Digital meets Culture

September-December 2022

The travelling MEMEX Exhibition is coming!

News from UNCHARTED community! MEMEX, the three-year H2020 project, aims to promote social cohesion through collaborative, heritage-related tools that provide inclusive access to tangible and intangible cultural heritage and, at the same time, facilitate encounters, discussions and interactions between communities at risk of social exclusion.

In the next few days it will kick off the Traveling MEMEX Exhibition which from September will continue until December.
The event will be an opportunity to discover the stories created by the inhabitants through the MEMEX project, the project methodology, the prototype app, the pilot projects and the policy recommendations.

In Lisbon, Barcelona and Paris participants were engaged by the MEMEX project’s partners in a digital storytelling journey based on a dedicated methodology and a co-designed app aiming to reinforce inclusion and cultural participation: visiting local heritage through guided tours, reflecting on these places and expressions, identifying the topics and writing their stories, and finally, co-creating audio-visual stories, emphasizing the active role of the participants in re-interpreting existing heritage and in co-creating plural meanings of it.

The MEMEX exhibition will present some of the stories as well as the social and technological development of the project.
The exhibition entrance is free in all locations and open to all.

The itinerary of this narrative journey includes:

Lisbon – 19/09/2022 – 29/09/2022 – Pharmacy Museum – R. Mal. Saldanha 1, 1249-069 Lisboa, Portugal – Public opening on September 19th (5pm GMT +1)
Paris – 05/10/2022 – 13/10/2022 – Rosa Lab – 20 voie EU/19, Paris 75019 – Public opening on October 5th (5 pm CET)
Genoa from 20/10/2022 – 01/11/2022- Festival Della Scienza – Piazza Giacomo Matteotti, 9, 16123 Genova GE, Italy
Barcelona – 09/11/2022 – 23/12/2022 – Loop Festival – C/ de València, 302, 08009 Barcelona, Spain – Public opening on November 9th (7pm GMT+2)

More information on the exhibition is available here.

News from UNCHARTED community

NEMO statement on the impact of the energy crisis on museums in Europe

NEMO, the Network of European Museum Associations, after observing the exceptional increase of costs for electricity and gas and its impact on museums in recent months, has published a statement calling on policy makers to support museums to cope with the energy crisis and keep open.

With the exceptional increase of costs for electricity and gas, some museums’ energy bills are likely to increase by 400% and there are already reports of museums having to close due to the energy crisis. NEMO fears that more will follow unless appropriate measures are taken.

NEMO also writes that cultural spaces and offers are important for social cohesion and personal well-being during times of crisis. The closure and/or reduction of services of museums has a minimal impact in terms of energy savings but does have a significant impact on the cultural and social fabric of Europe in this challenging time.

Read the statement here

French food as cultural heritage and the role of locality

WEAVE blogpost: A taste of terroir?

img: Fishermen in Lorient (France) by J. Hersleven, Jacques – Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, Belgium – CC BY-NC-SA.

The cultural connection between heritage and food has gradually gained visibility over the last decades.

Read the blog published by the WEAVE project editorial team in Europeana to discover the role of food as #CulturalHeritage in France
HERE

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.

How to safeguard transient, traditional and untouchable culture

WEAVE blogpost: Caring for intangible cultural heritage

img: Gegants i capgrossos, CRDI/Ajuntament de Girona, PD.

Intangible cultural heritage is a substantial part of what makes up our histories and identities, understood to be practices, ideas, insights and experiences.

Read the blog published by the WEAVE project editorial team in Europeana, to learn how to safeguard untouchable culture
HERE

From 19 to 22 August 2022 each part of the island of Sikinos transformed into a field of play, discovery and creation, where the audience became from a spectator to a participant and co-creator.

Little Islands Festival 2022 aftermovie

The Festival that connects the Aegean landscape and nature with Audiovisual Arts, Little Islands Festival (LIF) is dedicated to all artistic communities experimenting with hybrid artistic practices at the boundaries of the performing and digital arts.

The 4th edition of Little Islands Festival took place in summer 2022 under the theme of “Communality”, and explored the notion of community and opened a dialogue on its meaning and scope. Our driving force is the Aegean Sea as an element of unity and communication that has shaped a collective life culture, moving between self-sufficiency, resilience and assertion, interaction and coexistence. The festival hosted the works of 100 artists from Greece and abroad, presented installations, screenings, music, alternative tours, workshops, talks, site-specific projects and audiovisual performances.

From 19 to 22 August 2022 each part of the island of Sikinos transformed into a field of play, discovery and creation, where the audience became from a spectator to a participant and co-creator. We experiment with public open art that interacts with the regions of the world, making events that transform into common places, creating performances, telling stories, connecting the shared memory of space with the new reality of the digital world. Seeking the unexpected, the artistic experience that stimulates the emotion and sensory bodies, the “here” and “now” co-presence of people.

the important Digital Humanities Congress took place in Hybrid format in September 2022

CitizenHeritage presented at DHC 2022 in Sheffield

The Digital Humanities Congress is a conference hosted by the DHI at the University of Sheffield every two years. Its purpose is to promote the sharing of knowledge, ideas and techniques within the digital humanities. The fifth Congress was held in Sheffield from 8th – 10th September 2022. The programme included three keynote speakers and 44 papers, as well as plenary presentations.

The talk delivered by CitizenHeritage coordinator prof. Fred Truyen (KU Leuven) was entitled CitizenHeritage: Crowdsourcing, Digital Curation and Citizen Science with European Photographic Collections, and discussed the results of work on Photographic Heritage collections in a series of EU-funded research projects among which “Kaleidoscope: the 1950s in Europe” and “Europeana XX: Century of Change”, where digitised collections were contributed to Europeana, and both AI as well as crowdsourcing technologies were used to enrich metadata. In the context of the project CitizenHeritage, the talk indicated a roadmap in how this can lead to genuine citizen science.

In pursuit of the many “Visual identities of Europe” in the 20th century, editorials and hybrid virtual/physical exhibitions were curated based on aggregated collections from a wide variety of heritage institutions, allowing to explore new relations between and objects, representations and narratives. The presentation explained how data aggregation, AI-supported data improvement and crowdsourced data validation contribute to innovative heritage research, involving citizens and stakeholder communities.

Visit conference site: https://www.dhi.ac.uk/dhc/2022/

Download the presentation by prof. Fred Truyen, PDF 9 Mb

A multistakeholders conference was organized in Palermo in July 2022 to discuss synergies and strategies of collaboration for the promotion of islamic heritage in Sicily

INCULTUM first institutional animation meeting in Sicily

The INCULTUM project is an international initiative which landed in Sicily by implementing a Pilot project for tourism promotion in the area of Trapani, coordinated by GAL ELIMOS, Local Action Group.

The Pilot is innested in a larger initiative called “Siqilyya ğannat ˀal arḍ- Sicily is Garden Paradise on Earth”, an itinerary to enhance the cultural, material and intangible heritage of Islamic Sicily, concerning the territory of 12 municipalities of the north-western coast of Sicily, from the Gulf of Castellammare to the Stagnone of Marsala, Egadi and Pantelleria islands included. That was the territory of the first arrival of Islam in Sicily (around the ‘600 there were the first incursions in Cossyra – the current Pantelleria, to arrive at a real “entry into force” in 827 at Capo Granitola) which generated the blossoming of a cultural stratification, collaboration and peaceful fruitfulness that is also an example in everyday life today.

In this light, GAL ELIMOS already signed a protocol of collaboration with the Department of Cultural Heritage and Sicilian Identity that implements actions for promotion, including an upcoming conference to be organized in collaboration with the Islamic Communities of Sicily, for the “revitalization” and the enhancement of the important and ancient Islamic roots of the island tradition.

In this strand of work, the ELIMOS Local Action Group organized in July 2022 a multistakeholders meeting in Palermo, at the Regional County Seat, to describe the work done so far in the area of Trapani, and to discuss with university experts and policy makers about strategies and actions for sustainable development of the Region. The event, in Italian language, was streamed live and available on the ELIMOS LAG facebook page, reaching out to over 15.000 contacts with a total of nearly 7.000 visualizations.

photo courtesy of GAL ELIMOS

The discussion was organized into two main “sections”:
the first one, including a number of institutional authorities, provided the main bases of the general framework related to the INCULTUM project, the methodological principles and action on which it is based and its contextualization in the Community landscape, national and local. The INCULTUM Pilot acts as a demo of a wider initiative, based on an innovative method of enhancing the cultural heritage and identity considered “minor”, while instead they are more representative of an intense traditional imprint that is safeguarded in each local territory, to be strategically leveraged for the realization of a more general growth planning, to negotiated with all the local actors, for the development of the “rural” community.

photo courtesy of GAL ELIMOS

The second session, unfolding various valuable contributions by distinguished representatives of the world of Culture and the University, highlighted the reasons for the main “anchorages” of the specific action of valorisation selected by the ELIMOS LAG in the INCULTUM Pilot, which is also close to other similar actions in the international project, especially the pilots carried out by the partners of Spain and Portugal of the INCULTUM network. By condensing projects, contacts, existing relations already carried out and under way and others in progress, the efforts prelude to further and more future developments which, in turn, will determine a wider result of dissemination and collaboration at several levels.

screenshot from conference recording

The conclusion of the works was entrusted to Dr. Liborio Furco, President of the ELIMOS LAG organiser and promoter of the initiative, who provided a systemic and sociological reconstruction of the fundamental motivations of INCULTUM Pilot, enriched with the considerations made by experts and scholars who have contributed to the meeting and who eventually commented that “The friendship between different cultures and civilizations does not mean homologation, but the enhancement of diversity: history tellsa bout a role that, for centuries, Sicily has played as a mediator of this enhancement of differences; a historical tradition that highlights the natural predisposition of our stratified and multifaceted culture. The hope is that this vocation can move on and generate arenas of common territorial public policies of the Mediterranean.”

Read the full report of the meeting (Italian language): PDF, 430 kb

View the recording on ELIMOS Facebook page.

Learn more about INCULTUM Pilot in Sicily

Cisneros and Canadian guitarist Caroline Plante discussed the complex Spanish artform and explored the role of women in Flamenco.

Rosa Cisneros from C-DaRE and WEAVE partner is part of “The Conversation” BBC podcast

text by Rosa Cisneros, Coventry University.

The BBC Podcast “The Conversation” invites two women from different parts of the world, united by a common passion, experience or expertise to tell Kim Chakanetsa their stories. In early September Rosa Cisneros was a guest on the podcast and helped produce “The Women of Flamenco”. Cisneros sat down with Canadian female guitarist Caroline Plante and both explored and discussed the complex Spanish artform and explored the role of women in Flamenco. The two talk about their experiences of growing up with Flamenco and also how flamenco is a form of activism.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct37mc

The new free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)

How to develop and implement effective digital strategies in cultural heritage institutions

How can cultural heritage institutions keep up with the latest digital technologies and trends? How can they organise and develop a digital workflow to enhance audience engagement and participation?

The new Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) “Developing Digital Transition Strategies for Cultural Heritage Institutions” aims to answer these and other questions in order to support cultural heritage professionals in developing digital strategies.

The course will start on September 26, 2022 and is organized by the inDICEs project, which has received funding from the European Union for 2020-2022 under the Horizon 2020 programme.

MOOC course addresses cultural heritage professionals, policy makers, students, and anybody with an interest in discovering how to address the challenges of digital transformation. Experts from various fields will teach how to design, evaluate and improve digital transformation strategies, as well as, provide insights and tools to assess the impact that cultural heritage institutions can have thanks to new technologies.

‘Developing digital transition strategies for cultural heritage institutions’ will cover six modules:

Digital Transformation & Self-Assessment: introductory module partly focused on the concept and importance of digital transformation.
Digital trends and Culture 3.0: the main transitions of the web, the different domains and types of impact of digital cultural participation, as well as trend watching practices are focal points.
Empowering IPR for the commons : how cultural heritage institutions can make reuse of digital content clear from a legal perspective.
Strategic skills, collaboration & organisation growth: how participation in networks can increase organisational capacity and help to optimise the impact of cultural heritage institutions.
Impact assessment: good practices, tools and methodologies to assess whether a strategy is working or needs to be refined or redirected.
Approaching technological innovation.

More information at https://www.edx.org/course/developing-digital-transition-strategies-for-cultural-heritage-institutions

A theatrical event series to engage visitors is also an occasion to organize focus groups to discuss about sustainable tourism development of local territories

Storytelling for supporting tourism in the village of San Pellegrino in Alpe (Tuscany)

The Tuscan Pilot of the INCULTUM project, coordinated by the University of Pisa and set in the beautiful landscape of the Garfagnana in Tuscany, aims at developing innovative and community-involving tourism appraoches to support territorial promotion. In this effort, last summer 2022 a series of theatrical performances was launched, that aim to relive the memory of this community and its territory through a storytelling approach, realized in collaboration with the local Ethnographic Museum. This is a play is entitled “Un prete, due Santi, un confine e 4000 pezzi unici” (a priest, two saints, a border and 4000 unique pieces) by actress Elisabetta Salvatori, telling the stories of old traditions in this heritage territory. The scope of this action is to reconnect the touristic offer of the location, that is mostly appreciated for the landscape and the possibilities of sports and trekking, with the peculiar aspects of the cultural and historic heritage of the community, that is well documented in the Ethnographic Museum.

On the occasion of the final event of the series on 28 August 2022, a institutional meeting took place at the Ethnographic Museum, involving local organizations to learn about INCULTUM project and progress. Led by prof. Enrica Lemmi and her colleagues Fosca Giannotti and Dino Pedreschi, the meeting engaged various stakeholders as represented by: the major of the town of Castiglione di Garfagnana Mr. Daniele Gaspari; the vicepresident of the Natural Park of Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, also representing the Union of Garfagnana Towns Ms. Raffaella Mariani; and the presisdent of the Museums System of the Province of Lucca Mr. Alessandro Colombini.

Discover the INCULTUM Pilot set in Garfagnana: https://incultum.eu/pilots/5-garfagnana/