Digital meets Culture

a big event that EuropeanaPhotography could not miss to attend

Europeana Annual General Meeting 2013

The Europeana Network Annual General Meeting (AGM) is a key event for Europeana and its Network. It provides all partners with the opportunity to share experiences and discuss and develop ideas around specific areas of mutual relevance and interest.

It was recently held on 2 December 2013 in Rotterdam, and beside a strong focus on the Europeana Business Plan 2014 and Horizon2020, it was as usual the perfect occasion for meeting other projects’ representatives, sharing achievements and expertise, discussing possible future strategies and developing new partnerships.

EuropeanaPhotography was of course present in this important event: it was attended by the Technical Coordinator Antonella Fresa, who was also taking part as full member in the Public-Private Partnership task force session, Sofie Taes of KU Leuven and Nacha Van Steen of KMKG.

In the framework of the event, the interesting workshop organized by Europeana Creative “Bridging the gap with Creative Industries” and the DISH conference were also attended by the EuropeanaPhotography team.

Beside these networking and dissemination activities, a poster of EuropeanaPhotography was also displayed at the poster session.

Nominations open until 31 December 2013, voting in January 2014: nominate and vote EAGLE!

DH Awards recognizes excellence in Digital Humanities

Digital Humanities Awards are a new set of annual awards given in recognition of talent and expertise in the digital humanities community and are nominated and voted for entirely by the public. These awards are intended to help put interesting DH resources in the spotlight and engage DH users (and general public) in the work of the community. Awards are not specific to geography, language, conference, organization or field of humanities that they benefit and there is no financial prize associated with these community awards, just the honour of having won and an icon for your website.

DH Awards 2013 is now accepting nominations! You can nominate any Digital Humanities resource you feel deserves to win in any of this year’s categories; nominations will be open until the 31^st of December 2013 (midnight GMT) and voting will take place in January 2014. The nominations must be for projects/resources/sites that were launched/finished/created in 2013.

This year’s categories are:

Best DH tool or suite of tools
Nominations for this category should be for a tool or suite of tools created by members of the DH community, used for enabling, encouraging, and/or accomplishing DH work;
Best DH contribution not in the English language
Nominations for this category should be for DH resources or publications that are not in the English language;
Best use of DH for fun
Nominations for this category should be for projects/resources/sites for DH which are designed to be fun or inherently playful;
Best DH blog post, article, or short publication
Nominations for this category should be for a specific short DH publication (peer-reviewed or not) whether article, blog post, or other publication;
Best DH visualization or infographic
Nominations for this category should be for a graphic, infographic, or visualization created for or by the DH community;
Best DH project for public audiences
Nominations for this category should be for a DH project designed to be used by audiences primarily outside of higher education, including educators, students, enthusiasts, genealogists, engaged citizens, etc;

By its work at making available, with the most advanced digital technologies’ support, the vast majority of the surviving inscriptions from the Greco-Roman world, we think EAGLE can be a valid and qualified competitor for 2013’s edition of DH Awards. To nominate EAGLE visit the nominations page at: http://dhawards.org/dhawards2013/nominations/

The DH Awards 2013 are overseen by an international Nominations Committee consisting of:

James Cummings (Founder/Director) — University of Oxford
Craig Bellamy — University of Melbourne
Sheila Brennan — Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University
Marjorie Burghart — EHESS: École des Haute Études en Sciences Sociales (Lyon)
Kiyonori Nagasaki – International Institute for Digital Humanities 一般財団法人人文情報学研究所 (Tokyo)
Miriam Peña Pimentel — UNAM: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Fellowships available within Marie Curie

DiXiT now open for application

The Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network (DiXiT)* offers 12 fellowships to Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) for a period of 3 years and 5 fellowships to Experienced Researchers (ERs) for a period of 12 to 20 months. Fellowships are now open for applications (except 4 ER fellowships which will start at a later date).

Academic Requirements:
Early‐Stage Researchers must be in the first 4 years of their research careers and not yet have a doctoral degree. This is measured from the date when they obtained the degree which would formally entitle them to embark on a doctorate, irrespective of whether or not a doctorate is envisaged.
Experienced Researchers must be in possession of a doctoral degree or have at least 4 years of full‐time equivalent research experience. At the time of recruitment by the host organisation an experienced researcher must also have less than 5 years of full‐time equivalent research experience.
It should be noted that an individual researcher may not be recruited first as an ESR and subsequently as an ER in the same project.

Marie Curie ITN mobility requirement:
Researchers can be of any nationality. They are required to undertake trans‐national mobility (i.e. move from one country to another) when taking up their appointment. One general rule applies to the appointment of researchers:
At the time of recruitment by the host organisation, researchers must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc) in the country of their host organisation for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately prior to the reference date.
Short stays such as holidays and/or compulsory national service are not taken into account.

Application process:
Please note that applications from any qualified applicants, regardless of gender, ethnicity or country of origin are welcome if they meet the eligibility requirements.
Applicants should send their applications directly to the institution hosting the desired fellowship. Applications for more than one post are welcome – however, multiple applications should be indicated via the obligatory DiXiT application form (which has to be submitted separately from the application documents send to the hosting institution).

Deadline:
The deadline for applications is the 10th December 2013.
Please note that the four remaining ER fellowships will start at a later date and the possibility of application will be announced accordingly.

About DiXiT:
* DiXiT (Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network) is an international network of high‐profile institutions from the public and the private sector that are actively involved in the creation and publication of digital scholarly editions.
DiXiT offers a coordinated training and research programme for early stage researchers and experienced researchers in the multi‐disciplinary skills, technologies, theories, and methods of digital scholarly editing.
DiXiT is funded under Marie Curie Actions within the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme and runs from September 2013 until August 2017.
For more information, visit dixit.uni-koeln.de

Download the call in PDF

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.