhibition of ealy photography masterpieces.

All Our Yesterdays goes Belgian!

by Sofie Taes, KU Leuven

The second instance of All Our Yesterdays will take place from February 1 to March 15, 2015, in Campus Library Arenberg – Heverlee and Tweebronnen Library – Leuven (BE). While, for the greater part, this exhibition will re-produce the first run of All Our Yesterdays, its Belgian flavor will be enhanced by including photographs from the Leuven City Archives. At the Heverlee site, traces of local citizens’ “Yesterdays” will figure side by side to those of their international counterparts, as a new but integrated part of the original All Our Yesterdays-setup.

In Leuven’s city center, the public library will host an additional exhibition chapter, dedicated to Trading Spaces / Changing Places: how have the city and its rural surroundings interacted throughout the years and what remains of this? Which century-old street views are bound to draw up a stir when compared to today’s cityscape? And in how far or by what means have people tried to adapt their living environment to something more comfortable or more agreeable to the eye…?

From lost landscapes to stunning portraits and fascinating shots-in-action, Trading Spaces / Changing Places seizes the most compelling images from Leuven’s past, to make for a powerful injection into the present-day city dynamics.

The Slaughter Street, along with surrounding streets and lots were completely demolished after 1914. The plans had already been recorded around the turn of the century, but were brought by the war devastation to faster execution. (SAL, Photo Library)

The opening of the Leuven exhibition coincides with the ultimate days of Europeana Photography’s project term. Small wonder that a project plenary meeting and a scientific conference have been aligned with the official vernissage.

After a day (28 January) of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, reviewing the results of the consortium’s endeavors, and discussing its future plans as the association PHOTOCONSORTIUM, the conference on 29 and 30 January will be devoted to The Impact of Digitization on Photographic Heritage: Memories Reframed. Hosted by CS Digital (KU Leuven) and the Lieven Gevaert Centre for Photography in Campus Library Arenberg, this event aims at assembling scholars from the field of photography and professionals from photo-archives, in order to develop an understanding of responsible archival practices towards photographic heritage in the context of the promotion of public access through digital portals.

Topics to be tackled: archival practices for photographic heritage, digitization and preservation, Europeana, public exposure and the archival mission. Confirmed key note speakers at present are Elizabeth Edwards (De Montfort University, Leicester – UK) and Simon Tanner (King’s College, London – UK). Next to their contributions, the program includes collection pitches by all content providers involved in EuropeanaPhotography, presentations from ‘befriended’ Europeana-projects including Europeana Space, and a roundtable on IPR chaired by Charlotte Waelde (University of Exeter – UK).

About the exhibition: www.earlyphotography.eu

Final conference: http://www.arts.kuleuven.be/cs/onderzoek/digital-culture-1/epconf

highlights from an interesting article appeared on The Guardian

Creative Industries and the Arts

Recently, it was published a very interesting article in the Guardian, about creative industries and creative people in the UK. The article reports the opinion of 3 relevant professionals, who are also speakers at Remix Summit 2014, on why supporting artists and evolving the curriculum is key for the long-term sustainability of the sector and to encourage innovation.

Highlights from the article:

Alex Poots, director, Manchester International Festival

“The really obvious answer is that we need to support and empower the people who are best placed to advance artforms and challenge received ideas – and that’s artists. We have to start with the art”

Ian Livingstone CBE, co-founder of Games Workshop and creative industries champion for BIS

“We must not underestimate the contribution that art, music, drama and design make in promoting diverse thinking, self-expression and self-determination – the raw materials of the creative industries.”

Ruth Mackenzie, interim CEO and creative director, The Space

“Of course, every new work is not going to be innovative, change the artform and become a hit with audiences – and for artists, producers, funders and partners, creating something that is only recognised as amazing after your death may not sound like the most fulfilling career path. But exploring and inventing, experimenting and sharing is sometimes thrilling, often fun or exciting, occasionally provocative or even life changing.”

Read the whole article on theguardian.com