Digital meets Culture

A great emphasis is being placed by all the Pilots in promoting innovation in the products and processes proposed, or in techniques and approaches.

Midterm reporting for INCULTUM Pilots: progress and innovation

It is now available in the project’s website the recently released D5.1 Intermediate Pilots report, a condesed document which summarizes the work done by each of the 10 Pilot cases in the INCULTUM project.

Albeit with (sometimes big) differences and specifities, 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 terriotries in Europe.

The full deliverable can be consulted from this page along with all the other public deliverables produced in the project.

It is worth to highlight the emphasis being placed on the need to promote innovation in the products and processes proposed, or in techniques and approaches. In this sense, transversality with the innovation manager is being promoted. There is no shortage of challenges considering the nature of the pilots and the work being done with local actors and communities, based on participatory approaches that are not always simple and agile, but which we believe have greater potential in the medium and long term and will also have a deterrent effect on the negative impacts of tourism and touristification.

We can summarize the fields of innovation explored by INCULTUM in the following items:
1. The constitution of a heritage resource as a common (good) is a unanimously shared concern, but unequally explained by the pilots, even though it is obviously what provides legitimacy to the projects and grounds the actions.
2. The involvement of the community in the management of the heritage resource is a priority action over all others. The Granada team has developed a fine example of farmer involvement, which may be shared in greater depth within the consortium.
3. Most of the pilot projects have in common the objective of creating new visitor itineraries that make it possible to discover the resources of a territory along a route (most of the time using soft means of transport). These routes also involve local participation in their design and, of course, in their development. Thus encouraging local domestic tourism and knowledge of the local heritage. The systematisation of this approach through soft mobility can be considered as an element of innovation to achieve sustainable tourism.
4. The design of attractive narratives of the itineraries is essential (+in the light of the tourism revolution), the use and management of the water (pilot #1 Granada, pilot #2 Portugal, pilot #4 Sicilia), touristic resources based on a ethno-linguistic minority (pilot #7 Albania and in the next period also will be implemented in #pilot 6 Greece), or the dark tourism in pilot #9 can be detected as innovator touristic solutions.
5. In relation to the previous point, the mobilisation of artists to strengthen the attachment of communities to their heritage and to share it with others is a subject whose relevance is shown by the Bibracte achievements (see also the Apennine pilot #5).
6. The participatory heritage inventory and the participatory design of itineraries also seem to be vectors considered relevant by all the partners. It would therefore be useful to better share tools/methods to facilitate this mode of participation: importance of field surveys, availability of digital tools for collecting and sharing information.
8. Knowledge of visitors, their visiting practices and the impact (social, environmental, economic) of the involvement of the community in the management of the heritage resource as well as the sharing of this information with the community to produce ‘territorial touristic intelligence‘, is a subject that also interests several partners (pilot #6 Bibracte, the pilot #9 Irish, pilot #10 the Swedes), with concrete proposals from each pilot that should be made consistent / assembled.
9. Some pilots are modelling an integrated tourism economy approach (pilot #6 Greece, pilot #6 Bibracte, pilot #1 Granada) by mobilising the concept of territorial entrepreneurship that embrace the different sectors of activity of the territory involved in the management of the heritage common or by using business intelligence tools (pilot #6 Greece).
10. Promotional and visit tools are also a subject of interest to several partners (pilot #3 Slovaks and the pilot #9 Irish) and it would undoubtedly be useful for them to share their current work on this theme in more detail.

Additionally, all the pilots are doing their own communication on a local scale in the vernacular language, thus trying to have a greater implantation in the territory and the communities and stakeholders with whom they work and a greater dissemination on that scale, who are to a large extent INCULTUM closest and, a priori, most numerous target audience.

Be.CULTOUR is a EU-funded project focused on enhancing enhancing cultural heritage and landscape values for sustainable cultural tourism

Be.CULTOUR and INCULTUM establish collaboration

The EU-funded Be.CULTOUR project recently establised a cooperation agreement with INCULTUM, aiming at cross-dissemination, knowledge exchange and other common actions in the area of sustainable cultural tourism.

Be.CULTOUR stands for “Beyond CULtural TOURism: heritage innovation networks as drivers of Europeanisation towards a human-centred and circular tourism economy”. It expresses the goal to move beyond tourism through a longer-term human-centred development perspective, enhancing cultural heritage and landscape values.

Read more about the project in the official website: https://becultour.eu/

open online course of 6 weeks, to study the dynamics and trends in rural regions and how to create concepts, plans, and initiatives to improve rural development

RURALIZATION launches a MOOC, starting 1 March 2023

RURALIZATION is a EU-funded project aiming at developing forward-looking policies fulfilling the ‘future dreams’ of new rural generations and foster sustainable development of rural and marginal areas. In this light, RURALIZATION and INCULTUM recently established a cooperation agreement for cross-dissemination and knowledge exchange. The RURALIZATION project has identified a series of ‘innovation stories’ to better understand the problems associated with rural living, the importance of sustainable and inclusive farming practices, and how new thinking (dream scenarios, foresight activities) can help to transform rural communities. The ultimate aim is to open up rural areas to renew rural generations, jobs and farms.

Among other actions, RURALIZATION is launching a MOOC “Creating New Opportunities in Rural Areas”, which will be offered by TUDelft University and will focus on how to study the dynamics and trends in rural regions and how to create concepts, plans, and initiatives to improve rural development. This course provides ideas and insights that help to offer opportunities to young generations in rural areas.

This MOOC is mainly for:

(Young) professionals aiming to work on rural development policy and strategy design.
People aiming to make a difference in the future of rural areas, for example in the field of rural innovation and local economy.
Students aiming to strengthen their knowledge to become better equipped professionals in this field.

The course, free of charge, starts on 1 March 2023 with a instructor-paced format. The duration of the course is 6 weeks with a required effort of 4-5 hours per week.

Enrolling is open: https://www.edx.org/course/ruralization-creating-opportunities-for-new-generations-in-rural-areas

The course will be promoted also via the INCULTUM Training Portal and in the INCULTUM network.

the images testify the drama of the climate emergency, trying to raise awareness and awaken consciences on the theme of global warming and climate crisis

Accelerazione Pericolosa, photographic exhibition about climate change

After the first display at the Museo Piaggio in Pontedera in early 2022, the exhibition by photographer Fabrizio Sbrana entitled +2° Accelerazione Pericolosa (Dangerous Acceleration) was rearranged with a new format at the Museum of Natural History of the Mediterranean in Livorno, between 8 November 2022 and 8 January 2023.

Accelerazione Pericolosa is an exhibition dedicated to the theme of climate change. The exhibition is composed by 30 large photographic panels complemented by a video that shows over 300 more pictures. It represents the reinterpretation of Sbrana’s reportage photographs shot during many travels around the world, from the 1980s to the present day: from Zambia to Italy, from Brazil to Spain, from Ethiopia to Iceland passing through Tunisia and Namibia, the images testify the drama of the climate emergency, trying to raise awareness and awaken consciences, to “educate, empower, involve, mobilize and keep the light on the very urgent issue of global warming”.

[Show as slideshow]

The dangerous acceleration of climate changes means the increasingly worrying speed with which they occur: two degrees Celsius higher in temperature – compared to that at the beginning of the industrial era – is the limit that must not be reached, as it would produce devastating effects on the Earth, the oceans, the atmosphere and ecosystems. And Sbrana shows the crumbling glaciers and the lakes which have become crusts of salt, the poors in a desperate search for water to survive, and other effects of the climate crisis witnessed by landslides, floods, coastal erosion, floods, drought.

image Fabrizio Sbrana

In facts, the Nobel prize for chemistry Paul Jozef Crutzen and the biologist Eugene Filmore Stoermer proposed the term Anthropocene (article here, p. 17) to indicate our geological era dominated by the humans who imprinted territorial, structural and climatic changes. To govern such man-induced stress, global and sustainable and environmental management is needed in a worldwide dimension; however, each one of us can make an important contribution to achieving this goal, with small daily gestures and also promoting the development of a collective ecological awareness.

This exhibition is an opportunity to contribute to reflections around a theme of the climate change that is dramatically in focus nowadays, so to participate in the collective awareness-raising process that must accompany the concrete actions of governments, institutions and businesses.

Press Release (Italian language; PDF, 400 Kb)

Download the exhibition catalogue (PDF, 9 Mb)

the new project, started in January 2023, complements efforts in creating a common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage

EUreka3D: supporting the digital transformation of the cultural heritage sector

image CC-BY-SA Europeana/drawing Jeroen Meijer

The EUreka3D project, co-funded by the Digital Europe Programme of the European Union, addresses the growing need of enabling the digital transformation of the Cultural Heritage (CH) sector, in line with and complementing the scopes of the common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage. The digital transformation comes from a decades-long process of basing museum (and also in general Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums-GLAM) operations on solid information-sharing infrastructures, forcing an overall rethinking of the underlying work processes and business models. However, not all institutions have achieved the same level of maturity towards the new digital environment they need to embrace, and despite the covid19 crisis which acted as an accelerator of the process for nearly everyone in the sector, much work still needs to be done especially for smaller Cultural Heritage Institutions (CHIs).

image from European Commission website

The vision of a European Data Space for Cultural Heritage as a participatory playfield for all the actors involved (cultural institutions, technology partners, multidisciplinary experts, creative industry, scientific researchers, end-users) moves in the direction of modernizing workflows and digitization capacity of the cultural heritage sector at large, and requires CHIs of any size to enter the challenge of advanced digitization (especially 3D digitization in high-quality), holistic representation of CH information and re-use approaches. The existing services of the Europeana.eu platform is a good starting point to support sharing and re-use, but an integration with more advanced, powerful and safe services is needed to answer to the demand of small institutions, as well as modern workflows and increased digital capacity are requested on the side of CHIs.

In this light, EUreka3D project focuses on improving the digital capacity of the cultural sector by offering a knowledge centre and a service and resource hub, based on a smart technical infrastructure whose services are registered on the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). CHIs can access a virtual space of knowledge, can use storage and computing resources to manage their 2D and also 3D assets. Following the Recommendation 1970/2021 issued to Member States by EC, CHIs are in facts also called to improve efforts in meaningful 3D digitization, which they may not be fully acquanted with yet. A cloud-based and safely-authenticated environment as developed by EUreka3D will make it easier and more accessible for CHIs to create, manage, archive, preserve and share digitised objects, with a particular focus on 3D digitization and knowledge modelling for the semantically enriched 3D records.

3D model of Asinou church, courtesy of Cyprus University of Technology

The project will engage a variety of CHIs in a piloting action that will set-up and test dedicated cloud-based services for the management and preservation of cultural contents in a safe and IP-mindful environment. The pilot will also generate high-quality 3D digitization of selected items and their related para-/metadata ready to be harvested into Europeana, and perform their aggregation and publication online, also to provide exemplification of few cases for use and re-use in unique areas such as Education.

On top of that, the project will focus on the capacity building of the human resources of the museums and CHIs and develop unique training materials for the 3D digitisation, processing, preserving on the cloud and harvesting in Europeana, as part of a network effort, and by offering dedicated consultancy, webinars and training. Impact assessment and mindful sustainability planning will complement the effort of the project in enabling a long-lasting contribution to the digital transformation of the sector.

The main purpose is to learn from peers and acknowledge the best practices, their progress and their challenges in cultural tourism and beyond.

Be.CULTOUR webinar series in 2023 – first event on 24/2/2023

The Be.CULTOUR project, focused on enhancing enhancing cultural heritage and landscape values for sustainable cultural tourism, is launching a new series of webinars to boost peer learning among its Community of Interest and other followers. Various experts and on-field stakeholders will be invited to present and discuss their innovative ideas, their progress and their challenges concerning cultural tourism and beyond. The main purpose is to learn from peers and acknowledge the best practices from the field: where the challenges lay and how to face them.

The innovative and comprehensive approach to the cultural tourism sector, combined with the replicability of practices and co-creation methodology, is the added value of Be.CULTOUR webinars. The webinars are not only intended for the scientific community and policy-makers, but also for civil society and all other interested followers.

Given that recently Be.CULTOUR and INCULTUM established a cooperation agreement for cross-dissemination and knowledge exchange, the webinar series will be promoted also via the INCULTUM Training Portal and in the INCULTUM network.

The first event of the series is entitled “Circular cultural tourism: the role of Heritage Innovation Networks for co-creation and communities’ empowerment”, and is organized on 24 February 2023. The webinar will explain how to bring together expert and local knowledge to let “hidden” cultural resources emerge and be recognized and fully exploited as a driver of local development, community empowerment and innovative entrepreneurship through circular cultural tourism.

Registration is accessible from https://becultour.eu/becultour-webinars

The list of all other topics addressed includes:

Understanding the European value of cultural heritage: Power of networks – 24 March 2023
Innovative solutions for circular cultural tourism – 21 April 2023
Values-based innovative marketing for less-known cultural tourism destinations – May 2023
Community-led and innovative entrepreneurship for circular cultural tourism – June 2023
Creative tourism and the role of arts, interpretation and storytelling – September 2023
Circular economy implementation in the tourism sector – October 2023
Innovative finance for circular cultural tourism – November 2023
Smart data management for circular cultural tourism assessment and monitoring – December 2023

Relevant information will be published in due time on the website of the project here.

Read more about the project in the official website: https://becultour.eu/

Pisa (Italy), 23-24 January 2023

EUreka3D project opening event

Europeana.eu awareness raising and training

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 digitization, access, storage, sharing.

The kick-off meeting was organized by the project coordinator PHOTOCONSORTIUM in Pisa on 23-34 January 2023, hosted at the Museo della Grafica. On the first day, the kick-off meeting served to partners to review the workplan and align tasks and activities. The Project Officer Mrs. Kyriaki Tragouda (HaDEA) also participated with an introductory talk.

On the second day, two additional events were organized in hybrid form, including a awareness raising and training session about Europeana, with nearly 80 participants either on site and online; and a networking event with the sister projects currently funded by the EC with a focus on 3D, AI and Europeana.

Kick-off meeting of EUreka3D partners

Monday 23rd January – Kick-off meeting (partners only)

Tuesday 24th January – Training Workshop and Networking (hybrid)

9.30 – 11.00: Europeana.eu, sharing digital cultural collections and fostering reuse: awareness and training session – in collaboration with Europeana Foundation – the slides presented by the speakers are available HERE.

11.00 – 12.30: Networking session of DEP projects involved with 3D digitization, capacity building and tools

Funded in the Digital Europe Programme, the project helps big and small institutions to build capacity on digital transformation

EUreka3D project starting 1st January 2023

3D digital creating, by Situ Xiaochun

The project will offer a capacity building and knowledge programme, next to services and resources developed in a piloting action based on smart technical infrastructures and tools, also registered on the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). This virtual space will allow cultural heritage institutions to use storage and computing resources to manage their 3D assets, which will give smaller institutions an affordable and simpler way to digitise, model, manage and share 3D records.

Additionally, the project will aggregate and publish a variety of high-quality 2D and 3D digital records in Europeana.eu website as well as offer clear examples for the use and reuse of the cultural content in neighbouring areas such as tourism and education. Finally, it will support institutions by developing training material for 3D digitisation, data processing and publication on Europeana.eu as well as organising training activities to support cultural heritage institutions with the use of the virtual space. The project will perform an impact assessment to enable the sustainability of the virtual space.

The kick-off meeting is organized by the project coordinator PHOTOCONSORTIUM in Pisa on 23-34 January 2023.

EUreka3D factsheet:

Project’s name: European Union’s REKonstructed content in 3D
Grant Agreement nr: 101100685
Start date: 01/01/2023
EU Grant: 999.754,50 Eur

The project runs for 24 months and is led by PHOTOCONSORTIUM, International Consortium For Photographic Heritage (Italy).

The other members of the consortium are:

Cyprus University Of Technology (CUT), Cyprus
Centre for Image Research and Diffusion (CRDI) Girona, Spain
Bibracte, France
Museo Della Carta Di Pescia, Italy
Europeana Foundation, The Netherlands
EGI Foundation, The Netherlands
- Academic Computer Center CYFRONET AGH, Poland

In preparation for 2024, a special issue of Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism attempts to advancing understanding on spatiotemporal behavior in tourism

Locating Consumption: Spatiotemporal Methods Advancing Tourism Behavior Research

Upcoming in mid-2024, a special issue is organized in the Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism, in line with the scope of INCULTUM project and as part of the Swedish Pilot team and our collaboration network “MBT- Mapping the Beaten Track” activities, from the respectable publishing group Taylor and Francis.

The journal takes an interdisciplinary approach including, but not limited to geography, psychology, sociology, history, anthropology, and economics. SJHT encourages research based on a variety of methods, including both qualitative and quantitative approaches.

The journal covers all types of articles relevant to the Nordic region, as well as the North Atlantic, North Sea and Baltic regions, but reviews and conceptual articles with a broader geographical scope are accepted, that clearly enhance the theoretical development of the hospitality and tourism field. Published articles are the result of anonymous reviews by at least two referees chosen by the editors for their specialist knowledge.

Locating Consumption: Spatiotemporal Methods Advancing Tourism Behavior Research

Understanding the scope and consequences of tourism flows is a key challenge for researchers, planners and place marketers alike. In order to mitigate harmful effects of tourism and the uneven distribution of visitors, we need to advance our views on how, why, when and where individuals move in a certain destination. Since the rise of mass tourism, scholars and practitioners have attempted to develop models to assess visitors’ real-time mobility and spatiotemporal consumption in popular tourism places, but scientific progress mostly concerned conceptual approaches (Lew & McKercher, 2006).

In the past decade, an increasing number of scholars adopted new technologies (GPS-tracking, crowdsensing devices, GIS, mobile phone data, electrodermal activity sensors, etc.) to map, visualize and nudge tourist consumption in real time (among others, Shoval & Ahas, 2016; De Cantis et al., 2016; Domènech et al., 2020; McKercher et al., 2019; Hardy et al., 2020; Toger et al., 2021; Sciortino et al., 2022; Altin et al. 2022; Waleghwa & Heldt, 2022). However groundbreaking, the majority of these studies are based on small samples and focus on urban settings. There is still a lack of theoretical corroboration and systematical (longitudinal or cross-sectional) comparisons to better harness the innovative potential of geolocational methods. Furthermore, the majority of these studies are targeting day visitors and certain segments (e.g. cruise tourists or recreational shopping), while only few studies are conducted in rural and wilderness contexts (for a notable exception, see Hardy & Aryal, 2020).

This special issue attempts to fill this gap by curating conceptual, empirical, experimental, and comparative case research advancing our understanding on spatiotemporal behavior. We welcome contributions from different disciplinary perspectives, including, but not limited to: mobility studies, consumer behaviour, behavioural geography, behavioural economics, destination governance and sustainable tourism management). Relevant papers will focus on:

New, empirically grounded research informing the conceptual models of spatially mobile consumption, representing diverse geographical, social and ethnic contexts
Longitudinal and/or comparative studies across and beyond the Nordic countries (also including periurban, rural and peripheral contexts)
Methodological innovations, progressing spatiotemporal research design and multimodal data collection (GIS, eyetracking, EDA and sensory metrics, participatory and smart data)
Methodological innovations combining of data of different modalitites and new analytical approaches (e.g. stop analysis, rhythm analysis, visualizing densities and intensities, etc.)
Mapping of mobility conflicts among different groups and practices (commuting, recreational, residential and tourist mobility)
Affective dimensions of mobile consumption (e.g. street rage, anxiety and thrill), incl. place-specific moods and sensory modalities
Health risks and contagion mitigation in postpandemic tourism mobility
Interventions, crowd management and nudging experiments to alter tourism flows

Open call for artists, deadline 15th March 2023; Festival to take place in October-November 2023

International Festival Of Art, Theatre And New Technologies “The Wonders Of Possible” 2023

Between October and November 2023, Kyber Theatre organises in Cagliari (Italy) the 10th Edition of the International Theatre, Art and New Technologies Festival called “The Wonders of Possible”.

LMDP Festival is the first of this kind in the whole Italy. Its aim is to promote the interrelation between artistic and technological languages.

Kyber Teatro – spin off of L’ Aquilone di Viviana (theatre and new technologies company, LMDP Festival creator and manager), addresses to Italian and International artists, emerging and not emerging companies and/or artists, an Open Call to submit their projects about “Interaction between theatre and new technologies”.

Who can attend

We encourage applications from artists at all stages of their careers.

The participation is open to:

Artists and Companies of every nationality
emerging companies and under 35 artists
not emerging companies and artists of every age
to who works individually or in a group of maximum 3

Eligible projects

Theatre and new technologies plays
Art and new technologies performances

Application : deadline the 15^th of MARCH 2023

The theme of LMDP Festival is the interrelation between theatre, arts and new technology.

The application must contain:

Artist’s CV;
Detailed description of the project (in PDF);
Technical rider;
Selection of max 5 photos;
Link audio / video material (Vimeo or Youtube).

Application materials must be sent by the 15^th of MARCH 2023, to the mail: info@kyberteatro.it

The result is going to be notified only to selected projects by the 1^st of MAY 2023.

Economic conditions

The winners of the Open Call will have guaranteed the full coverage of the costs for mobility (flight travels, board and accommodation in Cagliari) and an “attendance fee” for the presentation of their performance for 2 evenings. If possible, we will cover also any material required for the presentation of the performance / show / play (it will be subject to agreements with our technical director).

Publication

Applying for the call, the artists must provide a short biography and an abstract of the project and they agree that the material related to the project could be published on the Festival website and/or presented to the press for promotional purposes.

Archiving process

Artists authorise Kyber Teatro – L’aquilone di Viviana to present their work, to store the material and make it accessible through the Festival’s website. All rights to the artwork and images will remain to the artist. The Organization is also entitled to document the event in all its phases through audio recordings, video or images.