Digital meets Culture

Berlin, 15-16 May 2017

PDF Days Europe 2017

After the success of the 2016 edition, the PDF Days Europe 2017 will be held in Berlin again, giving visitors plenty of opportunity to learn about the applications and benefits of PDF, PDF/A, PDF/UA and more.

Across two days, you’ll be able to choose from German- and English- language presentations, user reports and workshops in order to assemble your own personal package of PDF knowledge.

Highlights of the 2017 edition include:

The future of PDF: PDF 2.0 and new initiatives
PDF/A: Archiving solutions
ZUGFeRD: E-invoicing solutions based on PDF/A
PDF/UA: Solutions for accessible documents
PDF/VT: Solutions for personalised printing
PDF/X: Pre-press solutions

Highlights from the 2016 edition

Over 150 attendees came to Berlin for the two-day conference more than ever before. With over 50 presentations, the conference programme covered all PDF standards, giving visitors plenty of opportunity to learn about the applications and benefits of PDF, PDF/A, PDF/UA and more. The key message throughout the event was that the PDF format has become a critical component of every business, forming the fundamental basis of a wide range of business processes. This was underscored by the user presentations, the specialist talks from experts from around the world, and the podium discussions at the event.

For further information visit https://www.pdfa.org/pdf-days-europe-sees-record-number-of-attendees/.

Slide decks and video recordings of the PDF Days Europe 2016 are available at https://www.pdfa.org/slide-decks-and-video-recordings-of-the-pdf-days-europe-2016/.

About the PDF Association

First established as the PDF/A Competence Center in 2006, today, the PDF Association is an international organization promoting awareness and adoption of open standards in digital document applications using PDF technology.

The association facilitates education, networking and communication, and the sharing of expertise and experience with interested parties worldwide. The current membership includes over 100 enterprises and numerous individual subject-matter experts from more than 20 countries.

The management board includes industry leaders from Adlib Information Systems Inc., Adobe Systems Inc., callas software GmbH, Datalogics Inc., DocuSign Inc., intarsys consulting GmbH, levigo solutions GmbH, LuraTech Europe GmbH, Nitro Software Inc. and Satz-Rechen-Zentrum (SRZ). The associations chairman is Olaf Drümmer, CEO of callas software GmbH. Peter Duff, President and CEO of Adlib Software, is the associations vice-chairman.

Riga, 15-18 May 2017

Archiving Conference 2017

Since the first meeting in 2004, Archiving has continued to offer a unique opportunity for imaging scientists and those working in the cultural heritage community (curators, archivists, librarians, etc.), as well as in government, industry, and academia, to come together to discuss the most pressing issues related to the digital preservation and stewardship of hardcopy, audio, and video.

The conference presents the latest research results on digitization and curation, provides a forum to explore new strategies and policies, and reports on successful projects that can serve as benchmarks in the field.

Archiving 2017 is a blend of short courses, invited focal papers, keynote talks, and peer-reviewed oral and interactive display presentations, offering attendees a unique opportunity for gaining and exchanging knowledge and building networks among professionals.

PREFORMA has been contacted to organise a series of courses on preservation formats and assessment of file formats. These courses, which are short workshop-like sessions with a mix of theory and practical hands-on exercises, will be organised on May 15, 2017.

For more information visit the Conference website.

Amsterdam, 28-30 May 2017

The Reel Thing

Curated by Grover Crisp and Michael Friend, The Reel Thing addresses current thinking and most advanced practical examples of progress in the field of preservation, restoration and media conservation.

A special 40th edition of the ongoing technical symposium will take place in Amsterdam over the course of three days, May 28 – 30, 2017, in conjunction with the EYE International Conference 2017.

The event, organised in cooperation with with EYE Filmmuseum Amsterdam and the Association of Moving Image Archivists, will be composed of a three-day exploration of technologies for preservation and restoration, including an opening night reception and screenings of restored films.

As with all editions of The Reel Thing, this special edition will focus on the wide range of critical issues facing archivists, technicians, asset managers and curators of image and sound in the current media/digital landscape. Problems and solutions involving digital creation workflows (2K/4K/6K/8K), data storage access and recovery, image scanning and recording, image resolution metrics, traditional video and audio preservation and restoration issues are topics of interest. Of particular interest are the preservation and archiving issues surrounding Digital Intermediate and Digital Production workflows for motion pictures and television/streaming.

For further information please visit the Conference website.

Montreal, Canada, 8-11 August, 2017

Digital Humanities 2017

Co-organised by McGill University and the Université de Montréal, DH2017 will take place August 8-11, 2017 in downtown Montréal, Canada on the campus of McGill University. This is the premiere annual conference of the international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). The theme of DH2017 is “Access/Accès”.

About ADHO

The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) is an umbrella organisation whose goals are to promote and support digital research and teaching across arts and humanities disciplines, drawing together humanists engaged in digital and computer-assisted research, teaching, creation, dissemination, and beyond, in all areas reflected by its diverse membership. ADHO supports initiatives for publication, presentation, collaboration, and training; recognises and supports excellence in these endeavours; and acts as an community-based consultative and advisory force. In doing so, ADHO embraces and coordinates activity across its constituent organisations: the European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH, founded in 1973 as the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing), the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH, founded in 1978), the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities / Société canadienne des humanités numériques (CSDH/SCHN, founded in 1986 as the Consortium for Computers in the Humanities / Consortium pour ordinateurs en sciences humaines), centerNet, the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH), and the Japanese Association for Digital Humanites (JADH).

Members in ADHO societies are those at the forefront of areas such as textual analysis, electronic publication, document encoding, textual studies and theory, new media studies and multimedia, digital libraries, applied augmented reality, interactive gaming, and beyond. We are researchers and lecturers in humanities computing and in academic departments such as English, History, French, Modern Languages, Philosophy, Theatre, Music, Computer Science, and Visual Arts. We are resource specialists working in libraries, archival centres, and with humanities computing groups. We are academic administrators, and members of the private and public sectors. We are independent scholars, students, graduate students, and research assistants. We are from countries in every hemisphere.

Wrocław, 19-25 August 2017

WLIC 2017 IFLA World Library and Information Congress

The IFLA World Library and Information Congress is the international flagship professional and trade event for the library and information services sector.

It brings together over 3,500 participants from more than 120 countries, sets the international agenda for the profession and offers opportunities for networking and professional development to all delegates.

The 83rd World Library and Information Congress will take place in Wrocław, Poland, from 19-25 August 2017.

“Libraries. Solidarity. Society.“ A straightforward yet powerful message that resonates with a singular truth in a country where the most powerful union movement of the past century was born and went on to change the face of history. A message from a robust library community that managed not only to survive the challenges of the transformation, but excelled and flourished in the new social and political reality. And now the network of our country‘s information providers is ready to bring you the most exciting and exceptional congress experience.

Special attention will be posed to the long-term preservation of digitised and born digital materials, which poses many challenges for heritage professionals globally, spanning from policy requirements to constantly changing technology infrastructures. Considering both, digitised and born digital materials, IFLA 2017 will explore practical examples of how institutions respond to these challenges. The Conference will highlight challenges and critical aspects, and identify case studies which provide solutions to ensure our digital heritage will survive for future generations and we avoid digital amnesia.

For further information visit the Conference website.

An article presenting DCH-RP appeared in the December 2013 edition of the SCAPE Newsletter

DCH-RP features in SCAPE Newsletter

The SCAPE project – Scalable Preservation Environments – just released the December 2013 edition of their newsletter.

DCH-RP features in this newsletter with an article presenting the project, its main objectives and the first outcomes.

The other topics included in the newsletter are:

The results of the last SCAPE Training Events
The description of some of the tools under development: Scout and ToMaR
An interview with Zeynep PEHLIVAN from University Pierre and Marie Curie (UPMC)
The programme of the next SCAPE Demonstrations
The outcomes of the SCAPE Developers Workshop
The upcoming events

Click here to view the newsletter online.

Berlin, 30 August - 1 September 2017

Digital Cultural Heritage 2017

The DCH2017 International Conference will take place in Berlin, at the National Library, on August 30 – September 01, 2017.

The conference is organized by CODATA-Germany, the German National Committee for CODATA, Committee on Data for Science and Technology of the International Council for Science (ICSU), in cooperation with:

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Kartographie
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Map Department
DHN, Digital Heritage in the Nordic Countries
UNGEGN, United Nations Group of Experts on Geographic Names
Associazione per L’Informatica Umanistica e La Cultura Digitale
Forschungszentrum Deutscher Sprachatlas
UiO, Universitetet i Oslo
VUGTK, Czech Research Institute of Geodesy, Topography and Cartography
Digital meets Culture, Portal on Digital Cultural heritage
TOPOI, Excellence Cluster on the Formation and Transformation of Space and Knowledge in Ancient Civilizations

Erik Buelinckx from the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA), one of the memory institutions participating as procurers in the PREFORMA project, will deliver a presentation on Friday 1 September entitled “A small archive with a big collection! Now what? PREFORMA’s open source digital preservation tools on the rescue”.

The conference is open for contributions that cover technical challenges as well as strategic guidance. Key messages relating to the impact of new technologies and processes on cultural heritage are especially welcome.

Special aims of this 2017 edition are:

raise awareness in Society, Science, and Technology fields about importance of the cultural dimensions and the growing potential of Digital Cultural Heritage
promote innovative content analysis from cross-organizational interoperability of digital humanities databases and XML methods, techniques, and approaches
indicate on the central role of spatial concepts enabling synergy for knowledge generation from massive granular digital cultural heritage content
create innovative cross-disciplines / cross sectors partnerships facilitate intercultural and interdisciplinary dialogue
elaborate roles and interest of information society

Berlin, 17-22 September 2017

IASA 2017 Annual Conference

The International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) was established in 1969 in Amsterdam to function as a medium for international co-operation between archives that preserve recorded sound and audiovisual documents.

IASA has members from 70 countries representing a broad palette of audiovisual archives and personal interests which are distinguished by their focus on particular subjects and areas, eg archives for all sorts of musical recordings, historic, literary, folkloric and ethnological sound documents, theatre productions and oral history interviews, bio-acoustics, environmental and medical sounds, linguistic and dialect recordings, as well as recordings for forensic purposes.

The International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) 48th Annual Conference will be hosted on 17-22 September 2017 by the Ethnological Museum in Berlin.

IASA invites everyone engaged in or curious about the discovery, care, preservation and dissemination of our sound and audiovisual heritage, to explore the intersection of workflows and archival formats as manifest in new ways of thinking about, new ways of preserving and new ways of presenting our objects in the digital era.

IASA 2017 Conference theme is “Integration and Innovation: Bringing Workflows and Formats Together in the Digital Era”.

Jérôme Martinez, President of MediaArea, and David Rice will provide a workshop on that covers the basics of audiovisual formats specifications, discusses the challenges in the design of an audiovisual conformance checker, and demonstrates several of MediaConch’s key features.

For further information about the MediaConch workshop visit https://iasa2017annualconference.sched.com/event/Allk.

For further details about the Conference visit the Conference website.

For more information about IASA visit www.iasa-web.org.

Padua, 11-12 December 2013

DiXiT presentation at 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.

In the framework of the conference, Dr Domenico Fiormonte from Università di Roma ‘La Sapienza’ – DigiLab has attended the meeting as DiXiT representative and took an introduction to the project.

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.

EUDAT news bullettin, December 2013 edition

What’s on the agenda for EUDAT in 2014?

As the calendar year comes to a close, EUDAT is embarking on its third year with an even stronger focus on communities, services (both existing and new), training and collaboration. As part of its continuous drive to extend its network on both the community and geographical levels, EUDAT welcomes three new Associated Partners on board: the Greek Research and Technology Network (GRNET), the Distributed Research Infrastructure for Hydro-Meteorology (DRIHM) and the Data Infrastructure for Chemical Safety (diXa).

Listening to the requirements of research communities and scientists is the foundation upon which EUDAT is built, and agile interaction has always been part of its core activity. EUDAT has adopted different ways to listen to communities and users, and to involve domain experts in defining its new building blocks and services.

To intensify this interaction in specific areas of interest, EUDAT has adopted the concept of Working Groups from the DataONE project as a method to bring domain experts, EUDAT community representatives and EUDAT technologists together to discuss identified fields of interest, where the exact setup of a concrete service is not yet fully clear. Currently four service areas are being taken forward – Semantics, Dynamic Data, Workflows and Data Access and Reuse Policies. These four areas were the focus of dedicated working group meetings in September 2013 and a specific track at EUDAT’s 2nd Conference in October 2013. Detailed reports on the discussions and conclusions are available on the working groups section of EUDAT website.

During the last quarter of 2013, EUDAT invited the user community to provide input to the next set of services to be designed. We are grateful to the 123 people from over 17 countries who completed the survey, providing interesting and useful insight into community needs and requirements – see the preliminary results on the website.

EUDAT next appointments: where can you meet us next year?

In January you’ll find us with CLARIN at 7th Conference on Global WordNet, February takes us to Edinburgh with PRACE for the Data Staging and Data Movement Training, while in March we’ll be running training in Dublin at the RDA Third Plenary Meeting, then we go south to Greece in April for ICRI2014 and in May we’ll be organising a workshop at the EGI Community Forum 2014 in Helsinki.