Digital meets Culture

Through the workshop, participants gained valuable insights into the use of a 3D printer, the potential of 3D printing in general and learned about the potentials of these technologies in preserving cultural heritage

Training workshop on 3D Printing continues at INCULTUM Pilot in Greece

All images and text courtesy of The High Mountains.

Following a first training event in September 2022, in the context of INCULTUM Pilot 7 Aoos the shared river, the High Mountains Social Cooperative organised another training workshop on 3D Printing, dedicated to the printing of the waterjet, which took place on 7 and 9 of February 2023. This initiative in the context of INCULTUM highlighted the importance of using open-source technologies as innovative tools for preserving cultural heritage and promoting cultural tourism. By showcasing again, the possibilities of 3D printing, the initiative aimed to demonstrate how such technologies can contribute to the sustainable development of local communities.

The workshop brought together a diverse group of stakeholders, including local community members, employees of the Public Library of Konitsa, visitors of Konitsa, researchers, educators, and associated partners like P2PLab and Tzoumakers, and other interested parties. Through the workshop, participants gained valuable insights into the use of a 3D printer, the potential of 3D printing in general and learned about the potentials of these technologies in preserving cultural heritage. The training workshop on Culture in accordance with the natural resources of the area and 3D printing technologies was just one example of how this initiative sought to empower local communities and ensure the preservation of their cultural heritage for future generations.

The main point of the training was the idea that the use of open-source technologies can empower local communities to take an active role in the preservation of their cultural heritage. By providing access to free knowledge and open technologies, local communities can develop innovative solutions to preserve their traditions and promote their cultural identity. Additionally, these technologies can provide new opportunities for the development of sustainable tourism, allowing visitors to experience the local culture in a meaningful way. By leveraging free knowledge and open technologies, communities can create solutions tailored to their specific needs and context and take a proactive role in shaping their future and promoting a sustainable and responsible approach to tourism. These solutions can not only help to preserve cultural heritage but also promote it through cultural tourism, which can benefit the local economy.

The training workshop on 3D printing of the waterjet was just one example of the ways in which local communities can use open-source technologies to achieve these goals.

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The initiative showcases the power of collaboration and the potential of technology to make a positive impact on the environment and the local community. By sharing the knowledge gained from the initiative through Incultum’s training portal, others can learn from and build upon the work done by the local community in Konitsa. This is essential for the long-term sustainability of the initiative and the continued development of innovative solutions for preserving cultural heritage and promoting sustainable tourism.

The training and education activity will take place on Friday 14th April 2023

INCULTUM to be presented at the new Workshop on water heritage at the University of Algarve

A new workshop called “Water Path: Heritage-based solutions and community-based cultural tourism” is promoted by the University of Algarve, IN LOCO Association and INCULTUM and financed by the European Union will take place at the University of Algarve on Friday 14th April 2023.

The workshop will revolve around discussions and Round Tables on cultural and hydrological heritage, cultural tourism, and more, where INCULTUM project will be presented during the opening of the event.

The workshop is aimed at local producers, small tourism agents and guides, universoty and high school students and scholars, and anyone that has an interest on the topics.

Participation is free, but signing up is mandatory.

For more info, email at incultum@in-loco.pt

led by Matej Bel University, an interactive platform was developed to support tourist promotion, and students were trained to participate in content creation for the website

Creating content for online tourism promotion

Matej Bel University is coordinating the INCULTUM Pilot 3 Mining Treasures of Central Slovakia to improve the touristic and cultural promotion of this region, which has significant cultural and technical heritage related to its mining history.

As part of this work, a new website “Mining Treasures of Central Slovakia” was developed in the Pilot to collect and showcase information and other services to promote the area and its touristic offer: in the context of this action, a training for creating content to be used in this participatory platform was offered to the students of the University, in the period September – December 2022.

Creating the content of an interactive platform is a rather demanding process, which includes: preparation of text obtained from several sources (books, articles, websites, meetings with the community), photography and editing of photos, obtaining information about entrance, opening hours, time required, track length, restrictions, etc. Furthermore, it is necessary to obtain the exact location using Google Maps and the coordinates, which must be verified directly in the field. The content of the interactive platform is created in a participatory manner with the participation of students, representatives of partner organisations, and scientists involved in the project.

For this purpose, we created sharepoint with a clear structure that meets the needs of creating participative content on the platform. The first group of 18 students from Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica received training on creating content for the participatory platform Mining Treasures of Central Slovakia in September 2022. We divided content creation into three groups corresponding to activities at the platform and their division is based on time requirements for content creation. The first group presents the activities that are the most time-consuming; this includes museums, galleries, churches, calvaries, etc. The second group of activities presents activities with less time consumption; this includes mainly houses and bastions connected to mining heritage. ù

For both groups of activities, it is necessary to go directly to their location and do the field work like visiting heritage sites, collecting data, information, GPS coordinates and pictures. The third group of activities is related to events and creation of basic content for regular events related to mining heritage in Central Slovakia.

In the first stage of field work 18 students were involved and they created original content for a total of 54 activities mainly in area of Banská Bystrica and Špania Dolina. The next stages of field work are planned for 2023 in all mining treasures localities in central Slovakia.

Number of students trained: 18

Number of activities (items) with original content created for the platform: 54

Language: Slovak

The new project launched in January now has its own website to check for all the updates.

EUreka3D website launched today

We are enthusiast to announce the launch of the official website of EUreka3D, a project co-funded by the Digital Europe Programme of the European Union, that aims to support the digital transformation of the cultural heritage sector, by offering capacity building, training and new services to Cultural Heritage institutions, facing the challenge of advancing in the digitization effort, especially in the field of 3D access, storage and sharing.

EUreka3D is a project coordinated by Photoconsortium and involves many other partners, for museums, galleries, libraries, archives and archaeological sites to review and modernise their internal processes from digital capture to end-user access and re-use, and it has the following five main objectives:

To design and assess a range of new services and tools for CH digital transformation.
To provide new contents in Europeana.
To contribute to the capacity building of European CHIs.
To outreach the widest community of CHIs, with particular regard to small institutions.
To guarantee the highest quality of results, in terms of project’s outcomes and in relation to the compliance with Europeana and the future Data Space for Cultural Heritage.

In order to reach these objectives, EUreka3D project will engage a variety of CHIs in a piloting action that will:

Set-up dedicated cloud-based services for the management and preservation of cultural contents in a safe and IP-mindful environment
Generate high-quality 3D digitization of selected items and their related para-/metadata ready to be harvested to Europeana
Perform aggregation of the new contents to the Europeana platform and exemplification of few cases for use and re-use in unique areas such as Education.

EUreka 3D partners:

EUreka 3D website: https://eureka3d.eu/

Find EUreka3D also on Twitter.

Hosted by Uppsala University, the plenary meeting also includes a visit to Uppsala and to Roslagen (Öregrund)

INCULTUM third project meeting

All photos in this blog courtesy of Uppsala University, copyright Mikael Gidhagen.

On 27 and 28 April 2023, the third general assembly of INCULTUM takes place in Sweden, hosted by partner Uppsala University, also leading the INCULTUM Pilot 10 Escape into the Archipelago Landscape. This meeting marks the conclusion of the project’s second year, and it will be dedicated to a global internal review of the project, carefully analysing the progress and challenges in each Work Package, as reviewed with the various activity leaders.

A special focus on Innovation will be dedicated to continue the discussions, exchanges and synergies among the partners and the Pilots in particular, who developed interesting innovation routes in their locations. Guided by the INCULTUM Innovation Manager dr. Vincent Guichard from Bibracte, this session will review the work done so far in fostering promotion of the territories by participative approaches of the local communities and by new tools and actions deployed by the Pilots.

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Other topics in focus are the Impact for the Piloting actions and the extensive work ongoing to translate the experience of the various Pilots into Training Materials targeted to local communities, students, stakeholders and policy makers, collected into the INCULTUM Training Portal.

Agenda of the meeting (PDF)

Close to the conclusion of the project's second year, evidence of innovation in the local strategies for territorial promotion is being collected and shared

Innovation in the INCULTUM Pilots: sharing good practices and success stories

The work done by each of the 10 Pilot cases in the INCULTUM project shows (sometimes big) differences and specifities, nevertheless all the Pilots are aiming at developing new sustainable and collaborative strategies for local promotion of various areas, which also generate an effort in training and supporting actions to local stakeholders and a variety of innovations in rural and marginal territories in Europe.

The coordination for fostering synergies and common strategies in innovation is important to facilitate Pilots’ progress and to identify solutions to common challenges. In this sense, transversality with the INCULTUM innovation manager (dr. Vincent Guichard, Bibracte) is being promoted among partners. A series of innovation factsheets is currently being developed to disseminate the work done by each Pilot for other stakeholders to take inspiration from.

All the information about the work done by the Pilots is now available in the new section “Innovation” available in the project’s website. The section currently includes:

access to the Midterm interim report of the INCULTUM Pilots progress and innovation
summary of the 10 innovation areas identified and deployed by the Pilots
innovation factsheet about the strategies deployed in Bibracte (Pilot 6 “Ancient Paths into the Future”)

More updates are expected with additonal learning and descriptive material developed by each Pilot.

View the Innovation section here: https://incultum.eu/innovation/

On 4-5 April 2023, the Europeana ecosystem met in the twice-a-year gathering to hear and discuss the latest news of digital cultural heritage and Europeana initiatives

EUreka3D presented at Europeana Aggregators Forum

EUreka3D is a project funded by the Digital Europe Programme of the European Union, to support the digital transformation of the cultural heritage sector, by offering capacity building and training, and new services, to Cultural Heritage Institutions facing the challenge of advancing in the digitization effort, especially in 3D.

The project started in January 2023 was presented to colleague institutions, partners and Europeana aggregators, by the Project Coordinator Antonella Fresa, vice president of Photoconsortium, on the occasion of the Spring edition of the Europeana Aggregators Forum, the meeting that gathers all the partners and various stakeholders in the Europeana initiatives.

EUreka3D was specifically part of a session dedicated to 3D in Europeana, moderated by Marie-Véronique Leroi (chair of the Europeana Aggregators Forum Steering Group) and preparing for the key EU conference “Why 3D matters” on 18 April 2023, realized under the Swedish Presidency and fully dedicated to 3D digitization and why it is important for culture.

View and download the presentation (PDF, 351 Kb)

The report presents 15 European digital museum projects by 12 European countries.

A new report published by NEMO, concerning digital learning and education in museums

The Network of European Museum Organisation, NEMO, has presented a new report, “Digital learning and education in museums – Innovative approaches and insights”. The report presents 15 European digital museum projects and offers recommendations for fostering digital engagement, learning and education in the post-pandemic cultural heritage sector.

The 15 projects were submitted by 12 European countries that were developed for remote museum audiences from early 2020 to 2022. It highlights various formats of digital engagement and offers insights and recommendations from museum professionals as well as tech experts, and can be used as an inspiration for professionals looking for new ideas and formats for digital engagement with virtual visitors and reaching new audiences.

The report, published by the NEMO Working Group LEM – The Learning Museum, investigates digital learning in a broad sense and does not solely focus on formal educational projects, or on digital initiatives that are being developed from the beginning with the goal of delivering learning outcomes (formal and non-formal learning). The report covers the following themes:

Educational opportunities associated with the digitisation of museum collections and archives, as well as open access to museum data.
Creative interactions with digitised collection, such as citizen co-curation.
Social media and the expansion of museums into virtual environments and Extended Reality.
Digital communication and chatbots.
Digital games and playful learning.
Sustainable practices to profit from digital innovations.

To learn more about the report, follow this link.

Furthermore, experts will discuss the report and exchange on museums, Extended Reality, the Metaverse and AI Chatbots during a webinar, which will be held on 27 April from 14:00-15:00 CEST. The main author Kristina Barekyan has invited three of the experts interviewed for the NEMO report to discuss the opportunities and challenges of working on the cutting edge of technology, digital cultural heritage and museum education, and the launch webinar of the NEMO report is part of the ALL DIGITAL Weeks and co-hosted by NEMO and Europeana. Although the participation is free, registration is mandatory.

CitizenHeritage multiplier event - Leuven, 19th May 2023

CitizenHeritage: can citizen science contribute to the Cultural Heritage challenges of today?

Hosted by KU Leuven and including hybrid and in-person activities, this multiplier event of the CitizenHeritage project takes place at the Irish College in Leuven. A first part will be dedicated to frontal presentations from CitizenHeritage partners to share with the audience recent research on participatory approaches in cultural heritage and stories from the project’s journey so far.

A Workshop for students and other participants will follow in the afternoon.

Statue of Rembrecht Dodoens, famous physician and botanist in the 16th century, in the botanic garden of Leuven. Botanical gardens are traditional places to share scientific insights with the general public. Ph. by Fred Truyen.

Agenda and registration link: https://www.citizenheritage.eu/multiplier-events/multiplier-event-leuven-19-may-2023/

Schedule 19th May 2023:

10.00-12.00 Conference
13.00-17.00 Workshop
17.00-18.30 Transnational project meeting (Citizen Heritage partners only)

The training course is open to anyone interested and is done in collaboration with the experts of “OFFICINA STUDI MEDIEVALI” (Office of Medieval Studies).

Training activities about Islamic heritage in Sicily – INCULTUM Pilot

The INCULTUM Pilot set in Sicily is coordinated by the GAL Elimos, and is organizing a trainign action dedicated to share and enhance the islamic heritage in the territory of Mounts of Trapani.

The Sicilian GAL (Local Action Group) launched a new training course open to anyone interested, about the “Islamic itinerary”. The aim is to increase and share knowledge about the Islamic culture and its importance in Sicily. The training course will be done in collaboration with the experts of “OFFICINA STUDI MEDIEVALI” (Office of Medieval Studies).

The acquired knowledge will be the perfect base for future collaboration with local stakeholders and for more vocational trainings of tourism guides that are under development in the INCULTUM Pilot, with the specific aim of enhancing and promoting an “Islamic Itinerary” that unfolds across 3 municipalities in the area.