Digital meets Culture

online 29th November 2022

Time Machine conference 2022

The 2022 edition of the annual Time Machine conference is announced as an online event.

The detailed programme is currently being mapped. Besides providing on this occasion a detailed overview over the current EU project involvements as well as national activities as Time Machine Organisation, the conference wil allow to participate in various sessions concerning our Local Time Machine projects.

Additionally, the Time Machine General Assembly will take place within the frameworks of this conference.

More information to be published here: https://www.timemachine.eu/events/time-machine-conference-2022/

hosted by The High Mountains, partner Promoter visited the locations, community and environment of Konitsa

Meeting INCULTUM pilot in Greece, in the valley of Aoos river

the bridge of Konitsa

A meeting was organized between INCULTUM partners Promoter, and The High Mountains cooperative to review the work done so far for the participative action to enhance the Aoos river’s valley and unlock its tourism potential, in the context of INCULTUM Pilot 7 Aoos the shared river.

Aoos Valley belongs to Konitsa’s municipality, a mountainous municipality that hosts one of the most sparsely populated areas in Greece. Konitsa is the main town of the area and the capital of the municipality surrounded by some of the highest mountains of Greece. It is built on the edge of Vikos Canyon, core of the National Park of Vikos-Aoos, and is close to various protected natural areas. Despite its natural uniqueness, Konitsa remains one of the poorest and most depopulated areas in Greece.

meeting with president of village Molista

The actions of the Pilot included the development of a digital interactive map of the area and a range of dissemination and educational seminars engaging local stakeholders in various villages of the area, finalized to promote local resources and communities of practices.

Other actions and volunteer programmes also are promoted to strengthen the local identities and social ties making people value, rethink and reclaim the traditional ecological knowledge and practices in a orre modern and participative approach.

During the meeting, Promoter’s team had the change to meet communities of the villages, volunteers at work with cleaning hiking trails in the woods, and a variety of stakeholders engaged by The High Mountains cooperative to support the effort in INCULTUM pilot.

Discover the INCULTUM Pilots: https://incultum.eu/pilots/

All photos courtesy of Promoter.

the 3-days event is organized by The Grands Sites de France network, and INCULTUM partners will participate

International workshop in Albania about integrated management of heritage sites

Building together the future of heritage sites in the Balkans

Vau i Dejës & Shkodra, Albania

14-17 November 2022

Three-and-a-half days exchange workshop about heritage sites sustainable management in the Balkans, based on case studies and shared experiences. The plenary sessions will take place in the municipalities of Vau i Dejës and Shkodra. There will be a full day on the field at Komani site. The closing session will take place during an official event in Tirana.

The Grands Sites de France network, of which INCULTUM partner BIBRACTE is an active member, is an organisation that brings together local authorities responsible for both day-to-day operations and long-term evolution of the most remarkable protected landscapes in France. Since 2010, it manages the International Centre for training and exchange of francophone heritage site managers.

This seminar in Albania is s co-organized by the Franco-Albanian archaeological mission of Drin Valley, the municipalities of Vau i Dejës and Shkodra, as well as the Réseau des Grands Sites de France (RGSF), in collaboration with the Grand Site de France Bibracte-Morvan des Sommets, the French Embassy in Albania and the partners of the RGSF’s International Francophone Centre. Albanian partners of the INCULTUM project CeRPHAAL and the Municipality of Permet will also take part in the event.

Context and goals
The municipalities of Vau i Dejës and Shkodra are committed to a project to create a protected area in order to enhance the diversity of Komani heritage resources (landscape, archaeology, vernacular heritage, etc.). Based on Komani case study and on the Grands Sites de France approach, the workshop intends to feed discussion about integrated management of heritage site in Albania and more broadly in the Balkans. It will also discuss the experience acquired within the Grands Sites de France national policy (coordination between preserving heritage value of sites and managing tourist flows, stimulating a socio-economic impact on the area, urban sprawl, etc.).

More information about the event and registration: http://www.polepatrimoine.org/actualites/nos-dernieres-actualites/169-registration-open-international-workshop-albania-2

The web page of the UNCHARTED Central Event is available

The UNCHARTED project is excited to launch its Central Event which will take place in London on the 12th and 13th January 2023 organised under the co-coordination of the Goldsmiths University of London.

A dedicated page has been published on the project website and all information on the event will be made available here.

The event will involve the entire consortium, project advisory board members and other invited stakeholders to explore, reflect and debate around the conference topic: “Tensions in societal values of culture: can value conflicts be managed or mitigated?”

It will include:

a one-day public debate to present the findings of the project to a broader audience. It is designed to encourage critique and reflection from cultural practitioners, policymakers, administrators, and researchers to enrich our understanding and analysis of core value conflicts in the production, administration, and consumption of culture.

the second co-creation workshop of the UNCHARTED project offers the team an opportunity to reflect on the experience of the last three years and develop practical approaches for the next stage of the project

Stay tuned about the event: https://uncharted-culture.eu/events/central-event-in-london

partner Promoter organized a meeting with colleagues of CeRPHAAL and the Municipality of Përmet to discover the work done to promote the richness and heritage of the valley

Travelling to Albania to INCULTUM pilot in Upper Vjosa Valley

Përmet

A meeting was organized between INCULTUM partners Promoter, CeRPHAAL and the Municipality of Përmet to visit the sites of the INCULTUM Pilot 8 Vjosa the shared river.

The Vlachs hut recently reconstructed by CeRPHAAL. Vlachs are a recognized ethnolinguistic minority in Albania. The hut is now managed by a local lady, Dona, offering accomodation and an authetic experience to tourists.

The Pilot aims to support touristic development of the area, by exploring the ‘hidden’ potential of cultural heritage and landscape assets of the Upper Vjosa Valley, and also attempting to balance experiences on both Albanian and Greek territories who share the Vjosa/Aoos river.

The pilot develops by focusing on the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of the historic nomadic Latin-speaking Vlach community, including their transhumance routes and seasonal pastoral settlements. A big effort in preserving and sharing heritage of the Vlach community was the focus of pilot’s actions last summer.

Additionally, the area is rich in archaeological, historical and natural sites (both urban and rural) including the traditional villages and their communication routes, byzantine and post-byzantine churches, and the military and industrial remains/existing factories in the Përmet area and beyond.

Vjosa river

All these are important parts of local heritage, people’s identities and history of the area, but currently being marginalized/abandoned and lagged behind, due to globalization, regional weak promotion/preservation policies and the negligence and exclusion from the policies of ‘classical tourism’.

[Show as slideshow]

Discover the INCULTUM Pilots: https://incultum.eu/pilots/

All photos courtesy of Promoter.

five curated galleries from the WEAVE editorial team tell some stories of intangible heritage

WEAVE galleries in Europeana

Diada castellera de la festa major de la Mercè a Barcelona. Actuació de les colles convidades a la plaça de Sant Jaume. Els Castellers de Vilafranca carregant un 3 de 9 amb folre. S’observa l’enxaneta fent l’aleta.

img: Festa de la Mercè a Barcelona di Duran Fígols, Oriol – CRDI / Girona City Council – CC BY-NC-ND.

Disappearing trades and occupations

As our daily life and routines have changed a lot in past decades thanks to clever inventions and modernization, several jobs and trades that used to offer the same conveniences through less technologically advanced solutions are disappearing. With these gallery of workers with unique knowledge and skills, we celebrate the intangible heritage that is the art of the cobbler, the knocker up, the rag-and-bone-man, the peddler, lamplighter and more!

A whiff of memory: favorite smells

A faint hint of perfume, a sharp waft of mint, freshly mown grass or cake cooling from the oven: smells are powerful triggers of memory and emotion. Can you find your favorite in our gallery?

Never walk alone: processions

From Antiquitiy but particularly from the Middle Ages onwards, people worldwide have expressed belief, piety, societal cohesion and solidarity by organizing as collective bodies moving through public space. In so-called procession, participants often perform rituals, choreographies, songs and chants while wearing dedicated dress and carrying symbols, signs or banners.

Additionally, two more galleries were published by WEAVE Editorial Team in Europeana:

about the tradition of Castellers in Catalonia: Together we stand: human towers

and about various other intangible heritage practices: WEAVE intangible heritage.

This blog is part of WEAVE – Widen European Access to cultural communities Via Europeana: a project funded by the European Commission under the Connecting Europe Facilities (CEF) aimed at developing a framework to link the tangible and intangible heritage of cultural communities.

welcomed by colleagues of Maj Bel University, the team of partner Promoter explored the surprising cultural and tourism potential of an area that would deserve much more attention and promotion

Discovering INCULTUM pilot in Slovakia: mining treasures of Banska Bystrica

Promoter and UMB teams visiting Banska Stiavnica supported by the digital app – photo by Pietro Masi CC-BY-SA

In September 2022, INCULTUM partners Promoter and Matej Bel University met to discuss about the work ongoing in the Pilot 3 Mining Treasures of Central Slovakia.

Focus of INCULTUM action is to support territorial and tourist promotion in the region which has significant cultural and technical heritage related to its mining history. The Historic Town of Banská Štiavnica, and the Technical Monuments in its Vicinity (from 1993 enlisted at the UNESCO World Heritage List), are outstanding examples of an important mining settlement that has developed since the Middle Ages. The city of Banská Bystrica is the cultural and economic centre of Central Slovakia. The copper mining city acquired its present picturesque look in the Late Middle Ages when the affluent Fugger and Thurzo families founded the prosperous, largest and most modern early-capitalist company of that time. Depending mainly on the mines around Banská Bystrica, the company became the leading world producer of copper by the 16^thcentury.

[Show as slideshow]

Several other localities in the region were part of this important mining history while preserving cultural and technical heritage of international relevance. Despite the great potential of this heritage for tourism, its development is vastly underrated in the region, and due to significantly lacks in marketing and digital tools supporting promotion of this unique part of its history.

The Pilot coordinated by Prof. Alexandra Bitusikova, Head of University Centre for International Projects and full professor in social anthropology at Faculty of Arts, Department of Social Studies and Ethnology, is oriented towards the creation of an interactive digital map on mining treasures in Central Slovakia. The most important mining sites will be presented into one interactive platform and a digital map available as a software application. In the phase of its design, university students are acting as mystery shoppers to test the digital map and its applications.

the mining site in Spania Dolina – photo by Pietro Masi CC-BY-SA

Discover the INCULTUM Pilots: https://incultum.eu/pilots/

All photos courtesy of Promoter.

the important biannual gathering of experts about (digital) imagery and management of photographic heritage collections

WEAVE goes to Image and Research conference

img: Eiffel bridge in Girona, photo CRDI / Ajuntament de Girona, Public Domain.

Under coordination of WEAVE partners KU Leuven and Photoconsortium, a paper was submitted for the upcoming Image and Research conference in Girona (16-18 November 2022), where it was presented by Photoconsortium’s vicepresident Antonella Fresa.

The Image and Research Conference (Antoni Varés Conference) has been held in the city of Girona since 1990. This event brings together every two years experts and the public interested in debating, reflecting and teaching different aspects related to the management of photographic and audiovisual heritage.

The paper featuring WEAVE and its outcomes is entitled “Metadata generation for intangible heritage: the role of crowdsourcing and AI to address bias risk“, and it presents lessons learned from work on metadata enrichment in cultural heritage and archival collections, using both Artificial Intelligence as well as crowdsourcing in a complementary strategy.

Download Presentation (PDF, 2 Mb)

While AI approaches are unavoidable to be able to improve metadata at a sufficient scale, crowdsourcing through annotation tools proves crucial to validate the obtained results.

More importantly, involving stakeholders and representative organisations in this process is important as well as necessary to cope with contextual bias and misrepresentation, for which automated mappings cannot easily be implemented. To this regard, the WEAVE project demonstrates best practice approaches that were tested and validated during the project.

Metadata generation for intangible heritage: the role of crowdsourcing and AI to address bias risk

co-authored by Valentina Bachi (Photoconsortium), Rosa Cisneros (Coventry University), Antonella Fresa (Photoconsortium), Allison Kupietzky (The Israel Museum, Jerusalem), Alexandru Stan (IN2 Digital Innovations) and Frederik Truyen (KU Leuven).

In addition to this paper about metadata and communities representation in cultural heritage, a presentation of the major 3D digitization task performed by WEAVE partner CRDI was delivered by Marc Hernandez of La Tempesta, the specialized technology partner of CRDI, who explored challenges and solution for complex 3D digitization of daguerreotypes with photogrammetry techniques.

The importance of developing a new understanding on the value of cultural heritage

ILUCIDARE Policy recommendations to promote heritage as a source for innovation and international relations

ILUCIDARE, EU-funded H2020 project aimed at establishing an international network that promotes heritage as a resource for innovation and in international relations, has just published its policy recommendations resulting from the project’s activities.

Evidence gathered by ILUCIDARE during its activities shows how heritage resources are important drivers for innovation and international relations, stimulating a variety of impacts both locally and internationally.

Building on the ILUCIDARE learnings, the document includes proposals to better understand the value of heritage beyond its cultural value with respect to its contribution to (social) innovation, entrepreneurship and job creation, education or international cooperation and intends to provide recommendations on how policy should be framed to make the most of heritage to support innovation, international relations and contribute to a greener, more inclusive and sustainable future. More specifically, these policy recommendations aim:

To show the need to strengthen and improve heritage policy making to further unleash the potential of cultural heritage to contribute to innovation and international relations;
To help policy makers understand the value of heritage investment;
To guide future policy action with concrete measures addressing governance, legal and funding issues;
To empower heritage stakeholders to influence policy making and better develop heritage-led innovation and heritage-led international relations projects.

The recommendations can be downloaded at https://ilucidare.eu/resources/database/ilucidare-policy-recommendations

understanding context and challenges for innovatives approaches in tourism to achieve positive social, economic, cultural and environmental impacts.

INCULTUM Policy Brief on Sustainable Tourism

One of the research areas of INCULTUM project focuses on developing policy recommendations that supports innovative and participative approaches to a community-led and sustainable tourism development in rural or marginal territories.

The activity on policies overall is led by experts from Matej Bel University, with important tasks coordinated by cultural managers and researchers at Bibracte.

The first Policy Brief was released in September 2022.

This document formulates recommendations for the orientation of future research programmes in the field of cultural tourism, rural heritage management and sustainable development of peripheral territories. It develops a transdisciplinary approach, combining socio-economic analysis and drawing on the achievements of the literature on tourism development and territorial management. It endeavours to articulate the diversity of the
axes explored by the partners and the various aspects of the problem. This version 1 of the policy brief has been produced at the end of the first year of INCULTUM’s activity and the consortium members intend to publish a revised version at the end of the project in 2024.

Read the Policy Brief (PDF)