Digital meets Culture

the collaboration with professors and students aims at actions to rehabilitate the old Quinta da Penha (Faro) and its hydraulic heritage

INCULTUM pilot in Portugal involves students of the University of Seville in fieldwork

text and images courtesy of University of Algarve.

The Portuguese pilot of INCULTUM over the Campina de Faro (Algarve), launched a challenge to professors and students of Architecture at the University of Seville.

As part of the Taller de Arquitectura Iberia Sur (TAIS), by Tierras del Algarve, Occidentes, coordinated by Professor Juan Vásquez Avellaneda, 40 students from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura (ETSA) guided by six professors are developing projects to rehabilitate the old Quinta da Penha (Faro), from the 18th century, and its hydraulic heritage. TAIS proposes to work on the southern Portuguese region for the knowledge of shared experiences and situations: urban, housing, landscape, and heritage, with the aim of establishing cooperative and sustainable intervention strategies.

This aim is part of the intention of our pilot which, based on the study, inventory, and recovery of the traditional irrigation system (in disuse and degradation process), intends to give it visibility, making it protagonist in the proposal of cultural routes to be developed within the scope of the cultural tourism, and managed by the farmers and local communities.

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In this sense, a study visit, and fieldwork was carried out, on November 18, 2021, with the objective of recognizing and analyzing the heritage values, but also the existing problems, with a view to developing proposals for the recovery of the buildings, adjacent outdoor spaces, and hydraulic structures (waterwheels, tanks, canals), whose program is part of the objectives of our pilot and INCULTUM.

In addition, on 13th May, a Congress entitled Del Algarve. Paisajes Ciudades Arquitecturas Palabras will be held at the University of Seville with the participation of the Portuguese pilot’s team that will present our study-case about the Campina de Faro, and where the rehabilitation projects of the historic Quinta da Penha and the landscape and water heritage, will be presented by Spanish students and professors.

Learn more about INCULTUM Pilot 2 Campina de Faro

15 - 16 March 2022, Paris

Symposium: ‘Heritage for the Future, Science for Heritage: A European Adventure for Research and Innovation’

Under the French Presidency of the Council of the European Union, the symposium ‘Heritage for the Future, Science for Heritage: A European Adventure for Research and Innovation’ will be held next 15 – 16 March 2022 organized by the Foundation for Heritage Science with the support of the European Commission and in partnership with the French Ministry of Culture, the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the universities of Paris-Saclay and Cergy Paris.

The symposium will focus on heritage science, that contributes to the identification, understanding, conservation and transmission of cultural heritage and that brings together humanities, social, experimental, digital and engineering sciences.

Four main topics will be covered :

A reflexive heritage for a resilient society: the role of cultural heritage for the society and its interpretation and valorization.
Sustainable management of cultural heritage: the tools, methods and technologies that foster knowledge and transmission to the future generations.
Cultural heritage in a changing context: the challenges posed by the rapidly demographic, social, environmental, economic, political and cultural changing context.
Cultural heritage climate and environment change: the impact and the adaptation of heritage to climate change and its capacity to be a resource for a more sustainable society.

The event will be held in Paris, at the Louvre and the National Library of France (François Mitterrand) and it is still possible to participate remotely.

More information…

Programme of the event

Conclusions of the High-Level Workshop on ‘Research and Innovation for the New European Bauhaus’

The ‘Horizon Europe – New European Bauhaus Nexus Report’

The New European Bauhaus is an ambitious European initiative whose core values are Sustainability, Inclusion and Beauty.

The project, which also includes the cultural sector and will combine innovation and heritage, aims to make society more sustainable, aesthetic and inclusive.

The ‘Horizon Europe-New European Bauhaus Nexus Report’ (2022) is an independent expert report which names a number of challenges to address (which will require input and innovation from multiple sectors) and provides a set of guiding principles that can shape the goals of the New European Bauhaus initiative.

The recommendations include:

Opportunities for the current funding period 2021-22 and potential short-term actions
Mid-term goals for the 2023-24 period
Long-term actions beyond 2024 that reflect the transdisciplinary and trans-sectoral vision of the New European Bauhaus

The report also provides set of strategic priorities and associated benchmarks that describe a possible path forward for European society and its response to the climate emergency.

Read the report:

European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, Schellnhuber, H., Widera, B., Kutnar, A., et al., Horizon Europe and new European Bauhaus NEXUS report : conclusions of the High-Level Workshop on ‘Research and Innovation for the New European Bauhaus’, jointly organised by DG Research and Innovation and the Joint Research Centre, 2022, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/49925

RURITAGE is a another EU-funded research project which strives to enable rural regeneration through heritage

RURITAGE and INCULTUM establish collaboration

INCULTUM and RURITAGE projects have in common a keen focus on empowering marginal and rural areas in the promotion of their cultural and natural heritage, which not only needs to be safeguarded but also leveraged for communities-driven sustainable development. The INCULTUM project will build on RURITAGE outcomes and policy development to support strategies for participatory approaches, with the aim to unlock new opportunities of growth in peripheral areas.

RURITAGE is a four-year-long EU-funded research project, initiated June 2018, which strives to enable rural regeneration through heritage. The project aims to sustainably enhance local heritage for regional and community development. The intention is to regenerate rural areas with the help of the Systemic Innovation Areas (SIA) framework which identifies unique heritage potential within rural communities. The recognised SIAs are Pilgrimage, Resilience, Sustainable Local Food Production, Integrated Landscape Management, Migration and Art and Festivals.

Read more on RURITAGE website: https://www.ruritage.eu/

Students and other participants were involved in hands-on activities to plant typical trees and to recover part of the productive and landscape space

Recovering abandoned spaces in the rural area near Granada

Before and after the recovery activity of the area

text and images courtesy of Elena Correa Jiménez (University of Granada).

Following the work for recovering the area that was initiated on Pilot site in January, the students of the Rural Public School “SENED” of Jérez del Marquesado were involved in a day activity of planting rowan, walnut and chestnut trees. Continuing with the recovery of the Barranco del Alcázar in Jérez del Marquesado, after the reconstruction of the dry stone walls of the cultivation terraces, students planted typical trees of the area, to recover part of the productive and landscape space of this area.

The activity consisted of planting trees typical of the area. Mainly chestnut trees, but also some walnut, mulberry, rowan and other traditional fruit trees. The pupils of the Jérez del Marquesado school took part in this activity, with the children of the village being the protagonists. In groups, the students planted the trees and then watered them, thanks to the Alcázar irrigation channel, which was also recovered during the Balates School.

It has been a way of trying to create a link between the ravine and the younger inhabitants of the village who have not seen or known the chestnut grove or the cultivation area in all its splendour.

The activity was organised by the Biocultural Archaeology Laboratory (MEMOLab), coordinated by Professor Dr. José María Martín Civantos, from the Department of Medieval History and CCTTHH of the University of Granada.

Learn more about INCULTUM Pilot 1 – Altiplano de Granada

Coming together: Culture, Heritage and Smart Specialization for innovation with rural heritage and communities

RURITAGE shares recommendations for an integrated territorial development approach

Policy Recommendations for the Integration of Cultural and Natural Heritage (CNH) within Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation (RIS3/4) is the last publication from RURITAGE project.

The document provides practical strategies to bridge the gap by bringing culture together with areas like smart specialisation, innovation, experimentation, entrepreneurship, business development and sustainable development. In other words, it outlines a broader perspective of what innovation and regeneration can mean for communities – especially rural ones.

The document details ways for cultural heritage and smart specialisation experts to work in an interdisciplinary way, breaking down barriers between sectors that might otherwise be seen as unrelated. Some of the key recommendations include to:

Interact across sectors and areas of expertise.
Embrace a broader view on innovation and try to look at CNH from new perspectives.
Bring cultural and natural heritage into research and innovation.
Think beyond tourism to diversify the rural economy.
Consider the complexity of heritage in an integrated way, including cultural, natural and digital components as well as tangible and intangible aspects.
Include the Culture and Creative Industries, which are an excellent way to bring cultural and natural heritage features to life.

The document is available for direct download at this link: https://www.ruritage.eu/wp-content/uploads/fv-contest/c1/Ruritage-Policy-Recommendations-www-pages.pdf?_t=1641901585

Read more in an article about the publication on RURITAGE website: https://www.ruritage.eu/news-events/coming-together-culture-heritage-and-smart-specialisation/

ICOM General Conference, Prague 20-28 August 2022

The Power of Museums

The International Council of Museums ICOM has recently opened registrations to join the 26th ICOM General Conference which will take place in Prague from 20 to 28 August 2022.

Every three years, the ICOM General Conference gathers the international museum community around a topic of crucial interest to promote cultural exchange, international cooperation, and to inspire local actions in order to allow museums to continue their mission to support the society.

“The Power of Museums” is the theme of the ICOM General Conference Prague 2022, and four are the main subtopics:

Museums and the Civil Society
Museums and resilience
Museum and leadership
Museums and new technologies

For the first time the Conference will be organized in hybrid mode: keynote speeches, panel discussions, workshops, round tables and other activities of the main scientific programme can be followed online by participants from all over the world as well as at the Congress Center in Prague.
The Call for Papers to become part of the official scientific programme of the Conference is open until March 31.

Further and more detailed information on the event and on how to participate are available at https://prague2022.icom.museum/

How Artificial Intelligence can benefit the Cultural Heritage sector?

Watch the new video of the Saint George on a Bike project

Cultural heritage professionals aim to improve the way we understand paintings by generating descriptions of them. However, since millions of cultural objects have been created throughout history, completing such a task seems impossible, but only for humans.

The goal of the Saint George on a Bike (SGoaB) project is to provide high-performance metadata enrichment capability by using High Performance Computing (HPC) resources in the cultural heritage domain. The project trains natural language processing and deep learning algorithms in culture, symbols, and historical context to automatically generate rich metadata for hundreds of thousands of images from various European cultural heritage repositories. Within the project, researchers and engineers are creating rich descriptions for paintings to train AI models, so these can in turn analyse many more thousands of paintings automatically.

In this regard the project has launched an engaging and inspiring video that aims to show how AI can help the cultural heritage sector and its potential to soon recognize the context of artwork and generate accurate annotations automatically. The audience of this video are professionals working in the GLAM sector and also the general public.

Among other advantages of applying AI in the cultural heritage sector the video highlights the improved experience visually impaired people could have with better descriptions; the possibility to study hidden relations between thousands of items simultaneously and the opportunity to curate virtual exhibitions with related paintings from around the globe.

Saint George on a Bike: Training AI to be aware of cultural heritage contexts

Automatic image captioning is a process that allows already trained models running on commodity computers to generate textual descriptions from an image. It is a burgeoning reality in a handful of other areas such as classifying image contents on social media. However, to date, no AI system has been built and trained to help in the description of cultural heritage images, while factoring in the time-period and scene composition rules for sacred iconography from the 14th to the 18th centuries.

As part of the Saint George on a Bike project, researchers at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Europeana Foundation build and train AI systems to help cultural heritage institutions describe and classify their art pieces automatically. In the end both casual users and cultural heritage professionals will benefit from a better access to collections and also a better experience navigating through collection catalogs. They will owe this to richer artwork annotations, leading to improved image scene indexation and search capabilities, obtained with the help of a specialized AI system.

“Our project will allow quick access to enriched cultural information, which can serve equally well for cultural and social ends, education, tourism, and possibly for historians or anthropologists. Indirectly the citizens can benefit from better public services, when these are based on the insight that the richer metadata we produce offers – such as web accessibility for the visually impaired or narratives that can expose social injustice or integration and gender issues through cultural heritage corpora and help create a more tolerant European identity”, says Maria-Cristina Marinescu, coordinator of the Saint George on a Bike project.

To learn more about the Saint George on a Bike project, visit https://saintgeorgeonabike.eu/.

online event 25th February 2022 h. 14.30 CET

E-Learning Platform for Cultural Heritage Management

This online talk by ENCATC, the European network on cultural management and policy, will be an opportunity to learn more about the latest policy developments in the field of cultural heritage (CH) – among which, the European Heritage Strategy for the 21st century (ST21) of the Council of Europe – , as well as to get to know a new learning method and a best practice example of the implementation of this tool.

In the first part of the Talk, an extensive review of the state of the art of the main policies and initiatives currently in place or in development in the field of CH will be offered, with a special focus on Europe but also on some specific national realities.

The second part of the Talk, on its turn, will be devoted to the presentation of the new ST21 Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), which aims to address some of the challenges related to social cohesion, economic and territorial development, as well as education and knowledge. The MOOC provides heritage managers at local, regional and national levels with the knowledge and skills to implement the Strategy’s recommendations. To close this second part of the Talk, and before the debate with the audience, a best practice experience of application of this tool for a cultural project will be presented.

More info and registration: https://www.encatc.org/en/events/detail/e-learning-platform-for-cultural-heritage-management/

involving communities and engaging partners for the promotion of rural hicking tracks and the restoration of ancient paths

Fieldwork and expected outcomes for INCULTUM Pilot at Grand Site de France Bibracte-Mont Beuvray

All images courtesy of Bibracte.

A special session of the “rural tracks working group” was organized on January 24 2022, gathering around 25 local elected and volunteer residents of the 12 villages of the Bibracte – Mont Beuvray Grand Site de France. The group worked on the constitution of an “atlas” of the hiking itineraries of the area passing through the network of 1000 km of rural paths. Dozens of itineraries have been collected and participants were invited to discuss the best routes with the aim of creating a major hiking itinerary all around the Grand Site de France territory (a loop of around 120 km) and passing through the centres of the 12 villages.

On March 7, the Grand Site de France slow tourism working group (gathering around 25 professional of the territory) will gather for a session dedicated to the presentation of the INCULTUM Pilot. During this meeting, the members will be invited to map the tourist offer around the hiking itinerary of the Grand Site de France and identify the unmet needs in terms of tourism services. This will enable to begin the work on defining a marketing plan for the Pilot project, which will be produced by the end of the year in consultation in particular with the slow tourism working group.

In order to complete the mapping, work is ongoing for compiling existing heritage and environmental inventories and for studying the opportunity to complete or update them by organising, with Pilot’s partners, participatory inventory sessions involving inhabitants, and specifically the young audience.

All this work will allow to compile a technical file, which will be presented in the next few months to the local stakeholders in charge of the tourism strategy of the area. The next steps will include technical questions concerning the standardisation of certain routes, signposting and tourism communication. During springtime, these official stakeholders will be invited to participate in a special session of the rural tracks working group.

In addition to this work engaging various stakeholders, a partnership is being established with the French NGO Rempart, in order to organise an heritage workcamp on the restoration of an ancient Gallo-Roman road on the Bibracte site. The project is aiming at organizing a summer activity with young Europeans volunteers who will take part in the restoration of low stone walls and the enhancement of a new hiking itinerary.

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As part of the communication and event strategy within the frame the Pilot project, 5 “sensitive walks” in cooperation with Chemins association will be organized in 2022 on different themes on the rural paths linking the villages of the Grand Site de France. The first one will be held on June 2022 between the villages of Arleuf and Fachin on the thematic of a piece of heritage hidden in the forest: the ancient railway from Autun to Château-Chinon.

More widely, the Grand Site de France is working on the development of communication tools, such as a dedicated website which will including a section dedicated specifically to the work done within INCULTUM) and a project of tourist map based on the participatory work carried out in the frame of the pilot project. A press release announcing the new labelling period for the Grand Site de France for the next 6 years and also mentioning INCULTUM Pilot project will be sent out before the summer to local, national and professional media.