Digital meets Culture

event held at the Russian State Library (Moscow, the Russian Federation) in November 2013

EVA Moscow, good dissemination for EuropeanaPhotography

The EVA Moscow event is of course part of the EVA conference series, and the 2013 edition was a real success, with over 500 attendants, all very interested and motivated.

This conference was part of the Russian State Library cultural heritage event’s week held on 19–22 November 2013 the Russian State Library (Moscow, the Russian Federation) hosted the joint scientific and practical conference that included:

19-21 November 2013: 15th Annual international conference «EVA 2013 Moscow, Information society, culture, education». The theme of the conference – «Libraries and museums in digital environment: dialogue and cooperation».

22 November 2013: 12th International scientific and practical conference «Digital century of culture».

EuropeanaPhotography was presented by Andrea de Polo of Fondazione Alinari with a 20 minutes speech (the presentations is available here) and flyers. The presentation included examples on search images and explained the process for ingesting local databases to the Europeana Photography MINT tool that allows transformation in the Europeana Data Model and multilingual enrichment of the metadata, to be ready for ingestion in Europeana portal www.europeana.eu. Moreover, possible cooperation with local Institutions was deeply discussed. Several people asked questions, mainly about how their Institution can join the project and how Russian organizations can be involved.

Website of EVA Moscow 2013: https://eva.rsl.ru/en

Just released a new european study commissioned by the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market

The citizens’ perception of Intellectual Property and its infringements

“European Citizens and Intellectual Property: Perception, Awareness and Behaviour” is the first EU wide study which provides a comprehensive assessment of citizens’ perceptions of Intellectual Property (IP) and its infringements, both from a qualitative and quantitative point of view. The study was commissioned by the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM) acting through the European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights.

As expressed in the document foreword “This survey provides an analysis of how IP is perceived at EU citizen level. It is launched at a time when IP has never been so present in the day-to-day lives of European citizens. Intellectual property rights cover everything from the food people eat, to the clothes they wear, the cars they drive and the music they listen to. And through the explosion in digital content and technology over the past decade, people are now closer to IP than ever before.”

Read a summary on the EuropeanaPhotography IPR Blog, where the full report is also available for download, and the experts can reply any inquiry.

Participation is virtually via live streaming or physically at Trinity college Dublin - 16th January 2014

CULTURA Results Transfer Workshop

Challenges in Digital Humanities Research Environments: the CULTURA Approach

Supporting researchers in exploring and examining digitised artefacts presents many challenges in terms of understanding each researcher’s needs, performing appropriate manipulation of and uplift from content, and in presenting a suite of useful research tools to facilitate exploration.

This workshop will delve into these Digital Humanities challenges by examining the approaches taken in the CULTURA project (cultura-project.eu) to tackle the issues of:

Engaging with End Users through Participatory Design and Evaluation
Maintaining Data Fidelity whilst preparing it for Deep Exploration
Combining a suite of tools into a Holistic Personalised Environment to support researchers

This virtual/physical workshop will use CULTURA as a case study to drive discussion by presenting demonstrations and results from the project. The outputs of this workshop will be captured and placed online.

Date: 16^th January 2014

Time: 13:00 – 16:00 GMT

Participation:

Virtually – via live streaming and audience feedback channels (limited to 100 participants).
Physically – at Trinity College, Dublin (limited to 30 participants).

http://www.cultura-strep.eu/workshop2014

The event was held in Graz, Austria, on November 22, 2013.

Equalia Presentation at the conference “Culturelles Erbe in der Cloud”

The Equalia evaluation service was presented by Alexander Nussbaumer at the conference “Culturelles Erbe in der Cloud” (Cultural Heritage in the Cloud) in Graz, Austria, on November 22, 2013.

This event was organised the Center for Information Modelling in the Humanities of the University of Graz together with Europeana Local Austria.

Equalia was presented as poster in the context of the CULTURA project and its digital libraries 1641 Depositions and IPSA Collection. An explanation of the CULTURA project and Equalia was given to the whole conference audience in a poster presentation session and in conversations with individual participants in the poster exhibition area.

EAGLE joins Pelagios for linking together the ancient places through the documents that refer to them

The Eagle
flies with Pelagios

EAGLE (the Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy) joins Pelagios.

EAGLE is a Best-Practice Network (BPN), co-funded through the ICT-Policy Support Programme of the European Commission and aimed at creating a new online archive for epigraphy in Europe. As part of Europeana’s multi-lingual online collection of millions of digitised items (from European museums, libraries, archives and multi-media collections) EAGLE will link and connect, using Linked Open Data (LOD) best practice, thousands of inscriptions, photos of inscriptions and related contextual items in a single readily-searchable platform. The project will make available the vast majority of surviving inscriptions from the Greco-Roman world, complete with the essential information about them and, for all the most important, one or more translations.

PELAGIOS stands for “Pelagios: Enable Linked Ancient Geodata In Open Systems”. It is a collective of projects connected by a shared vision – most eloquently described in Tom Elliott’s article ‘Digital Geography and Classics’ – of a world in which the geography of the past is every bit as interconnected, interactive and interesting as the present. Its aim is to help introduce Linked Open Data (LOD) goodness into online resources that refer to places in the historic past.

Pelagios also means “of the sea”(and sea was the superhighway of the pre-industrial world): an appropriate metaphor for a digital resource that will connect references to ancient places.

By joining Pelagios, EAGLE will be able to connect with other major online projects about the Ancient World and make its data accessible to other aggregator and LOD projects to increase the quality, usability and accessibility of data provided by the BPN. Moreover, working with the Pelagios team, EAGLE looks forward to taking linked ancient world data one step further in terms of networking and interoperability and to helping facilitate research in all disciplines of the field, digital or otherwise.

For more information:

http://pelagios-project.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-eagle-flies-with-pelagios.html

http://pelagios-project.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-nesting-of-eagle-within-pelagios.html

an intuitive tool to support a very ambitious 3D modelling program

The Smithsonian x3D Explorer launched!

The Smithsonian Museums, in cooperation with Autodesk, recently launched a new program and big effort to create 3D renderings of its vast collections of more than 137 million objects. The Smithsonian’s Digitization Program Office, featuring the most advanced 3D scanning and rendering technologies, has developed 3D models from its holdings, a miscellaneous selection including whale fossils, Abraham Lincoln’s head, the Wright Brothers’ flyer, Amelia Earhart’s flight suit, David Livingstone’s gun and many others.

“With only 1% of collections on display in Smithsonian museum galleries, digitization affords the opportunity to bring the remaining 99% of the collection into the virtual light.” said Günter Waibel, Director of the Digitization Program Office. “All of these digital assets become the infrastructure which will allow not just the Smithsonian, but the world at large to tell new stories about the familiar, as well as the unfamiliar, treasures in these collections.”

The Collection includes digital objects derived from different applications of 3D capture and printing, now available online for interaction with the public, thanks to a portal and a tool specifically designed.

The Smithsonian x3D Explorer allows users to interact with the digital objects in a web browser, to access, view and manipulate these objects, and eventually to print them with a in-house 3D printer, as the raw 3D data from the objects will be made available for downloading for personal and non-commercial use.

The Collection is available here: http://3d.si.edu/browser

The explorer contains a variety of tools for examining these objects: users can to rotate the objects, take accurate measurements between points and adjust color and lighting. The explorer also has a storytelling feature, which allows Smithsonian curators and educators to create guided tours of the models.

The potential in terms of research, accessibility and education is of course very much evident, and this is “another brick in the wall” as for the open data and open access movement. Teachers and other educators can use the data to create 3D models of these objects for use in their classrooms, and to interact with Smithsonian museum objects in new ways.

In particular on the side of education, these 3D objects offer an excellent opportunity to excite and engage students in a valuable, interdisciplinary education experience. To help introducing 3D and its possibilities in schools, Smithsonian educators are creating other new resources, currently being tested in schools across the US, and a blog to exchange experience will be online soon.

The conference was the occasion to launch and showcase the first set of EUDAT services.

EUDAT 2013 conference in Rome

EUDAT project provides an integrated solution for finding, sharing, storing, replicating, staging & computing primary and secondary research data, deployed thanks to different services.

digitalmeetsculture was media partner of this important event, the EUDAT 2nd conference held on 28-30 Oct 2013 in Rome, that saw the participation of international speakers discussing the new challenges for research in the big data era. Medicine and Natural sciences, including astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth sciences and physics, and, more recently, the Social Science and Humanities and in particular the Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) sector are facing an increasing need for new services and data management solutions.

For this reason, the conference was the ideal setting to showcase the services developed withing the EUDAT project, and outline the roll out phase as well as to offer hands-on training. Discussions on the new set of EUDAT services were also a feature of the conference with semantic annotation, dynamic data & workflows addressed, a natural follow on to the Working Group discussions that were held in Barcelona in Sept. 2013.

EUDAT first set of data services currently includes:

B2FIND : a simple and user-friendly way to find and access research data collections stored in EUDAT data centers

B2SAFE : a robust, safe and highly available replication service allowing community and departmental repositories to replicate their research data

B2STAGE : a reliable, efficient, easy-to-use service to ship large amounts of research data between EUDAT storage resources and workspace areas of high-performance computing systems.

B2SHARE : a user-friendly, reliable & trustworthy way for researchers & communities to store and share their research data.

EUDAT’s approach to building services is based on three fundamental elements:

Capturing community requirements
Appraisal of technologies and service candidates
Operation of the collaborative infrastructure

These services imply and demand data access and re-use policies as well as sustainability plans and cost & funding models, not to forget public-private-partnerships and interoperability all addressed during the conference.

Cultural Heritage and Social Sciences & Humanities featured strongly in this year’s conference with two dedicated workshops: Social Science and Humanities (SSH) tackle the Big Data challenge and Digital Preservation of Cultural Data.
The former saw the presentation of several case studies, demonstrating what can be achieved with big data in these fields: from new archaeological methods to understanding historical census data, and from handling audio-visual data to understanding works of art.

The latter brought together projects and initiatives working world-wide in the domain of the digital preservation of digital cultural heritage, digital arts, digital performances and digital humanities, to identify common goals and strategic approaches, find synergies, and discuss opportunities for cooperation, starting from concrete use cases. Several services were presented during the workshop: EUDAT services to safely store and preserve data, SCIDIP-ES tools for managing provenance and authenticity, SCAPE scalability platform, APARSEN registry of services.

They will all be tested in the second run of the Proof of Concepts that will be conducted by DCH-RP, the project who organised the workshop, generating a very concrete impact of the encounter. Finally, new emerging issues have been investigated, such as the possibility for the memory institutions to check the conformance of their digital archives implemented in the most common file formats. This is a key topic in the digital preservation workflow and it will be the subject matter of the new PREFORMA Pre-Commercial Procurement project.

the coordinator was invited at the Photo Archive Days, on 4th and 5th November 2013

Europeana Photography disseminated in Finland

The project coordinator prof. Fred Truyen and his assistant Sofie Taes were invited for a lecture about EuropeanaPhotography at the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki, during the Photo Archives Days.

The meeting room at National Museum of Finland. Photo Virve Laustela / SVM

The event was a very good occasion for disseminating EuropeanaPhotography project, and also Europeana, the European digital library, to national and international colleagues and curators, all of them involved and interested in the photo heritage.

Finland is not represented (… yet!) in the EuropeanaPhotography consortium but the event was useful to start a dialogue and relationships with representatives from the Finnish archives and museums.

Also, a nice visit to the Finnish Museum of Photography allowed the participants to enjoy a beautiful collection of postcard art.

Read a wider report of the mission in the blog Digital Culture by Fred Truyen

The Senior Curator at National Council of Antiquites Ismo Malinen, the director of Finnish Museum of Photography Elina Heikka, Anna Boman from Swedish National Heritage Board and Frederik Truyen. Photo: Virve Laustela / SVM

Specialists from all over Europe shared and discussed their expertise about photographic collections.

The CO-MA conference, interesting event in Brussels

by Nacha Van Steen

The 31st of October 2013, Brussels’ IRPA (Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage) hosted a 1-day conference on issues in the management of photographic collections: CO-MA.

This day brought together specialists from all over Europe to share and discuss their expertise on issues regarding collection management, care and conservation of collections, and digitization and access to photographic collections.

The collection management portion of the day, which featured Johan Swinnen from VUB and Hilke Arijs from IRPA as keynote speakers, looked more closely into the conservation of images, the value assessment and categorisation related to the decision making process of conservation, and the consequences of historical archival methods on collections and accessibility. The speakers presented the obstacles with which they had been confronted in the past during the conservation of their colelctions, and the best practices they developed from these experiences.

Session 2, with keynote speaker Herman Maes, focused on the care and conservation of images and collections as a whole, confronted with ecological and economical perspectives. It went deeper in on the issue of conservation of photographical images during exhibitions, and presented research into the conservation of cellulose acetate negatives. This session addressed very practical issues with which collection managers are confronted today, and will have to address in the future as well.

The final session, with keynote Juozas Markauskas, focused on the digitization and creative reuse of photographic content, and looked to the future of digital accessibility and preservation of collections. This session was followed with a poster session highlighting some practical research and results in the marking of photography, storage of digital data, and digitization and dissemination techniques.

A small exhibition of IRPA’s photographic collection accompanied the conference.

Website of the conference: http://org.kikirpa.be/coma2013/

KIK IRPA website’s news

Download the booklet of the abstracts: http://org.kikirpa.be/coma2013/Abstractbooklet_web.pdf

About the author:

Dr. Nacha Van Steen holds a Masters degree in Art Science from Ghent University, Belgium. She is project manager for KMKG in several EU projects. Attending this event, she took the occasion for disseminating EuropeanaPhotography project.

Padua, 11-12 December 2013

AIUCD annual conference on digital humanities

The AIUCD (Associazione Italiana per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale) annual conference, devoted to any aspect of the digital humanities, was held in Padua on 11-12 December 2013. It particularly focused on interdisciplinary work and new developments in the field and related to some specific themes:

Interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity
Legal and economyc issues
Tools and collaborative methodologies
Measurement and impact of collaborative methodologies
Sharing and collaboration methods and approaches
Cultural institutions and collaborative facilities
Infrastructures and digital libraries as collaborative environments
Data, resources, and technologies sharing.

The programme of the conference is available here in the official website.

All the submitted abstracts for which the primary author was a Master or PhD student were eligible for the AIUCD 2013 Best Student Abstract Award.

The prize consisted in a cash prize of € 200,00 and in the possibility of the full paper publication on the AIUCD 2013 post-proceedings volume.

AIUCD is sponsored by the Department of Information Engineering of University of Padua and by CULTURA, EU Project for the development of next generation adaptive systems aimed at increasing and enhancing the use of digital humanities collections.