Digital meets Culture

Paris, 6-7 October 2014

First ICCA Workshop on Cultural Industries

This Workshop, hosted by the Labex ICCA (an interdisciplinary research centre on the arts, culture and digital markets and their practices), intends to provide a forum that allows the development and the dissemination of researches on a single object (cultural industries) but from different scientific fields (economics, communication sciences, sociology, law, education sciences…). It aims at favouring discussions and connections between various scientific fields and various cultural industries. Professionals and institutional representatives of the cultural sector will also be invited to compare their experience with the researches presented during the workshop, which will be held in English.

Propositions of communication will be selected on the basis of a detailed abstract or a full- paper. These propositions may cover all the above mentioned scientific fields, all the cultural industries (publishing, audiovisual, movie, music, videogame, …) and deal with various topics like (among others): the impact of digitization on cultural industries (disintermediation, redefinition of the authorship, cultural diversity, new modes of distribution and consumption), the assessment of cultural policies, creativity in cultural industries…

Deadline for submitting detailed abstracts or full-papers was June 30, 2014. Authors will be notified on acceptance or rejection by July 11, 2014. There is no submission or registration fee. Monday evening dinner, Tuesday lunch and accommodation expenses (up to two nights) of the conference participants who presented a paper will be covered by the Labex ICCA.

Travel expenses will not be covered.

Local Organization Commitee:

Prof. Françoise Benhamou, University Paris 13

Prof. Bertrand Legendre, University Paris 13

Prof. François Moreau, University Paris 13.

For more information visit http://www.univ-paris13.fr/icca/callworkshop/

Warsaw, December 1-3 2014

Engaging Spaces: Interpretation, Design and Digital Strategies

NODEM 2014 is part of the NODEM Nordic Digital Excellence in Museums conference series under the stewardship of the Digital Heritage Center Sweden AB.

Nodem 2014 theme is: Engaging Spaces – Interpretation, Design and Digital Strategies

The aim of the 2014 conference is to bring together museum and heritage professionals (galleries, archives, libraries and museums), innovation experts (universities, research and technology transfer centres, start-ups) and creative industries to enable discussion on the potential of dialogue and collaborations between architecture, experience design, strategies of interpretation and ICT. The NODEM 2014 Conference intends to reach the following objectives:

To examine a variety of challenges and opportunities that newly built or renovated museums and other culture-historical institutions are facing to stay competitive in engaging today’s visitors.
To explore interaction modes between exhibition spaces, interpretative content and digital strategies in the context of visitor engagement at cultural and heritage institutions.

PRELIMINARY PROGRAMME (PDF, 368 kB)

NODEM (Nordic Digital Excellence in Museum Conferences) was established in 2003 by the research studio Visions for Museums at the Interactive Institute and supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers. Between 2010 and 2011, NODEM is developing to become a larger international conference networking platform called NODEM INTERNATIONAL, which will be acting in Nordic countries and beyond and will be building a digital platform for archiving, collaboration and community building. In the future it intends to connect research and practice in the field of digital cultural heritage in Nordic countries and other international arenas as well.

NODEM is an interdisciplinary conference forum that connects various disciplines and professions related to digital cultural heritage:

interaction design
exhibition design
museum studies

NODEM 2014 ORGANIZERS AND PARTNERS

NODEM Network of Design and Digital Heritage

The Museum Educators Forum, Poland

Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań / The Faculty of Pedagogy and Fine Arts in Kalisz

Digital Heritage Center Sweden AB

Museum of King Jan III’s Palace at Wilanów

The Museum of the History of Polish Jews

NIMOZ – The National Institute for Museums and Public Collections

DISH – Digital Strategies for Heritage

CONFERENCE VENUE

Museum of King Jan III’s Palace at Wilanów / Muzeum Pałacu Króla Jana III w Wilanowie
Stanisława Kostki Potockiego 10/16
02-958 Warszawa
Polska

The Museum of the History of Polish Jews / Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich

Anielewicza 6
00-157 Warszawa
Polska

For more information www.nodem.org/conferences/nodem-2014

Outcomes of the PREFORMA Requirements Workshop

Open Dialogue: towards a joint user model

On March 5th, 2014 PREFORMA project organised a workshop in Brussels targeted to memory institutions to agree on the joint user model for tendering the PREFORMA conformance checker.

This workshop was organised as part of the Open Dialogue between the memory institutions and the technology providers who develop the software. The memory institutions will define the functional requirements of the tender based on the outcome of the Open dialogue.

During the workshop several topics have been discussed: the various use cases to be taken into consideration for the conformance checking, the joint user model, the deployment options for the tools developed by the suppliers, the different formats and standards to be taken into account and the list of requirements for each media type.

The outcomes of this discussion will be soon available on the PREFORMA project website.

The great Europeana Photography exhibition opened with a big launch event in Pisa, 11th April 2014.

All Our Yesterdays… welcome to Pisa!

All Our Yesterdays will be a travelling exhibition all over Europe, hosted by the partners of Europeana Photography. The choice of Pisa for the first run of the exhibition was based on the fact that Pisa is a city suited to the research and the arts, home of a prestigious university, with international dimension, which offers an international airport connected with many destinations in Europe.

Lungarno Galilei in Pisa

The location of the exhibition was Palazzo Lanfranchi, a very prestigious exhibition centre, in an historical palace in the center of Pisa, on the Lungarno Galilei (the embankment of river Arno). Palazzo Lanfranchi hosts the permanent exhibition of Museo della Grafica, and hosted the Europeana Photography exhibition under the patronage of the Municipality of Pisa by the Chancellor of Culture and of the University of Pisa through the Department of Arts. Tuscan Region was also patronizing the event.

Palazzo Lanfranchi

Palazzo Lanfranchi hosted about 120 prints following the fil-rouge of the narrative developed by KU Leuven. Each photograph displayed in Palazzo Lanfranchi is printed with the most advanced printing techniques and on a very pure, cotton-based paper that enhances the photograph at its best. This solution makes the use of covering glass superfluous, and this way it is possible to avoid glares and light effects – which may disturb the beholder. Each print is framed with a wooden, neutral frame and is accompanied by a small panel with caption and credits. In each room there was one or more explicative panels. The panels and captions were in two languages: English and Italian.

The virtual exhibition

All Our Yesterdays is also a virtual exhibition: a virtual gallery where visitors can stroll through 3D technology. The visitor, when entering in the hall of the virtual museum, will find some information panels concerning the partners of the project and also a representative image for each partner. In the same room, there will be a timeline for the first century of the photography history (1839-1939). Around 100 images will be exhibited in the eight rooms of the gallery. The virtual exhibition was a proposal by partner CRDI and it is developed with the same 3D technology applied in video games. It is a step up from currently existing projects like Google Art since in this case the move through different virtual spaces is continuous and uninterrupted. Moreover, the application is ready for access from iPad , as well as from any computer in a web environment. The virtual exhibition is also hosted on All Our Yesterday’s landing page.

The Europeana kiosk

On the first floor of Palazzo Lanfranchi, near the entrance, there was be a space dedicated to Europeana, the great European Digital Library. This space is set up in partnership with Europeana Foundation. It included a desk with a computer to be used by the visitors to browse Europeana portal and dissemination material e.g. Europeana folders, fact sheets, postcards etc. as well as banners to decorate the corner. An Europeana representative was present both to have a short speech at the opening ceremony on 11^th April, as well as to perform dissemination to the visitors on the 12^th April. During the rest of the exhibition, the Europeana corner remained available for consultation by the visitors..

The digitization desk

a digitization desk

In order to attract the citizens to visit the exhibition and to engage the visitors, Collection Days were organized to digitize family photos and albums related to the timeframe of the project. Such photos were professionally digitized on site and in real time: the original photo and the file was immediately given back to the owner, the file is returned on an USB pen or via email. The digitized photographs and their related information (metadata) are collected to be re-used in projects for the enhancement of digital cultural heritage. The same initiative will be replicated also in the other venues where the exhibition will take place.

The exhibition, organized by Promoter, featured a great launch event on the 11th April; the opening ceremony included the presence and the speech of the local Authorities (Municipality of Pisa and Chancellor of Culture), of the University of Pisa (Faculty of Arts), of the Project Coordinator and of a representative of Europeana. All the Europeana Photography partners participated to the event.

KU Leuven coordinated all the partners of Europeana Photography for creating this amazing photographic exhibition.

All Our Yesterdays, story of a narrative

All Our Yesterdays is the great exhibition of Europeana Photography project. It is the collective effort from all the partners of this extraordinary consortium that make the exhibition so important and noteworthy: in facts, during the project, images selected by the content providers are shared and new discoveries discussed within a Content Committee of experts coming from each partner institution; and the exhibition is truly a golden opportunity and an ideal way to highlight the richness of the Europeana Photography collection.

So, in preparation of this exhibition, there was a lot of work to do for the Content Committee, in order to develop an attractive narrative for the exhibition. An important role in the direction of the scientific project behind the exhibition was played by the project coordinator KU Leuven, in charge of coordinating the selection of images together with the content providers, and of developing themes and narrative of the exhibition and the catalogue book.

First proposals for the exhibition content were initially discussed in Paris in November, on the occasion of the Europeana Photography IPR workshop, where the general concept of the exhibition was outlined – stressing vernacular photography, highlighting the city life in Europe, with as theme how photography was a premier witness to our common memory.

All Our Yesterdays, Life Through the lens of Europe’s first photographers (1839-1939) is in facts the opportunity for the European modern citizens to discover the lives that European past citizens lived throughout Europe’s history in the period 1839-1939. The exhibition is organized in different “chapters” and sub-themes, featuring photos of everyday life of people in the streets, outside, in the cities, in the countryside, in the villages, etc.

The photos were selected basing on their testimonial power and photographic value. They are images that inspire empathy and appeal to historical consciousness, and most of all they are images that tell a story. The content providers were extremely responsive and enthusiast of this task, and came up with a very large number of proposed images. A poll was then organized and coordinated by KU Leuven, asking all the partners to vote for their favorite images among the wider selection. These “best of the best” images have been selected for printing and framing.

An overall amount of about 120 photographs are represented in the exhibition, printed and framed, while a Virtual Exhibition and a showreel will include an even larger number of images. The whole exhibition includes photographs from the partners of Europeana Photography consortium and from 2 associate partners (SC Bali from Kiev and CUT from Cyprus).

Grand opening event is taking place in Pisa (Italy) 11^th April – 2^nd June 2014, in the historical setting of Palazzo Lanfranchi, organized by project’s Technical Coordinator Promoter.

Leuven will also host this exhibition in January 2015.

Learn more on www.earlyphotography.eu

Life through the lens of Europe’s first photographers (1839 – 1939).
Pisa, 11 April - 2 June 2014

All Our Yesterdays. Europeana Photography exhibition

In Pisa, at Palazzo Lanfranchi, from 11th April to 2nd June 2014, a great photographic and multimedia exhibition based on the most advanced digitization and printing technologies, telling the stories of our grandfathers.

18 international partners – museums, archives and agencies from all over Europe – joined forces in EuropeanaPhotography project to digitize the best of their collections of early photographs; now they are proud to present the finest, and often unseen, images of the past as witnessed by the pioneers of photography.

Main objective of the Europeana Photography project is in facts to digitize over 430.000 images with historical, artistic and cultural value belonging to the first 100 years of photography, since its birth (1839) till the beginning of WWII.

Now, the project’s exhibition All Our Yesterdays is the great occasion to discover how citizens in Europe lived before Europe was born, in a moment of great change, while the future was approaching and a new medium – the photography – was capturing everyday life within a picture. The exhibition was hosted first by Museo della Grafica, under the patronage of Pisa Municipality, Pisa University and Tuscan Region.

With the camera as a time machine – framing the present, documenting the past and showing a glimpse of the future – men (and women!) have, throughout the history of photography, captured their world from its most beautiful angles as well as in its most dramatic days. Early photography is an important element of our cultural heritage as it is direct and visual witness of the great changes in Europe in between the two centuries. Digital technologies have nowadays a key role in ensuring accessibility, enhancement and preservation of cultural heritage for all the citizens, and in this light the images digitized by Europeana Photography are available online through www.europeana.eu, the great European Digital Library. This way, anybody (students, researchers, experts, professionals in the field and common people) can access these images for many and different purposes: for education, for research, for personal interest. In Palazzo Lanfranchi a corner dedicated to Europeana allowed visitors to discover more and browse the collections.

All Our Yesterdays shows how history of Europe is our story too, and everybody could join, by bringing old family photos in Palazzo Lanfranchi: they were digitized for free and converged into projects for the enhancement of the cultural heritage of the territory, such as MemorySharing and a second exhibition in Pisa organized by cultural association Imago in December 2014.

ALL OUR YESTERDAYS

Pisa, Palazzo Lanfranchi

11 April – 2 June 2014

FREE ENTRANCE

Further info: www.earlyphotography.eu

Ciudad Real, 15 – 17 October 2014

ARQUEOLÓGICA 2.0

ARQUEOLÓGICA 2.0, the 6th International Meeting on Graphic Archaeology and Informatics, Cultural Heritage and Innovation, will analize both the present and future of documentation, reconstruction and computer aided render techniques, applied to archaeological heritage and culture. The main aim is to offer an updated overview about the Archaeology of XXI Century: research and development on virtual archaeology, performed and planned projects, new render techniques, development of innovative methods and procedures. This event is being organised by the Spanish Society of Virtual Archaeology (SEAV) and Virtual Archaeology International Network (INNOVA).

Participants from any discipline are encouraged to contribute in order to create an open forum for knowledge exchange and a fertile environment for discussion relating to the topic of Graphic Archaeology and Informatics, Cultural Heritage and Innovation.

Researchers or practitioners are invited to submit papers on original work from within archaeology although contributions are particularly encouraged from other disciplines which address and inform key issues in the context of the following sub-themes:

Virtual reconstruction or virtual anastilosys of archaeological heritage
Virtual and augmented reality applied to Archaeology
3D digitalization of archaeological & cultural heritage
CAD tools on virtual Archaeology
Render techniques
Archaeological prospection and visualization
Applied theory of virtual archaeology
Virtual Archaeology and museums.
Virtual museums

For more information download the brochure or visit the event website.

Open is definitely better...

EUDAT News bullettin – February 2014

Open is definitely better… Open access, open data… we hear about it every day. EUDAT welcomes the recent policy statements from the European Commission on open access to scientific publications and research data and the importance of data management planning in the forthcoming Horizon 2020 research programme, and endorses the research data guiding principles from the recent G8+O6 working group on data. As a cross-community, data-driven project EUDAT is strongly positioned to support the Horizon 2020 open access data pilot aiming at a reliable and high-performance infrastructures for data management – because EUDAT shares the same goals. Read EUDAT’s current position on open access, open data and data management planning.

Policy, licensing and open access in a trans-national, cross-discipline data infrastructure: work-in-progress in EUDAT will be tackled at the Workshop on Data Preservation and Reuse organised by APARSEN, DPHEP, EUDAT and SCIDIP-ES on 25th March 2014 in Dublin. For more details and free registration see SCIDIP-ES Workshop on Data Preservation and Reuse

EUDAT is teaming up with RDA Europe (Research Data Alliance), OpenAIRE and TTA (Finnish national research data initiative) at the EGI Community Forum 2014 to organise a workshop on Research data and services workshop. Technically-driven by representatives from the 4 initiatives the workshop will offer an overview of the data service solutions available and opportunities to collaborate through the RDA Interest / Working Groups. See http://www.eudat.eu/events/egi-community-forum-2014 for details.

Learn, learn, learn… about the fundamentals of data infrastructures and how EUDAT services can help you store, share, preserve and access research data. Co-located with the Research Data Alliance Third Plenary Meeting in Dublin, the first in a series of EUDAT training events on this topic takes place on 25th March 2014 and is open to all. The course will focus on two main aspects Data Discovery giving introductions to topics such as data re-use, identifiers, metadata, ontologies, “big data”, and Data Sharing including, notions on data access rights and mechanisms, open, sensitive and confidential data, and copyrights and licensing issues. For more details see http://www.eudat.eu/training/eudat-training-fundamentals-data-infrastructures

If you can make it to Dublin, then join us in Athens on 2nd April – co-located with ICRI2014 at the Training on data services organised by EUDAT & GRNET with support of CHAIN-REDS. For complete details and registration visit http://www.eudat.eu/training/training-data-services-eudat-support-chain-reds. Both courses are free of charge but subject to prior registration.

Communities and users are central to EUDAT. The call for Collaboration projects inviting communities and initiatives to propose collaboration activities with EUDAT was a resounding success and led to the submission of over 30 applications from a vast range of scientific communities. The selected projects will be focal to our 3rd User Forum taking place at Charles University in Prague 23rd-24th April 2014. Registration and more details coming soon.

Next month…watch out for views from the Community on EUDAT Services…

Barcelona, 15 March 2014

Barcelona Hackaton 2014: Augmented Reality Games

Within the Future Internet Content Initiative the i2CAT Foundation, with the collaboration of Computer Graphics Lab at ETH, Disney Research Zurich and Barcelona the Lab organised a one day hackathon to create Augmented Reality games.

A hackathon is an event for creative people to come together and build something for fun and to potentially win a prize! Sometimes the hacks can later evolve to something big, but mostly it’s about having fun and creating something that you think is great! In this hackathon people were invited to develop and implement ideas, visions and concepts, related to Augmented Reality games.
The Augmented Reality Games Hackathon 2014 – follow up of the previous Augmented Reality Games Hackathon held in Zürich – started in the morning. At the end of the day participants had the opportunity to carry out a presentation of their applications and compete for one of three cash prizes. Barcelona’s hackaton brought together a group of developers and creatives to create, in a funny way, augmented reality applications.

People were invited to participate in teams of 2 to 4 persons. The prize money was split among all team member.

Participants could participate in one or a combination of the four following challenges:

1. AR Toy / Tabletop game

Your game can be played on a table or on the floor, within the space normally used in games like monopoly, cards, children books, etc. The use of physical objects – like a game board, marker cards, etc – is allowed and encouraged.

2. AR Installation game

Your game is suitable for an installation at a venue (movie theater, shopping mall, etc.) and is played on a larger, but still contained area, such a booth or corner of a room. You can control the space, i.e. can install any kind of equipment necessary for the game to run.

3. AR City-wide game

Your game is played over a large area, and requires players to move over longer distances to be played. Here you don’t have control over the space, and should also be concerned with security and legal issues (you cannot ask your players to trespass on private facilities/land!).

4. Serious / Educational AR game

Your game combines fun with usefulness, by helping education of children, training of adults, or any other socially useful activity.

Judging Criteria

During the hackathon were offered drinks and food to keep pace.

This activity took place within the framework of FIcontent and was supported and funded by the European Commission and the FI-PPP program.

RICHES on Twitter! #richesEU

PREFORMA: gli standard del futuro per la conservazione dei dati digitali culturali

PREFORMA presented on Archeomatica website

On the 21st of February 2014, Archeomatica published an article about PREFORMA, offering to its readers a general presentation of the project and of the related Call for Tender.

Archeomatica is a multidisciplinary magazine, printed in Italy and published also online, devoted to the dissemination of advanced methodologies, emerging technologies and techniques for the Cultural Heritage’s knowledge, documentation providing, preservation and improvement.

Archeomatica is open access, believing that the research results freely available to the public improve the global knowledge exchange.

Click here to read the article about PREFORMA, entitled “PREFORMA: gli standard del futuro per la conservazione dei dati digitali culturali” (Italian langiage).