Digital meets Culture

Coventry (UK), 5-7 September 2014

We are preparing for a very 21^st Century event to be held at the Lunt Roman Fort in Coventry, aimed at helping to breathe new life into the historic Fort – and applications are now open for people to get involved in a unique weekend of creativity, invention and fun.

Ludi Lunt (roughly translated from Latin: ‘public games at the Lunt’) will run from 6pm on Fri 5^th September 2014 to 4pm on Sunday 7^th September, and is a hackathon-style event. The event aims to bring together creative people from around the UK to devise ways to improve the visitor experience, reveal more of the site’s fascinating past and breathe new life into this cultural gem, helping to re-establish the Lunt as a major Roman visitor attraction.

Ludi Lunt is being organised by staff from the Lunt and its management team, who are working with a diverse group of local historians and hackathon experts to put this very special event together. They are now looking to recruit people with a range of skills to take part in the event, including historians, artists and illustrators, technologists, engineers, hackers, gamers, app-makers and coders, writers, performers, designers, social media whizzes, educational professionals and craftspeople, students – as well as anyone who feels that they have ideas to contribute to a weekend of innovation and creativity.

In return for your efforts, you will have the unique opportunity to spend a weekend with other creative people at this amazing location, including camping, eating and working in the grounds of the Lunt. There will also be prizes for the best ideas generated over the course of the weekend, as well as the opportunity to be involved in the implementation of selected projects.

There is no charge for you to be involved in the Ludi Lunt hackathon and applications are open now. Subscribe here!

For more information visit http://www.ludilunt.co.uk/

EU projects panel workshop at congress Euromed 2014 (Limassol, Cyprus, 3 November 2014)

A strategy for cultural heritage in the new digital age.

A panel workshop to disseminate the latest achievements and to foster collaboration in the digital cultural heritage sector was organized by Promoter Srl on Novermber 3rd, 2014 in the framework of the important congress Euromed 2014.

EU projects, organizations and professional operating in this field were invited to participate in the discussion.

Title of the session: The Digitization Age: Mass Culture is Quality Culture. Challenges for cultural heritage and society

The amount of digitized cultural heritage in Europe continues to grow: the digitization activities have a positive impact on the society, by making the cultural heritage more accessible for the citizens, and by generating benefits to the content owners. Several questions arise about digitized cultural heritage: how can digital cultural data be re-used at best, what is the impact on society, and how to preserve it in the long term? This panel discussion will try to answer these questions, and to present the latest EU projects that wish to identify a strategy for the cultural heritage in the new digital age.

The project that particpated to the workshop are both advanced projects such as ITN-DCH, Europeana Photography and Preforma, and newly launched projects as Europeana Space, RICHES, and the brand new Civic Epistemologies (kick-off meeting on 1st September 2014).

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Starting from digitization, which produced such a big amount of cultural data, there are different areas of impact: to use such digitized materials, the e-infrastructures and preservation standards are needed, mostly for allowing to manage and search digital cultural objects and metadata, in terms of creative re-use and scientific research.

An analysis about the impact of digital cultural heritage on the society at large is necessary to understand how the society itself is changing, and how the role of citizens, who become an active part in the science and humanities, is crucial to guarantee a real development and participation in the research and educational fields.

A creative re-use of digital cultural content and repositories can also act as a leverage to unlock the business potential of European cultural heritage, generating benefits for companies and creating new job opportunities.

For more information:

Article “The Digitization Age: Mass Culture is Quality Culture. Challenges for cultural heritage and society.”, by Valentina Bachi, Antonella Fresa, Claudia Pierotti, Claudio Prandoni, Promoter srl (PDF, 1.2 Mb)

AGENDA Panel Workshop – The Digitization Age Mass Culture is Quality Culture

Workshop announce

Congress website with more photos of the Euromed 2014 congress

Venice, 16 - 17 October 2014

Europeana Space Opening Conference

A rich program of speakers and creative sessions to build bridges between Cultural Institutions and Creative Industry.

Digital Cultural Content Re-imagined: New Avenues for the Economy and Society.

The Opening Conference of Europeana Space is a great event held in Venice on 16-17 October 2014, in the beautiful locations of Ca’ Foscari University.

It is becoming extremely relevant that these two sectors, the Cultural Institutions and the Creative Industry, are more and more encouraged to get in connection, in order to unlock the business potential of digital cultural heritage.

Europeana Space project, including representatives of both sectors, intends not only to demonstrate that this connection is a win-win opportunity, but will also support its initiation and long-term viability by creating an open, fertile enviroment where the digital cultural content can be re-used in innovative creative applications and products.

Conference page:

http://veniceconference2014.europeana-space.eu

Conference Objectives:

spreading the message that cultural heritage is a living process and is vital for the health of society and the growing economy
presentation of market analysis and business models for reuse of digital objects / promote discussion on economic sustainability of cultural assets
involve players in discussion on how digital cultural content can be re-used
awareness-raising and public engagement in the Europeana Space project: set problems and show in which way the project is addressing them

Why in Venice / Ca’ Foscari University

Italy as unique repository of cultural heritage with huge potential for valorization
Venice meeting East and West, land and water, history and future
Ca’ Foscari University merging economics & management with humanistic knowledge

just inaugurated an important new section of the Museum, provided with the most advanced digital media

German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin: New permanent Exhibition

On July 1 2014, the Federal Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel opened the new permanent exhibition “Resistance against National Socialism” in the German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin. The entire social breadth and ideological diversity of the fight against the National Socialist dictatorship is are documented in 18 topic areas. The barrier-free permanent exhibition is accompanied by a wide range of media and materials, along with an audio guide in seven languages and a video guide in German Sign Language.

Our Europeana Space partner Museumsmedien produced the extensive digital media offers for the exhibition.

Links:

Federal Chancellor : http://www.bundeskanzlerin.de/Content/DE/Artikel/2014/07/2014-07-01-gedenken-widerstand-bkin.html

The German Resistance Memorial Center: http://www.gdw-berlin.de/en/home/

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Deeper information to the topic of the exhibition

The German Resistance Memorial Center is located in the historical site of the attempted coup d’état of July 20, 1944, in the former headquarters of the Army High Command. Here, starting in 1942, several officers close to Friedrich Olbricht prepared the coup.

After Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg’s attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler in the Führer’s headquarters in East Prussia, Operation Valkyrie was set into action here in the Bendler Block in the afternoon of July 20, 1944.

The coup attempt by civilian and military circles failed. That very same night, Ludwig Beck, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, Albrecht Ritter Mertz von Quirnheim, Werner von Haeften (pron. Haften) and Friedrich Olbricht were shot dead.

Since 1953 a memorial in the inner courtyard has commemorated those events. In 1980 the commemorative courtyard was given its current form.

Nowadays the German Resistance Memorial Center doesn’t commemorate only the coup attempt of July 20th, 1944, but also many people and groups that resisted National Socialist injustice. The exhibition shows the entire breadth and diversity of opposition to the regime and reveals the different traditions, motives, aims and situations that enabled and influenced resistance to National Socialism between 1933 and 1945.

In 1933, most Germans welcomed the new rulers and their policies. Only a minority reacting to the violation of human rights and destruction of democracy put up resistance. Those people used the scope for manoeuvre that exists, even in a dictatorship, for compassion and political activity. Resistance became a clear part of the process of contending with National Socialism and its crimes.

By presenting what happened to individuals and the how resistance networks emerged, as well as the motivations and campaigns of the various resistance groups, we show the many and varied dimensions of the struggle against the Nazi dictatorship.

Vienna, 7-11 July 2014

Digital Preservation Advanced Practitioner Course 2014

After the success of last year’s workshop, we are delighted to announce the return of this training event organised by APARSEN and presented in collaboration with TIMBUS.

This week-long event in Vienna, will bring together practitioners and researchers at the leading edge of digital preservation. The training will aim to cover issues across the digital preservation lifecycle by addressing topics within four main themes: identifying the key issues of digital preservation, understanding the value of digital data, managing and preserving your data and establishing trustworthy repositories. The training will be presented as a mix of presentations, practical exercises and group discussion.

The course is the second iteration of what will become a yearly event to be presented from 2015 by the Virtual Centre of Excellence developed out of APARSEN. It will bring together those at the forefront of digital preservation research and training, and it is intended for managers and staff already working in digital preservation. It assumes a working knowledge of existing standards like the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) as well as an understanding of how issues of preservation apply to their own institution.

Target Audience:

This training event is aimed primarily at:

Records managers and information officers in organisations that rely on long-lived data;
Data managers, librarians, curators and archivists in all institutions;
Innovators and researchers in information technology and computing science.

Feedback from 2013 Participants:

My knowledge has deepened and I have a greater awareness about digital preservation policies and topics […] I wish this course could have been longer!

[…] have a much better understanding of all different issues associated with DP. Also got some good solutions to take back to try and implement.

Great to have so many experts from so many projects across Europe talking about cutting edge/latest developments. Also really good to network with other people on the course and share experiences with each other. Very well organised!

Registration and programme:

Course fees are 250€ for 5 days, and this includes lunch and refreshments but not accommodation.

Registration is open until 17:00 (GMT) on 3^rd July via the APARSEN website where the full programme can also be found: http://bit.ly/1gWdQzs

http://www.alliancepermanentaccess.org/index.php/training/aparsen-training-schedule/advanced-practitioner-course-2014/

A delegation represented the project at the Anthropology and Photography Conference in London in May 2014

Some of our yesterdays: Europeana Photography @ British Library

by Sofie Taes, KU Leuven

From 29 to 31 May 2014, a small delegation of the Europeana Photography-consortium represented the project at the Anthropology and Photography Conference at the British Museum’s Clore Centre, London. Organized by the Royal Anthropological Institute and the British Museum, this gathering of professionals from either the artistic/creative field or the academic world, offered the opportunity to anyone active at the crossroads of both disciplines to showcase an oeuvre or project to the conference attendants.

Next to the promotion of our project from the broadest possible perspective, encompassing demonstrations of Europeana-searches online and introductions of partner institutions and collections involved, two focal points were chosen for this dissemination event.

Firstly, as the initial stance of EuropeanaPhotography’s exhibition All Our Yesterdays (Pisa, 12 April – 2 June) was to close only a few days later, the accent was not so much on present as on future activities: the upcoming Belgian production of the expo (Leuven, 30 January – 30 March 2015), as well as its flexible, transferable and transformable concept – intended to attract the attention of possible future host institutions.

Secondly, this participation in the conference exhibit was directed towards attracting interested / interesting partners or associates to join the future platform that is crystallizing from the current project consortium as we speak!

I shared the impression of my fellow exhibitors, John Balean (TopFoto) and Nacha Van Steen (KMKG), that attending this event was well worth the effort: our booth attracted the attention of a good number of visitors, most of whom were not yet acquainted with Europeana nor EuropeanaPhotography, but often surprised and inspired by the great opportunities for research and re-use (especially in an educational and editorial context) offered by our collections as represented in the database.

London, 17-18 November 2014

Investing in Opportunity: Policy Practice and Planning for a Sustainable Digital Future

Registration is now open for the exciting two day digital preservation conference ‘Investing in Opportunity: Policy Practice and Planning for a Sustainable Digital Future’ which will take place at the Wellcome Trust in London on 17th – 18th November 2014.

Funded by the European Commission, ‘Investing in Opportunity’ is a free conference but places are limited so booking is essential to avoid disappointment. Register now.

Brought to you by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and the 4C (Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation) Project, the conference will compare the strategic economic aspirations of funders and policy makers against the practical experience of digital preservation, including perspectives from practitioners, vendors and users of digital preservation services. It will identify emerging best practice and will provide a forum for needs and practical requirements to be articulated.

Participants will be invited to review key 4C Project deliverables, considering the implications of these resources and providing the opportunity to shape these to suit community needs before they are submitted to the European Commission.

The conference also coincides with a ceremony at which the biennial Digital Preservation Awards will be presented.

Who should come?

This conference will be beneficial to:

Research funders
Collections managers, librarians, curators and archivists in memory institutions and higher education
Information and records managers in regulated sectors whether in the public or private sector
CIOs and CTOs in organisations with commercial intellectual property such as publishers or content creators
Vendors and developers with digital preservation solutions
Researchers with interests in data management
Agencies and SMEs with a commercial interest in curated information

Digital content creators, curators and funders alike, across public and private sectors, will find relevance in addresses from leaders in digital curation. Their insightful analyses of the state of the art in digital curation will remind us all of the need to make smart investments now, buying ourselves options for the sustainable digital future we are striving to achieve. And the 4C project will aim to show us how.

Keep an eye on the DPC and 4C Project website for conference themes and speaker announcements. For the latest ‘Investing in Opportunity’ Conference news follow @4c_project on Twitter or search #IIO2014.

Barcelona, 8 – 11 July 2014

Collective Amnesia at Fundació Joan Miró

The smile of a tear, Joan Miro, 1973

An international symposium and a workshop about the forgotten shanty towns on Montjuïc opened a space of discussion on the subject of memorials from the perspective of art and contemporary thought.

With Collective Amnesia, it was explored the backside of a key concept of historiography in the last decades, namely “collective memory”, as formulated by Maurice Halbwachs. The “collective amnesia” can be considered to correspond to a formation that is generated in the wake of commemorations and memorials that declare themselves “official.” From Halbwachs’ perspective forgetting, like remembering, is a collective act. According to recent developments in the philosophy of history and contemporary thought, everything that is omitted from the past reveals much more about a given culture than what it registers as history and promotes as collective memory.

Via Favència municipal warehouse, Barcelona, 2011. Photo: Llibert Teixidó. © Llibert Teixidó / La Vanguardia.

Collective Amnesia is conceived as a space for discussion around the intersections that occur between artistic practice and historiography. With the symposium and the workshop, Fundació Miró offered opportunities to debate and collaborate with agents who come from different cultural sectors involved in experimental processes of knowledge production.

The symposium included the participation of experts coming from the fields of artistic practice, historiography and contemporary thought. The workshop, in turn, was focused on the Montjuïc slums, a specific case study directly linked with the site on which the Fundació Joan Miró sits. It is a side of things that the city of Barcelona has tried to forget even though they grew in the wake of what has been championed as the launching platform of urban development in 20th-century Barcelona: the hill of Montjuïc. For the workshop, Fundació Miró counts on the collaboration of a number of groups and organizations from Barcelona that are working on the recovery of the memory of this urban phenomenon.

International symposium:

Debate on Contemporary Memorial Culture

July 8 and 9, 4–8:30pm

Fundació Joan Miró’s Library

Speakers:

Miriam Basilio, Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies, NYU

Azul Blaseotto, visual artist, (La Dársena Platform) Buenos Aires

Oriol Fontdevila, curator and art critic

María Ruido, visual artist, researcher and cultural producer

Octavi Rofes, anthropologist, professor and Vice President of EINA, Barcelona

Joan Roca, historian and geographer; President of the Museu d’Història de la Ciutat de Barcelona (MUHBA)

Francisco Rubio, art mediator

Enzo Traverso, S. B. Winokur Professor in the Humanities, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

Workshop in Montjuïc:

Exploring the Informal City

July 9–11, 10am–2pm

Fundació Joan Miró’s Espai Taller

Public Presentation of the workshop’s conclusions:

July 11, 6pm

Plaça del Mig, Can Clos (Barcelona)

With the collaboration of the Centre d’Estudis de Montjuïc, Lúa Coderch, Antonio Gagliano, Valeria Giacomoni, Grupo por el Cambio (Can Clos), Oriol Granados, Imma Jansana, Lola Lasurt, Taller de ficció, Mercè Tatjer, among others.

Collective Amnesia is a collaborative project between the Fundació Joan Miró and Tricentenari BCN. It is part of Preventive Archaeology, an exhibition program at Espai 13, the Fundació’s project room for emerging artists.

Coordinated by Oriol Fontdevila and La Fundació

More information can be found at www.fundaciomiro-bcn.org

Attendance earns you one credit hour of an official degree from the UB (Universitat de Barcelona) and UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya).

RICHES on Twitter: #richesEU

RICHES on YouTube: www.youtube.com/richesEU

Conference special edition

EUDAT News bulletin

Registration now open!

Focusing on bringing data infrastructures to Horizon 2020, the EUDAT conference is an unmissable event for anyone interested in managing and manipulating data. Beginning immediately after the RDA 4th Plenary, the conference offers an ideal opportunity to learn about solutions for data infrastructure and help ensure these are tailored to user needs, as well as exploring how to give research communities control of these tools. Find out how EUDAT common data services can meet your data-management needs, ultimately helping you transform data into knowledge, and learn what the future holds in this area, with the focus on Horizon2020. Visit the EUDAT website to view the draft programme and register online.

Showcase your work at the EUDAT conference poster session

Are you researching issues surrounding data infrastructure and management? Display your findings to key figures in the field at the conference by submitting a poster – find out how by visiting the poster section on the EUDAT website.

Learn about the crucial issues affecting sustainable data infrastructure

One of the main issues in the field of data infrastructure and management is sustainability, with legal concerns being one area of specific focus. EUDAT is here to help: its Legal Issues in Research Data Collection and Sharing series provides essential information to help providers better understand the issues which affect them. The course, aimed at researchers, data managers and citizen scientists, is currently composed of three modules: Intellectual Property Rights, Personal Data and Service Provider Liability and Terms of Service. Learn more and download the training presentations from the EUDAT website.

Be a part of the European Ontology Network (EUON) – workshop 25 September

Community-driven and voluntary, EUON brings together people working in ontology and the broader area of semantics in Europe. By sharing experience and expertise, participants can discover how semantics are applied and tools used in different fields, as well as grappling with issues such as standardising terminology. A EUON workshop is being organised as part of the EUDAT conference featuring talks by Professor Robert Stevens (University of Manchester) and Jean-Pierre Evain (European Broadcasting Union). Interested in participating? The call for abstracts has been extended to 7 July – submit yours now via the EUDAT website.

And finally… the EUDAT conference will bring together users and providers of data infrastructure from all over Europe, so don’t miss your chance to get to know your colleagues in the field. Networking cocktails on 24 and 25 September offer the ideal opportunity to meet likeminded professionals and follow up on ideas. We look forward to seeing you there!.

More information at http://eudat.eu/3rd-eudat-conference

Anagni is an ancient town in the hills located in southeast of Rome

When Digital meets artistic treasures: Anagni, the City of Popes, virtual tour

The project “Navig@nagni” was born in 2009 to let the world know the artistic trasures of the “City of Popes” through the web.

This has been by scanning the major historical and artistic sites with a laser scanner which, in addition to a perfect 3D modeling, has allowed a scan hundreds of equirectangular pictures, using a special software developed by Massimo Iachetta, head of the ICT department of the City of Anagni. You can admire and appreciate in detail the Anagni monumental treasure, with 360° view and in each direction.

The crypt of the cathedral,built and painted in 1300 and also known as “the Sistina Chapel of the Middle Ages”.

the Cathedral, dedicated to Saint Mary

The project Navig@nagni starts from one of the major art treasures, the crypt of the cathedral, built and painted in 1300 and also known as “the Sistina Chapel of the Middle Ages” for the beauty and uniqueness of the paintings on the walls and vaults, and then navigate inside the Cathedral, the museum site called “lapidarium”, in the halls of the “museum of the slap”, dedicated to the historical events of Pope Bonifacio XIII, and finally in amazing halls of the headquarters building of the Municipality.

For further detail of the virtual tour, each site was taken up in various “points of view”, logically linked by the software, to create a true “virtual path” where visitors have the real feel of the road ahead personally.

To see more details of the works of art, in the navigation software has been implemented an algorithm that allows you to make an “zoom in” with automatic pixels regeneration, through appropriate interpolation algorithm, thus avoiding the view of the classics “pixels into large squares.”
Direct link: http://www.comune.anagni.fr.gov.it/home/progetto-navignagni

the Palace of the Municipality

The web version, for obvious reasons of space and processing speed, has been realised in medium resolution, but the entire project is available on DVD with all scans in 3D and all different visuals in high definition.

The project is in the expansion phase, the first models are provided for scan of other important monuments and the use of a drone with hd camera is being studied for aerial set of the sites.

So stay tuned…