Digital meets Culture

The webinar will be held on 14 April, 14:00 Central European Time (13:00 UK time) via web-meeting and is scheduled to last 90 minutes.

APARSEN webinar on Storage Solutions for Digital Preservation

Storage is a central component in any preservation solution, and requires special functionalities in order to adequately address the need of a preservation system. Partners’ needs for storage may vary substantially, e.g. in required capacity, number of objects, size of a typical object, geographical locations. Furthermore, depending on the nature of the data and its usage pattern, performance needs may vary greatly. New technological approaches are required that help bridge the observed gaps in requirements collection, design phase and quality assessment process of the storage architectures.

Within APARSEN use cases were studied and a survey was undertaken to make an in-depth inventory of DP-risks and DP-options for different storage situations.

This APARSEN webinar provides recommendations towards adopting storage solutions that can better serve digital preservation.

The speaker’s programme is:

Simon Lambert, APARSEN Coordinator: APARSEN and why Storage Solutions are important in Digital Preservation
Silvio Salza, Consorzio Interuniversitario Nazionale per l’Informatica (CINI): Survey on Italian preservation repositories
Jeffrey van der Hoeven, The National Library of the Netherlands (KB): The use case at the National Library of the Netherlands
EUDAT SPECIAL GUEST SPEAKER: Mark van de Sanden: The EUDAT approach regarding Storage Solutions
David Giaretta, APARSEN project Manager: Concluding remarks and recommendations, what this means for APARSEN

Moderator: Eefke Smit (STM)

The meeting is a web-meeting and takes place on megameeting: http://alliancepermanentaccess.megameeting.com/guest/#&id=36245

More information on APARSEN can be found here: http://aparsen.eu/

More information on APARSEN webinars can be found here: http://www.alliancepermanentaccess.org/index.php/aparsen/webinars/

To raise awareness about the project and to better disseminate the call for tender

PREFORMA factsheet translated in Dutch

The factsheet presenting the project and the call for tender is now available also in Dutch thanks to the work of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.

This helps to raise awareness about the project and to better disseminate the call for tender, particularily in Dutch speaking countries, in order to attract new possible suppliers.

The factsheet has been published in the NISV project pages at http://www.beeldengeluid.nl/node/9569 and it’s also posted on the DEN Project repository at http://www.den.nl/nieuws/bericht/4224.

Oxford, 14-18 July 2014

Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School 2014

Registration has opened for the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School (DHOxSS). DHOxSS is an annual event for anyone interested in Digital Humanities.

This year’s DHOxSS will be held on 14-18 July 2014.

DHOxSS is for researchers, project managers, research assistants, students, and anyone interested in Digital Humanities. DHOxSS delegates are introduced to a range of topics including the creation, management, analysis, modelling, visualization, or publication of digital data in the humanities. Each delegate follows one of our five-day workshops and supplements this with morning parallel lectures. There will also be a (peer-reviewed) poster session giving delegates a chance to present posters on their Digital Humanities work to those at the DHOxSS.

This year’s five-day workshops are:

1. Introduction to Digital Humanities
2. Taking Control: Practical Scripting for Digital Humanities Projects
3. Data Curation and Access for the Digital Humanities
4. A Humanities Web of Data: Publishing, Linking and Querying on the Semantic Web
5. Using the Text Encoding Initiative for Digital Scholarly Editions

Morning parallel lectures include contributions from:
James Brusuelas, Lou Burnard, Julia Craig-McFeely, Emma Goodwin, Howard Hotson, Eleanor Lowe, Carole Palmer, Allen Renear, Kerri Russell, Judith Siefring, Lynne Siemens, Ray Siemens, William Kilbride, Zixi You, David Zeitlyn, and more.

Keynote lectures: Ray Siemens and Melissa Terras

Evening events: Monday – a peer-reviewed poster session and reception at Oxford University Museum of Natural History; Tuesday – a guided tour around Oxford city centre; Wednesday – an elegant drinks reception and three course dinner at historic Wadham College; Thursday – The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities Lecture; Friday – Trip to the pub.

10% discount on registration fees if you block book 10 or more places from a single institution.

DHOxSS is a collaboration between the University of Oxford’s IT Services, the Oxford e-Research Centre, the Bodleian Libraries, the Oxford Internet Institute, and The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. We are very pleased this year to partner with the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to provide the Data Curation and Access workshop. Thanks to all our other external partners listed here: http://dhoxss.humanities.ox.ac.uk/2014/about.html.

If you have questions, then email us at events@it.ox.ac.uk for answers.

More details at: http://digital.humanities.ox.ac.uk/dhoxss/2014/

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NeDiMAH Early-Career Researcher Bursaries for DHOxSS Humanities Web of Data Workshop, Deadline: 22 April 2014

The NeDiMAH project has sponsored up to 6 bursaries of up to EUR 500 each for those attending the Humanities Web of Data workshop in particular (see http://dhoxss.humanities.ox.ac.uk/2014/HumData.html). Applicants should be early-career researchers in the humanities, and must be working in participating NeDiMAH countries (see http://www.nedimah.eu/Contributing-Organisations) and priority will be given to applicants whose travel costs mean they would not otherwise be able to attend. ‘Early-Career Researcher’ is defined as up to five years post-phd (or equivalent).

The DHOxSS will offer an excellent opportunity to gain knowledge and participate in discussions about a wide range of digital techniques and research methods, as well as exploring key topics in depth with leading senior researchers and technologists.

The application form asks for a description (max 250 words) of how attending the Humanities Web of Data workshop in particular will benefit your research. Applications are due by 22 April 2014. For more information see: http://dhoxss.humanities.ox.ac.uk/2014/bursaries.html and for enquiries email nedimah-bursaries@it.ox.ac.uk.

Berlin, 20-21 March 2014

German Cultural Heritage on the way to the Europeana

Digital photographs, film and sound recordings, books and museum objects are no longer hidden in archives, libraries and museums, or scattered on different websites, but more accessible and used in various ways by central services and Internet portals thanks to the services offered by Europeana.

This meeting had a wide audience:
• preserving cultural heritage museums, archives , libraries and audiovisual archives
• Projects that bring together specific content for Europeana
• Projects that provide content from Europeana and network
• Projects that create the appropriate tools
• Planners and designers of Europeana and the German Digital Library (DDB)

In this framework, Europeana Space has been represented by Jennifer Müller (Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg) who delivered a presentation of the project (it will be published soon).

More information: http://www.armubi.de/tagung2014/

a very profitable meeting in Brussel

Europeana Space Scenarios: development of Pilots in the six thematic areas

Europeana Space project started its life on February with a successfull kick-off meeting in Leuven.

Every Work Packages group are developing initiatives and meetings to discuss about their aims and objectives. On 19th and 20th March, the partners involved in the WP4 had their first meeting in Brussel, hosted at the iMinds – Vrije Universiteit Brussel offices.

The Work Package number 4 is called “Europeana Space Scenarios: development of Pilots in the six thematic areas”. The object of the WP4 refers to the implementation of the Europeana Space Pilots.

In particolar, the specific objectives of WP4 are:
– to establish a common methodology for the Pilots and a framework for monitoring and validating the deliverables;
– to run experimental Pilots in the domains of Education, Research, Leisure and Tourism and exploring different scenarios of content re-use in the six thematic areas defined by Europeana Space, namely:

EuropeanaTV
Photography
Dance
Games
Open and Hybrid Publishing
Museums

– to develop six Pilot applications and to deliver demonstrable results that will be presented for further experimentation at the hackathons and incubated for exploitation by the creative industry;
– to integrate the Pilot results into the Europeana Labs.

The meeting has addressed one by one all the pilots and the specific tasks assigned to the WP and in particolar: Europeana TV Pilot (with a wide discussion leaded by the Pilot Coordinator Sound & Vision and Noterik), Photography (curated by the Pilot Coordinator KU Leuven), Games (with a presentation provided by the Serious Games Institute of Coventry University), Dance (with a presentation by the Pilot Coordinator Coventry University and IN2), Museums which includes a part under the responsibility of Eureva (for the mobile App) and a part devoted to the integration of a Toolbox targeted to museums (leaded by MuseumsMedien) and eventually the Open and Hybrid Publishing pilot (presented by Goldsmiths University of London).

Another part of the meeting was devoted to the preparation of the Deliverable 4.1 on “Pilots methodology and content sourcing”. The partners also scheduled two meetings in preparation of D4.2: the first one will focus on brainstorming on use cases (in Amsterdam in mid May) and the second meeting’s aim is to finalize D4.2. (perhaps in Brussels in mid June).

Agenda of the meeting here

For more information: info@europeana-space.eu

http://www.digitalmeetsculture.net/projects/europeana-space/

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Gothenburg, 25-26 March 2014

Chalmers Initiative Seminar on Big Data

llustrations produced by Simon Fetscher

Everywhere we look, the quantity of data is exponentially growing, fueled by the pervasive diffusion of digitalization in modern life. The fields of science, engineering, technology and even social sciences and humanities are undergoing a profound transformation to a data driven approach. We are entering an era of data-intensive knowledge discovery and analysis, and understanding and using this growing body of information will be one of the greatest scientific and engineering challenges of the 21^st century.

The two-day Chalmers Initiative Seminar on Big Data took place on Tuesday 25^th and Wednesday 26^th March 2014. The seminar offered insight into a range of research challenges related to big data in areas such as life sciences, digital humanities, engineering sciences, natural sciences, and business. The organizers have invited a group of researchers at the top of their field to come to Gothenburg and share cutting-edge works in their respective fields, helping them to better understand the diverse and complementary aspects of big data. Besides the top-level researchers invited, the seminar also drawn strong interest and participation from global hi-tech industries. Participants in the seminar were researchers from the Nordic area investing one or two full days to gain knowledge about the challenges and potentials of big data.

The DCH-RP project was represented by the Technical Coordinator Antonella Fresa. She delivered a presentation of the project with a special focus on “Big Data in the Digital Cultural Heritage”(PDF, 533 Kb). Supply and demand of large datasets for academic and scientific research is becoming a constant reality in many scientific domains, also within the digital cultural heritage. The presentation aims to discuss which is in this scenario the role of museums, libraries and archives and how they are looking at a profitable cooperation with e-Infrastructures.

Venue

Room RunAn, Chalmers Conference Centre, Campus Johanneberg, Gothenburg

Programme

Download the full programme of the meeting here

Official website: https://www.chalmers.se/en/areas-of-advance/ict/news/Pages/Big-Data.aspx

6 projects with similar aims to bring together relevant data and content for re-use by creative industries

Europeana New Projects meeting: a growing Family.

The Europeana family projects is growing with several new projects that it was recently presented at the meeting organized by Europeana Foundation at the Letterkundig Museum hosted by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, (The Hague, 13-14 March 2014).

This meeting has provided an opportunity for coordinators and relevant work package leaders of recently started Europeana-related projects to exchange information about their projects, identify overlaps between projects and discuss an agenda for co-operation.

How can we get the most from 5 projects with 127 partners totaling 3500 man months? Europeana Space, Apps4Europe, Ambrosia, Europeana Cloud, Europeana Creative and Europeana Sounds have similar aims to bring together relevant data and content for re-use by creative industries.

The programme was therefore designed to cover the following 5 topics of mutual interest:

Data/Content: the projects all have an aim to provide access to relevant and re-usable content. In order to do the meeting has established what is already available in Europeana, what the relationship is between metadata and content, what themes are relevant in the projects.

IPR: a crucial component of the offering will be the legal conditions and constraints around the content available for re-use. The meeting has established what frameworks are already in place and what the projects will develop that builds upon these frameworks.

Tech: this topic has focused on the data infrastructure (EDM), the ways to deliver (UIM) and access (Europeana Search API/Content re-use framework) the data and content in Europeana. The necessity to avoid any duplications in the development of tools and services and to set up a co-ordination group across the 5 projects to meet by Skype bi-monthly, especially useful for Creative, Space and Sounds are the key actions decided.

Distribution: all projects have as their main aim to stimulate creative re-use of digital cultural heritage. Experts had investigated the methods (hackathons, challenges, pilots, co-creation spaces, business lounges) that each project is developing and how they can learn from each other and co-operate.

Dissemination: all projects reach out to creative industries. The meeting has invited the projects to disseminate their results using all the various channels available (websites, social media etc.) and it has investigated markets, messages and branding.

Download the outcomes of the meeting (PDF, 540 Kb)

Europeana Space project has been represented by Tim Hammerton (Project Manager, Coventry University), Antonella Fresa (Technical Coordinator, Promoter srl) and Frederik Truyen (KU Leuven). Europeana Space is a 36 months project with a wide Consortium that includes 29 partners. The project objective is to increase and enhance the use and re-use of digital cultural content by creative industries, with a special focus on the use of Europeana, by delivering a range of resources and instruments to support their engagement. Tim Hammerton brought greetings from Sarah Whatley (Project coordinator) and presented the Coventry University (download the presentation, PDF, 288 Kb). Antonella Fresa has instead presented the objectives and aims of the project, by explaining what methodologies and which activities the project will use to intend to achieve them (download the presentation, PDF, 277 Kb).

Next appointment: Projects Group Assembly, September 2014 (dates to be confirmed)

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The launch of the new project about creativity took place on 6-7 February 2014

Europeana Space Kick-off meeting

Kick off meeting of the new project Europeana Space took place in Leuven, hosted in the glorious venue of the Auditorium at STUK (a place where generations of university students spent hours of their time learning and studying, now become an arts center). Beside the project members, participants in the meeting were the EU Officer Marcel Waletet and the deputy director of Europeana Foundation Harry Verwayen.

This is going to be a great project indeed: comprising 29 partners from a range of organisations and sectors that together create a rich group, the objectives of the project are for the use and reuse of Europeana and other digital content, with final aim to create new opportunities for economic growth and jobs.

The project will build three spaces to ensuring access to digital cultural content (Technical Space, a technical framework consisting of an ICT-based infrastructure and associated tools), to providing guidelines, tools and methods for managing IPR, clearing copyright and exchanging open content (Content Space) and to fostering creative entrepreneurship within an environment for exploitation of content, applications and services (Innovation Space). Integration of the three project spaces is fundamental of course and will be fostered through themed pilots, open network and exploitation of outputs for growth. There will be a broad reach of impact aimed at SMEs, the creative industries and individuals, through a rich set of user validated applications and services.

Europeana Space was very well evaluated by the EC, resulting one of the few winner projects of the call it applied to. 190 proposals were submitted in response to this call in year 2013; 61 in the Theme 2 of which 5 only awarded, among which Europeana Space.

Big expectations are put in this project, in the light of unlocking the economic potential of the digital cultural heritage, and also for fostering a true cooperation with Europeana and other creativity projects and initiatives such as Europeana Creative and the upcoming Europeana Lab. In facts, it is crucial to connect those who are doing similar things, to foster synergies and new ideas.

During the plenary meeting, presentations of the 6 pilots were delivered by the involved partners, launching interesting ideas to be developed. The overall orchestration of the pilots in the different thematic areas is a very important issue and the joint coordination of the area, by WP leader iMINDS with cooperation of the pilots coordinators and Promoter as co-leader, has already started, including a WP4 organizational meeting to be held in Brussels on 19-20 March 2014.

The six pilots are the following:

EuropeanaTV, coordinated by NISV and with the participation of Istituto Luce, Noterik, NTUA, RBB, Proton Labs
Photography, coordinated by KU Leuven with the participation of iMINDS, Promoter, EUREVA, Cyprus University of Technology, Culture Label
Dance, coordinated by Coventry University with the participation of IN2 and University of Lisbon
Games, coordinated by Coventry University
EuropeanaPublishing, coordinated by Goldsmiths with the participation of Coventry University
Museums, coordinated by Fondazione Sistema Toscana with the participation of Estonian Ministry of Culture, Museum Medien, Lithuanian Art Museums, EUREVA, SPK, Culture Label

Exploitation and demonstration actions are strictly linked to the development of the thematic pilots: the hackathons, monetisation workshops and demonstrators will be the project’s showcase to the creative industry, demonstrating how to use Europeana resources and therefore the advantages of creative re-use of on-line collections, of course keeping in the right consideration the IPR framework.

The kick-off meeting was already the place to start the organization of the first public event of Europeana Space: the appointment is in Venice, in October 2014 with a great opening conference organized by the hosting partner Università Ca’ Foscari.

Brussels, 2 April 2014

TERENA AAI Workshop

Aim of the workshop

The European Commission Information Society and Media DG, with the support of TERENA and the GÉANT project are organising a workshop to discuss federated access and more in general the vision for a global authentication and authorisation infrastructure at European level also in the context of the Horizon2020.
The workshop will offer an opportunity to learn about the key concepts of federated access and how to benefit from it. It will also bring together different EC-funded projects and communities to discuss their needs for authentication and authorisation and how their are met by the existing e-Infrastructures.
The workshop will focus on the following main topics:

Review the recommendations from the AAA study
Show cases of existing Identity Federations: how they work, what they support
Implementation of H2020 call
Coordination among different EC-funded initiatives

Pre-requisites

To ensure that the workshop is as interactive as possible, participants will be asked beforehand to describe their existing requirements in terms of support to authenticate and authorise users.

The process will be facilitated by providing a template.

Registration

The event is free of charge, however registration is required.

Draft Agenda

Start Time: 10.30
End Time: 16:30

Introduction by the EC on the aim of the workshop
Review of the AAA study: what has happened since and what not and why.
Opportunities to work on some of the recommendations in the horizon2020 calls?
Introduction to federated access (how it works, IdPs and SPs) and standardisation efforts in the AAI
Inter-federation and international collaboration for R&E: eduGAIN
Successful inter-federation showcases and the use-cases they support (SURFconext, eduGAIN)

LUNCH

Setting the AAI scene (in preparation for the panels): overview on scope and differences between eduGAIN, STORK, AAI for grid/clouds/data. Where do persistent IDs initiatives fit in the picture?
PANEL: drivers & barriers for a cross-sector European federated AAI (30 m)
PANEL: user requirements and future use-cases to be supported by an AAI infrastructure
PANEL: technology requirements (based on the use-cases provided by the audience)
Closing remarks

Now that the project is finished let's have a look at the most important outcomes

CULTURA: the main achievements

The CULTURA Virtual Research Environment

The Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for the Digital Humanities is the central component of the CULTURA project and it supports users with different levels of experience to use a variety of tools to interact with a number of cultural heritage collections. A number of different cultural collections have been incorporated into the CULTURA Virtual Research Environment, which provides a suite of useful services, integrated into a unified portal. These services are central to enhancing a user’s engagement with an archive and include faceted search tools, annotators, social network visualisation tools, and personalised recommenders. The CULTURA portal is built on top of the Drupal content management system, as it provides numerous services that, while essential to CULTURA, are not core research elements, such as user authentication and system-wide logging.

The Cultural Heritage Collections

The concepts developed within the CULTURA project have been proved through the use of two reference cultural heritage collections: The 1641 Depositions and IPSA. These two collections are particularly relevant for scholars in the humanities, respectively for historians and historians of art, and have been chosen as case studies because they cover different and complementary aspects in the research on cultural heritage. The 1641 Depositions are composed of textual documents that required the development of tools for text processing, while IPSA is mainly a collection of digital images and metadata that required the development of tools for multimedia delivery. Yet the CULTURA approach showed to be effective for both collections, with a number of tools (annotations, visualisations, narratives, personalisation) that proved to be independent on the content and thus easily extensible to additional collections. This was proved when a third collection, 1916 Rising – a set of witness statements collected by the Irish Bureau of Military History – was integrated into CULTURA.

Personalisation

Cultural heritage collections often contain a large amount of resources and support a wide community of users that have varying levels of expertise. It is vital that the various types of users who interact with collections within the CULTURA portal are supported in locating content relevant to their current interests and tasks. Hence, the application of personalisation techniques by CULTURA helps empower experienced researchers, novice researchers and the wider community to discover, interrogate, and analyse cultural heritage resources.

Entity Relationship Extraction

The Entity Relationship Recognition module is a linguistic solution, developed by the IBM team, for extracting key entities from cultural resources and understanding the relationships among them. The process is done through a UIMA pipeline for annotating textual content, using IBM LanguageWare Workbench to create custom dictionaries and parsing rules. The module was applied on the 1641 Depositions to extract persons, locations, dates, and events, as well as the relationships among them and their associated attributes.

Entity Oriented Search

EoS features Entity Relationship Data Discovery model, a data discovery extension to the classical ER conceptual model and a new logical Document Category Sets model used to represent entities and relationships within an enhanced document model. Based on this data modelling, the IBM team developed a novel approach for exploratory search over rich entity-relationship data that utilizes a unique combination of expressive yet intuitive query language, faceted search, and graph navigation.

Text Normalization

In the framework of the CULTURA project, it has been developed and implemented a new general and language independent approach to the noisy text correction problem. This issue has been addressed by designing a novel machine learning technique called REBELS and combining the correction candidates provided by REBELS with respect to their rank and some standard language features and ignores the principle complications.

Network Visualisations in the Drupal Module

The network visualisations in the Drupal module in the CULTURA portal visualise the entities, discovered in digital humanities content – be it the 1641 depositions, the IPSA collection or the 1916 statements collection. The networks take two forms – the Wheel and the Octopus. Both show the same data, but are organised in a different way. The Wheel orders all entities in circular form by grouping them by type and sorting them alphabetically. The Octopus follows an algorithm to reveal the structure of the network and interconnections and is very useful when the networks of multiple items (depositions, statements or works) are visualised at the same time. These interactive network visualisations help users navigate massive amounts of content in a fast and efficient manner. When reviewing the entity network of a single 1641 deposition, the user can easily access the network of a location, crime or a person within this deposition, and see other contexts where these were featured.

Desktop Premapper and Web Premapper

The PreMapper is a custom-built tool for applying social network analysis to digital humanities resources. The desktop version of the software was originally planned as the only tool to edit entities and relations, add new entities, arrange custom maps and export results. The web PreMapper was developed in the second half of 2013 following the second stage user trials of the desktop version. It supports the main functionalities of the desktop application: creating new entities, selecting, editing and merging entities, adding or editing entity relations, filtering.

FAST Annotation Service

The Flexible Annotation Semantic Tool (FAST) service covers many of the uses and applications of annotations ranging from metadata to full content; its flexible and modular architecture makes it suitable for annotating general Web resources as well as digital objects managed by different digital library systems; the annotation themselves can be complex multimedia compound objects, with varying degree of visibility which ranges from private to shared and public annotations and different access rights.

Content Annotation Tool

CAT is a web annotation tool developed with the goal of being able to annotate multiple types of documents and assist collaboration in the field of digital humanities. At present, CAT allows for the annotation of both text and images. The current granularity for annotation of text is at the level of the letter. For image annotations, the granularity is at the level of the pixel. This allows for extremely precise document annotation, which is very relevant to the Digital Humanities domain due to the variety of different assets that prevail.

Equalia

Evaluation is an important task in the context of digital libraries, because it reveals relevant information about the quality of the technology for all stakeholders and decision makers. The main objective of Equalia is to support the systematic and sound evaluation of digital libraries systems in line with the key phases of evaluation. For this reason, its approach is based on an evaluation model, multi-modal data collection, and automatic reports.

For further information visit http://www.cultura-strep.eu/it/outcomes.