Digital meets Culture

European week of Regions and Cities: The New European Bauhaus and its Relevance for its Citizens – Shaping a More Beautiful Future in Europe

On Tuesday 12 October 2021, from 9:30-11:00 CET, stay tuned! The European Movement International, in partnership with the Council of European Municipalities and Regions (CEMR) and Europa Nostra, will hold a digital panel discussion entitled “The New European Bauhaus and its Relevance for its Citizens – Shaping a More Beautiful Future in Europe”. The debate will be run in the framework of the EU Regions Week 2021, the annual four-day event during which cities and regions showcase their capacity to create growth and jobs, implement European Union cohesion policy, and prove the importance of the local and regional level for good European governance. This workshop will bring together the voices of Europe’s local and regional governments, of Europe’s shared cultural heritage and Europe’s young generation to demonstrate the mobilising and transformative power of the New European Bauhaus for the future of Europe. This creative and interdisciplinary co-creation movement aims at bringing the European Green Deal closer to citizens and their living environments. Together with the ongoing Conference on the Future of Europe, it offers citizens a unique opportunity to shape a future that is sustainable, beautiful and inclusive, both in urban and rural areas.
Featuring:
Flo Clucas, Spokeperson – Local Finances; Councillor of Cheltenham, Council of European Municipalities and Regions (CEMR).
Sneška Quaedvlieg–Mihailović, Secretary General, Europa Nostra.
Monika Skadborg, Board Member, European Youth Forum.
Marcos Ros Sempere, Member of the European Parliament, Founder of the European Parliament’s New European Bauhaus Friendship Group.
Moderator: Petros Fassoulas, Secretary General, European Movement International.
Registration for the event is available here.
More information…

An online event organized in collaboration with the National Széchényi Library in Budapest engaging students of the Media and Communication department of Pázmány University

Facts & fiction: Hungary in black-and-white photographs

Standfotó a Nyugati övezet című filmből – Film still of Nyugati övezet feature film by Csépány Sándor – National Széchényi Library (OSZK) Budapest, Europe – CC BY-NC-ND.

15th October 2021 h. 9-12 CEST

online event via Zoom

Enriching photographic heritage through citizen science.

This second workshop from the Citizen Heritage project is focused on engaging university students with digital cultural heritage and the importance of good metadata associated to online collections.

In this event, students of Master and Bachelor courses in digital humanities and film history at Media and Communication department of Pázmány Péter Catholic University worked on metadata improvement, by annotating and enriching the beautiful digitized collection of early photography and film stills published by OSZK the National Széchényi Library in Europeana.

The new Europeana Gallery Builder tool was also be presented as an engaging and easy to use feature that enables to explore and reuse Europeana collections in curation activities, by creating short visual stories on specific themes, in the form of galleries to be published on Europeana portal.

DISCOVER THE EVENT:
https://www.citizenheritage.eu/citizen-science-workshops/budapest/

1st October 2021, online

WEAVE LabDay: Digital Innovation of Cultural Heritage: 3D Modelling for Cultural Heritage

WEAVE, Widen European Access to cultural communities Via Europeana, is a project co-financed by the European Union under the CEF Connecting Europe Facility Programme with the aim of enriching Europeana with great content of tangible and intangible heritage of cultural communities, safeguarding the rich and invaluable cultural heritage which they represent.
WEAVE has organized a series of LabDays, the first of which will take place tomorrow 1st October 2021. The event, named “Digital Innovation of Cultural Heritage: 3D Modelling for Cultural Heritage”, will be hold on line, organized by the partner ARCTUR (Slovenia) in collaboration with Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (Portugal) and Coventry University (UK).

The purpose is to offer information about the digital innovation of cultural heritage, including various aspects of digital innovation, with the main focus on 3D objects.

Main topics:

The advantages of investing in cultural heritage tourism
A short presentation of the development of interactive experiences (3D movie, hologram, 3D printing, virtual tours with the 3D objects, interactive table with 3D objects, enriched reality, VR360movie with the 3D objects, VR games, etc.)
How to prepare a good concept with defined target groups and user experience
Cooperation of key stakeholders in the process of digitisation and the digitalisation of cultural heritage
The digitising process: digital capture, point clouds, photogrammetry and laser scanning, data processing, simulated reconstructions on practical case studies of cultural heritage objects.

Registration for this event is available here.

To know the dates of the LabDays, you can consult the page LabDays – WEAVE (weave-culture.eu)

outcomes of PAGODE Final Conference: interesting keynotes, good presentations and nice video pitches from the content providers are now available

Discovering Chinese Heritage in Europeana – video recordings

See the full programme here: https://photoconsortium.net/pagode/final-conference/

Recordings of the event are made available on the same page.

PAGODE is a Generic Service project granted by the European Commission in the frame of the Connecting Europe Facility Programme, in support to Europeana. Several European cultural institutions participated in the project as partners and are associated to contribute with their digital collections about Chinese cultural heritage.

In this two-day conference, speakers shared their experiences of making Chinese cultural heritage collections accessible via Europeana and of developing tools towards this direction. The project results were also presented as well as exchange of knowledge and best practices that support the digital transformation of cultural heritage institutions with a focus on Chinese Cultural Heritage hosted in European Cultural Institutions.

A better understanding of the cultural values of China and of the cultural exchanges between China and Europe will allow European institutions to connect and share more widely their collections and metadata across new sectors and borders, increasing awareness and usage of Europeana internationally.

#EuropeanaChina

#CEFTelecom

#ConnectingEurope

#allezculture

21-24 September 2021-Venice, Italy

The European Cultural Heritage Summit 2021 “For a new European Renaissance”

The 2021 edition of European Cultural Heritage Summit took place from 21 to 24 September 2021 in Venice, Italy, organised by Europa Nostra, the European Voice of Civil Society Committed to Cultural Heritage, with the support of the European Union (through the Creative Europe and Horizon 2020 programmes) under the patronage of European Parliament and in collaboration with other European and Italian partners.
The format of the event was hybrid: a selected and limited number of stakeholders was on-site while a wider audience had the opportunity to engage with the event virtually, in livestreaming.

The event was the occasion to celebrate excellence in cultural heritage skills, and to debate the value of cultural heritage for a sustainable and inclusive post-pandemic recovery of Europe.
It also offered the opportunity to discuss and demonstrate the role of cultural heritage for ensuring the success of two key citizen-driven initiatives launched by the EU institutions: the New European Bauhaus, of which Europa Nostra is proud to be civil society partner, and the Conference on the Future of Europe.

Some highlights of the Summit:

“Saving Endangered Venice & its Lagoon: How to Build Back Better?” meeting
the 2021 European Heritage Award Ceremony co-hosted by the European Commission and Europa Nostra to celebrate the winners of the European Heritage Awards / Europa Nostra Awards 2021 and of the ILUCIDARE Special Prizes 2021 (during which the four Grand Prix laureates and the winner of the Public Choice Award were announced)
the European Heritage Policy Agora “From the New European Bauhaus to the New European Renaissance”, that brought together policy-makers at all levels as well as key heritage stakeholders in a series of high-level debates on the most topical issues for the cultural heritage ecosystem in Europe.

A concrete outcome of the Agora was the Venice Call to Action: “For a New European Renaissance”.

It contains over than 10 concrete and actionable proposals aiming European leaders at all levels of governance to duly integrate culture and cultural heritage in their ongoing and future priorities.

More information on the event at https://www.europanostra.org/european-heritage-summit/

UNL is one of the two public Universities located in Lisbon and it is the best ranked Portuguese university in QS Ranking 50 under 50

Meet WEAVE Team: Universidade NOVA de Lisboa

With the WEAVE 3D Modelling LabDay fast approaching, scheduled for October 1, 2021 from 10-11GMT, the WEAVE team is pleased to introduce the University Nova Lisboa (UNL), located in Portugal.

UNL is one of the two public Universities located in Lisbon and it is the best ranked Portuguese university in QS Ranking 50 under 50 (36th). NOVA is committed to the construction of the European Higher Education Area and all its courses are organized under the principles of the Bologna Agreement. The university includes, besides the Rectorat, 5 Faculties (Science and Technology; Social and Human Sciences; Business and Economics; Medical Sciences; Law), 3 Institutes (Tropical Medicine; Technology and Biochemistry; Statistics and Information Management) and 1 School of Public Health. It offers graduate courses (1st cycle), masters (2nd cycle), doctoral courses (3rd cycle) and postgraduate courses covering a comprehensive array of fields of knowledge.

With more than 19,000 students, 1,100 academics and 500 non-academic staff, NOVA is an active member of UNICA and YERUN networks and has a consolidated experience within European programmes, such as Tempus, Erasmus and Erasmus Mundus, as well as it is involved in cooperation with North-American, African and Brazilian universities. These partnerships are expanding the initiatives of joint degrees and also of R&D projects and competitiveness.

Research at NOVA has been growing and developing, both at quantitative and qualitative levels. Universidade NOVA de Lisboa hosts 40 Research and Development Units (R&D Units), 15 of which are research partnerships between NOVA and other national institutions. In 2013, the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FC&T) evaluated 75% of the R&D Units with “Exceptional”, “Excellent” or “Very Good”. These results were way above the national average of Portuguese Universities.

Within the WEAVE project, the UNL team will offer technical and scientific expertise, leading on the MotionNotes development, a digital and open web-based video annotator for both video streams and recorded videos, which focuses on the annotation of movements, targeting dance and performance professionals. MotionNotes has been developed within the CultureMoves Generic Services project.

The current version of MotionNotes allows only for manual annotations. In WEAVE they will integrate innovative ML/AI algorithms to perform semi-automatic recognition of specific gestures and movements (dance steps, for instance), outputs which can be used to identify Europeana videos containing dance or be re-used outside the toolbox as a software library and dataset. Moreover, MotionNotes will be extended to allow annotations in 3D space, representing information about what the performers are doing, and also about where they are in the physical space, along with their moving patterns. For the visualization of the performance space, images and 3D models will be used, thus opening up new possibilities of re-using 3D content of Europeana. MotionNotes will be a 3rd. party hosted tool that will connect with Europeana CSP via Europeana APIs.

The team includes Carla Fernandes, Nuno Correia, Stephan Jürgens, Rui Rodrigues and João Diogo.

Carla Fernandes (f) is invited Professor and Principal Investigator at FCSH – NOVA University Lisbon, head of the European Research Council-funded BlackBox Lab on Arts&Cognitionat FCSH – Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. The project title is “A collaborative platform to document performance composition: from conceptual structures in the backstage to customizable visualizations in the front-end”. Previously she was Principal Investigator of the “TKB project” (A Transmedia Knowledge-Base for performing arts) funded by the National Foundation for Science and Technology in Portugal and Research Partner in EU-funded projects (“Inside Movement Knowledge”, “LABO 21”, “Europeana-Space” or “CultureMoves” more recently) at the crossings of Arts&Science and the digitalization of intangible Cultural Heritage. At present her research focus is in the intersection of Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Gesture Studies and the Performing Arts (from cognitive and ethnographic perspectives), particularly concerning the annotation of multimodal corpora in dynamic digital archives for the analysis/documentation of contemporary dance. Supervisor of 7 PhD theses; scientific consultant for dance-related structures in Europe, Brazil and Mozambique; author of numerous papers and book chapters in international peer-reivewed publications.

Nuno Correia is a Full Professor at NOVA. He is the coordinator of the Multimodal Systems area of the NOVA-LINCS research unit. Nuno Correia is currently the coordinator of the PhD program in Computer Science and the FCT NOVA coordinator of the PhD program in Digital Media. His research interests cover several aspects of interactive multimedia, creativity, cultural heritage and digital arts. He was a researcher at Interval Research, Palo Alto, CA, and a researcher at INESC, Portugal. He participated in several EU funded research projects (recently the EC funded H2020 project Cognitus and the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) CultureMoves) and evaluated national and international projects. Current work, supported through national projects and new EU projects (T-Factor, CRAFT, WEAVE), includes video archives, mobile image processing, AR and VR, multimodal interfaces for exploring art collections, and art+technology initiatives . Nuno Correia supervised 14 doctoral theses and about 60 master theses already completed and currently supervises several doctoral and master dissertations. He is the author or co-author of more than 100 publications in journals, conferences and books. Nuno Correia is a member of the board (FCT NOVA representative) of the recently launched NOVA Institute of Arts and Technology.
Stephan Jürgens holds a PhD on Contemporary Choreography and New Media Technologies. His research interests concentrate on designing creative strategies for live performance involving interactive systems. He has been teaching movement research, interdisciplinary choreography and interactive system design in many different learning environments and institutions for many different people ranging from interested beginners to professional performers and MA/PhD students. He collaborated on several international research projects, such as TKB, BlackBox Arts&Cognition, and Moving Digits, all of which investigate the use of recent technology in Contemporary Dance and Live Performance. As a choreographer he has presented several works supported by the Portuguese Ministry of Culture. His collaborative digital performance work .txt won the national multimedia prize in 2010. Author of several papers and book chapters in international and national publications.

Rui Rodrigues is a PhD Student in Computer Science at NOVA LINCS and the Computer Science Department of the Faculty of Science and Technology of the NOVA University Lisbon. He is a Teaching Assistant at the Department of Systems and Informatics of the Setúbal School of Technology of the Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal, where he teaches classes about web development and service-oriented architectures. His research interests cover several aspects of web technologies, interactive multimedia and HCI. He was an IT professional for nine years, where he developed software and managed software development teams. Recently he finished participation in the project CEF CultureMoves, and now he joined the ongoing project CEF Weave.

HERIWELL Workshop: survey to population on the contribution of cultural heritage to societal well-being

On 4th October 2021 the workshop “HERIWELL Population Survey 2021” will be hold on-line organized by HERIWELL, a project launched by ESPON EGTC, with the aim of developing a pan-European methodology and analisys of impacts of Cultural Heritage (CH) that can be associated with ‘societal well-being’.

The workshop will discuss the results of the survey conducted in Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Poland and Spain, between May and June 2021, and which involved a total of 8,818 respondents.

The main objectives of the HERIWELL population survey were:

distinguish respondents based on their interest in the CH: “consumers”, “active” and non-interested users
identify the obstacles hindering the use of CH
show the impact of COVID-19 on people’s view of CH
determine the impacts of COVID-19 on people’s use of digitized content related to CH
identify different views regarding heritage- related quality of life, social cohesion, employment and heritage tourism.

Some survey findings that will be discussed during the workshop:

The negative impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on practices related to CH. The main consequences of COVID restrictions.
The link, recognized by all interviewees, between social well-being and CH: where does this recognition come from and what it could mean for future heritage policies.
How to control the impact of problematic aspects connected with CH, especially the effects of massive “heritage tourism” or “contested heritage”.

How to participate: fill in the form at https://iniziativeirs.wufoo.com/forms/heriwell-survey-to-population-findings-and-debate/
More details of the concept and current state of the HERIWELL project at https://www.espon.eu/HERIWELL
Download the workshop invitation here.

Successful workshop for the UNCHARTED project

The first UNCHARTED co-creation workshop that was concluded last Friday 17th of September 2021 signed an important step for the project.

The choise to run it in a hybrid manner, both in presence and on line, facilitated the interactions and fostered participation within the attendees.
The first day was dedicated to present case studies about the emergence of values of culture in cultural participation, with focus on live arts and media, cultural production and heritage management, and on cultural administration.
The programme was concluded by a special session titled “The challenge of representing cultural value” which hosted the contributions of two key-note speakers: Valentina Montalto of the Joint Research Centre and Ben Walmsley of the University of Leeds.
The second day was devoted to face the conflictual plurality of values in cultural participation, cultural production and heritage, and in cultural administration. All panels confronted synthetic presentations with practical reflections by institutional stakeholders.
A Round-table about Covid-19 impact on the values of culture in cultural participation closed the works followed by a concluding remarks session.

A cultural program enriched the workshop with:

a dance spectable (Dis)encounters by Estùdio de Dança Margarida Valle.
In an unexpected journey of transparente and fragiel hope, inequalities are revealed by (dis)encounters. Music by Dinu Lipatti “Piano Concertino in the Classical Style, OP.3: II. Adagio molto”
the exhibition TRAVESSIA by Susan Meiselas, curated by Lydia Matthews.
TRAVESSIA is an experiemntal, collaborative “expanded documentary” project.
Annotated photos focus on the African and Afro-descendent communities in Porto, exploring the variety of crossings that shape contemporary Black life in the city of Porto.”

A photo gallery reporting the two-day event is available on the workshop webpage.

the 27th Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists took place from 6 to 11 September

Historic Graves pilot from INCULTUM presented at EAA 2021

“Livestreaming the Past” is the title of a talk presented by INCULTUM partner Eachtra during the renowned meeting of EAA, the European Association of Archaeologists. Eachtra is engaged in The Historic Graves project, that is a community focused, grassroots heritage project where local community groups are trained in low-cost, high-tech field surveys of historic graveyards; also recording their own oral histories.

The EAA conference was a great occasion for dissemination of the Pilot and of INCULTUM as well. As part of a session on community archaeology in a Covid-19 world a video lecture was recorded, reflecting on how archaeology and heritage can be relevant and positive in the light of Covid-19 challenges. This talk by John Tierney explains Eachtra’s approach to community archaeology, the Covid-19 experience and impact, and concludes by outlining the intention of livestreaming archaelogical and participative work as a means of building an audience for collaborative projects at Eachtra.

Outdoors livestreaming is in facts becoming increasingly ‘doable’ due to improvements in mobile phone technology, 4G networks and affordable data. A new video aesthetic of chest and wrist mounted cameras is developing with large audiences for walks, bus and cycling journeys, often with little purpose other than to entertain an audience. Eachtra is applying the techniques developed by outdoors livestreamer’s to archaeology & heritage as part of the INCULTUM pilot 9 “Historic Graves”

As part of INCULTUM, Eachtra team have also recorded and tested a number of highly interesting livestreams, that can be reached in this YouTube compilation including 18 videos.

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

CES Winter school: second call for application, deadline 14 October 2021

The Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra (CES) is a scientific institution focused on research and advanced training within the Social Sciences and the Humanities through an inter and transdisciplinary approach. This winter, the Centre relaunches the second edition of its School with the title “Complexity and change: thinking, practices and processes for addressing global challenges”. Perfectly in line with the aims and the vision of the Centre, the School promotes productive, collaborative, critical and creative dialogues between different disciplines and modes of thinking, as well as a strong interrelationship between practice and theory conducive to the production of policy-oriented knowledge.
In this second edition the Winter School will address key global challenges, exploring a variety of critical, alternative and complementary views on how to address their complexity. As such, the School will combine lectures, seminars and creative moments of group discussion aimed at the integration of knowledge and experiences towards the production of new ideas and projects.

Targeted challenge themes:

Being and Thinking Together (in) Complexity
Knowing Together: Grasping the Complexity of the World
Living Together: Peace and Communities of Well-Being
Learning and Teaching Together
Changing and Acting Together

This School represents an opportunity for sharing learning and discoveries. Each activity is designed to build upon and interact with the others. The distinction between Speakers and Audience is dissolved in a climate of co-construction and collaborative dialogue where everyone takes the role of a participant who brings unique contributions to the discussions. It will use a variety of platforms and techniques to support rich interactions and dialogues between the participants and ensure conditions for the emergence of novel and creative ideas.

The School welcomes the participation of researchers, doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, practitioners of NGO and NGDO, activists.
The wider audience interested in the themes of the School is invited to follow the daily reports and to interact with the group by posing questions and raising issues through the Facebook page.

Important Dates:
Open call for applications: 7 June 2021
First Call – Deadline for Application: 10 September 2021
First Call – Communication of acceptance: 24 September 2021
Second Call – Deadline for application: 14 October 2021
Second Call – Communication of acceptance: 20 October 2021
Registration and payment: 31 October 2021
Preparatory induction meeting (mandatory for participation): 2nd week of November 2021 (day and time to be announced)
School days: 16, 17, 18, 19, 22 November 2021 (extra day: 23 November 2021

CES School website