Digital meets Culture

The mapping of impact assessment practices in CH of the SoPHIA Platform

The Sophia platform, is developing a Holistic Heritage Impact Assessment Model. The recent progresses of its evaluation are referred to the identification of the three axes along which the model can be developed which are domains, people, and time. Next step was to collect and analyse existing cases of impact assessment practices for their applicability. At this puropose, members of SoPHIA’s Advisory Board as well as stakeholders were asked to reflect upon their experiences and practices of impact assessment in cultural heritage.
This shared reflection led to the identification of an extensive amounts of information on good and poorly done practices in impact assessment: their review was proved to be a crucial exercise in identifying key factors that will define the process of developing the SoPHIA model and will constitute the bases for the creation and implementation of policy recommendations, operational programmes, and guidelines for the use of the model by heritage professionals.Link to the D2.1 Mapping of Impact Assessment Practices in Cultural Heritage
More information…

a project to demonstrate the potential of Data Analytics for tourism development in the area of Black Sea

Tourism 4.0 for the Black Sea

Tourism is increasingly popular at the Black Sea, while the challenges affecting the sustainability of the sector (environmental pressures, peak visits in limited areas, poor overall visibility, etc.) are rising at the same rate.

Tourism 4.0 for the Black Sea project strives to enable local stakeholders from public and private sector in tourism to increase their understanding of current trends, patterns of tourist flows and impact of visitors as well as predict the tourist impact for taking strategic data driven decisions to foster more sustainable tourism in the future. For this reason, collaboration of all stakeholders of tourism ecosystem as well as exchange of data between them will be promoted to spur innovative touristic services and policies tailored to the regional challenges and opportunities.

The aim of the T4.0 for the Black Sea project is to demonstrate the potential of Data Analytics for tourism development in the area of Black Sea. To achieve this, pilot services will be tested and the dialogue with regional stakeholders encouraged. Tourism 4.0 for the Black Sea project will boost sectoral cooperation and allow greater usage of the Industry 4.0 technologies in tourism. Data driven tourism will enable more sustainable development of tourism in the future.

More about the project: https://www.t4bs.eu/

under the Sicilian sun, a meeting between INCULTUM partners to discuss about the local pilot

INCULTUM in Sicily

On the 6th of July 2021, INCULTUM partners Promoter and GAL Elimos met to discuss about the work ongoing in the Pilot 4 Sicilian inland: Monti di Trapani.

Scope of the Pilot is to valorise the territory and the rural and archaeological heritage of an economically depressed area far from traditional tourist circuits. With the proposed actions, the aim is also to give visibility to rural groups by empowering them as valid agents by complementing their traditional knowledge with innovative elements that attract visitors.

INCULTUM Pilot will focus on the three municipalities in the inland of the Trapani territory, which are away from traditional tourist itineraries but with great cultural potential:

1. Agrarian heritage: persistence of traditional irrigation systems, of clear Islamic legacy, especially in Calatafimi-Segesta, where previous projects (such as MEMOLA) documented numerous associated hydraulic systems and infrastructures (mills, irrigation channels, wells, fountains, watering holes), both in the urban area and the surrounding territory.

2. Rural heritage built: represented by “bagli”, these are constructions linked to agricultural activity, dispersed habitat nuclei, many of them of clear Islamic origin, which have survived until recent times.

3. Archaeological heritage: Thanks to previous projects (FP7 MEMOLA in particular) most outstanding elements of each population are known: Calatafimi-Segesta has the Castello Eufemio and the Borgo (old neighbourhood that retains part of its organizational structure despite the strong abandonment), Terravecchia (the neighbourhood from which the entire population emerges, linked to the castle) and churches of great artistic interest (Carmine, Crocifisso, etc.). Custonaci has Pizzo Monaco, a fortified granary from the Islamic era, dated to the 11th century. It is a unique structure in Italy, formed by a fortified enclosure with numerous inside cells dedicated to the storage of agricultural surpluses and the most precious goods of the members of the Islamic community that lived in a nearby settlement.

Finally, Buseto Palizzolo has Monte Luziano that seems to have been another fortified granary of Islamic times. These different archaeological elements are related to the daily activities of the different communities that have inhabited this territory over time.

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

All photos courtesy of Promoter.

Incredible pictures of Native Americans from old books to digital collections

Karen Hatzigeorgiou: U.S. History Images in public domain

text by Caterina Sbrana

Dear DIGITALMEETSCULTURE.NET readers, in these almost two years of collaboration with the magazine, I took care of proposing digital archives, online exhibitions, artistic experiences in which the digital technology meets art, dance, literature, historical events etc..

Most of the archives that I have proposed on my latest articles are made by universities, research centers, government agencies or partnerships among many organizations.
Today I would like to suggest the consultation of a site that was created by a single woman, whose name is Karen Hatzigeorgiou.

The site http://ushistoryimages.com/index.shtml , named U.S. History Images, collects drawings and engravings of United States history, which she found in ancient books.

“I decided that this was a special niche that should be shared with others. What better way to learn about and appreciate the history of the United States than through the illustrations of artists from the last century and a half?”, she said.

The Home page of U.S. History Images by Karen Hatzigeorgiou ; on the left there is the list of topics, the first of which is Native Americans; http://ushistoryimages.com/index.shtml

The digital images that we find on the website primarily come from books published from as early as 1842 up to 1922. Of course those books are affected by the stereotypes of that time, but Karen says herself that, even if she doesn’t agree with those views, she wanted to present “the images as authentically as possible, without censorship”. Karen suggests users to keep in mind the prejudices that could have affected the authors, while browsing the site.

In Karen’s website I focused my attention on images of Native Americans. To appreciate the iconography of the different tribes, you can start from the Site Map and entering the section ‘Native Americans Tribes’.

Geronimo, the chief of the Apaches; below the picture, Karen indicates the Source: Wood, Norman B. The Lives of Famous Indian Chiefs. Aurora: American Indian Historical Publishing Company, 1906.

The name “Geronimo” opens the Native American section. This section contains an assortment of seven black and white and color images. On the site there are other Indian leaders such as Tecumseh or King Philip.

You can also find drawings related to the art of Native Americans, paintings of clothes, artifacts as stone pipe, flutes, jewelry, illustrations, etc.

The list of American Indian tribes is long. There are illustrations of Indians, belonging to different tribes. Karen counts 38 tribes, and places them in alphabetical order, from the little known (to the writer) Algonquin, Ponca, Zuni to the most known Cherokee, Kiowa, Navajo, Sioux.

Native american clothes: Kiowa moccasins; Source Humfreville, J. Lee. Twenty Years Among Our Savage Indians. Hartford: The Hartford Publishing Company, 1897; http://ushistoryimages.com/native-american-clothes.shtm

A small section is dedicated to paintings of Native Americans women showing clothes, jewelry, everyday life scenes like the one you can see in the image below:

Native American Women; Wood, Norman B. The Lives of Famous Indian Chiefs. Aurora: American Indian Historical Publishing Company, 1906; http://ushistoryimages.com/native-american-women.shtm

Karen’s site on U.S. History Images starts with the section named Native Americans and then continues with Native American Tribes, Native American Culture up to the Civil War with 3 dedicated sections about the outbreak of the war and the battles of 1861 and 1862. In the site, as explained in the caption that opens the U.S. History Images section, there are many other sections that are related to later periods of American history. Other sections concern colonies, slavery, agriculture.

It is not difficult to understand what Karen writes about her commitment: “This website is a work in progress and new images will be added, in chronological order, over time.”

I really appreciate the work that Karen is doing because I think it’s important to make accessible the documents that many students often can not find, because they are contained in rare books. I think that the effort of all of us for digitising the cultural heritage contained in rare books that we own, and for making them available as part of a collective heritage is a interesting step towards a modern, democratic and participatory society.

https://guides.library.upenn.edu/c.php?g=475958&p=3255323

http://ushistoryimages.com/index.shtml

http://ushistoryimages.com/geronimo.shtm

http://ushistoryimages.com/native-american-clothes.shtm

http://ushistoryimages.com/native-american-women.shtm

Bio

Call for nomination is open

Let’s save Europe’s endangered heritage: the 7 Most Endangered Programme 2022

The last 29th June, EuropaNostra launched the Call for Nominations for the 7 Most Endangered programme 2022 which will be open until 17th September 2021.

It is a civil society campaign, launched for the first time in 2013, to save Europe’s endangered heritage; it is run by Europa Nostra in partnership with the European Investment Bank Institute and with the support of the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.
The scope of the initiative is to raise awareness, propose recommendations for action and seeks to rally support to save the selected endangered sites.
In addition, the 7 Most Endangered Program provides the possibility for the 7 selected sites to be eligible for an EIB Heritage Grant of up to 10,000 euros to start the implementation of actions, studies or assistance measures for the threatened site.
The applications will be discussed by an international advisory panel, comprising specialists in history, archaeology, architecture, conservation and finance, who shortlist the most endangered monuments and sites; the final list of 7 sites will be selected by the Board of Europa Nostra.
Each case will be evaluated by teams of experts representing Europa Nostra and the European Investment Bank Institute, together with the organizations that nominated the sites. These multidisciplinary teams will provide expert advice, identify possible sources of funding and help mobilize broad support to save these heritage landmarks. They will also provide a number of recommendations for future action.

The call requires to provide a series of specific information to evaluate the state of the site: in addition to the description of the designated site, its specific value for the local community and in the European dimension must be specified as well as the damage already incurred, its current state, what are the threats (natural, man-made or both) and the likely path of deterioration, if corrective measures are not taken;
further information to be provided concern the actions necessary to save the site and the short and long term strategy for their implement.

What are you waiting for? Do you know an endangered heritage gem in Europe? Nominate it for the 7 Most Endangered Programme 2022!

Here the call.

For more information about the 7 Most Endangered programme, visit the dedicated website and read the latest news.

online, 21st July 2021 h. 1 pm

Digital Storytelling Festival

Europeana, the European gateway to digital cultural heritage, is reflecting about digital storytelling since a long time, also thanks to a dedicated task force on the topic, run by the Europeana Communicators Community with 26 members from 14 countries. Storytelling is important to engage various types of audiences with a variety of tools such as online exhibitions, apps and videogames, video content and podcasts with entertainment or educational purposes.

Effective storytelling can really be crucial in reaching better and more audiences, sharing knowledge and enablying participation in cultural heritage. Cultural Heritage audiences want to feel informed by digital stories, but also curious, immersed, inspired and connected by them. It is this that sets storytelling apart from other content types; and it is this that gives storytelling such a role to play in engagement and community-building across the cultural heritage sector.

Digital Storytelling Festival

Among the initiatives aiming at exploring and promoting Digital Storytelling, the Festival was created as an online event inviting cultural heritage professionals to discover resources and tools to create digital content, explore ways to boost audience engagement online and discover the value of Open GLAM.

More about the Digital Storytelling Festival: https://medium.com/digital-storytelling-festival

This first edition of the Europeana Digital Storytelling Festival actively encouraged people to create digital stories from openly licensed cultural heritage collections in Europeana.

During this Closing Online Event, we will:

announce the contest winners
explore the submissions
discuss the opportunities and challenges related to storytelling and work with openly licensed cultural heritage collections
showcase inspiring examples of storytelling by professionals from the culture sector

Registration to the Closing Online Event: https://pro.europeana.eu/event/digital-storytelling-festival-closing-online-event

adding richer and interlinked metadata to existing collections in Europeana helps to make them come to surface and be more visible and easily searchable

PAGODE, an effort for annotating digital heritage collections

image: Wereldculturen Museum CC-BY via Europeana

PAGODE – Europeana China is a project aiming to highlight digital collections of Chinese heritage, with a particular attention on those made available by various cultural heritage institutions in Europeana, the European digital library. Many of those collections would benefit from additional and richer information (i.e. metadata) to make the resources more visible and easily searchable.

Among the activities in PAGODE, a big effort is deployed to annotate and enrich with additional metadata a selection of existing collections from Europeana. This is done in two different actions:

Automated semantic enrichment: by the use of algorithms and artificial intelligence, additional metadata are extracted from the existing records. The additional metadata are then re-associated to the cultural resource, also adding links to authority files and established LOD thesauri. A human-in-the-loop approach in the validation of the enrichments guarantees the highest level of confidence for these AI-generated information, thus sending back to Europeana trustable metadata. This task is coordinated by partner PostScriptum.

Deep curatorial annotation on selected objects: this is also called the PAGODE Annotation Pilot, and the action makes use of a crowdsourcing platform, where users can access curated collections sourced from Europeana and manually “tag” each record with appropriate keywords about places, subjects and highly-specific terms related to Chinese heritage. This task is coordinated by partner Photoconsortium.

Both actions are based on specific lists of keywords developed by the Sinologists, specialized in Chinese heritage semantics, of the University of Ljubljana.

Expected outcomes:

While the automated semantic enrichments are now completed, offering additional metadata to over 20.000 existing records in Europeana, the Annotation Pilot is continuing all across the summer, expecting to offer back to Europeana over 3.000 items with curated annotations.

Two campaigns were deployed in the past months: Scenes and People of China, consisting in ca. 1.900 records annotated with over 26.000 tags; and Artefacts, consisting in ca. 600 records with over 6.900 tags.

Additionaly, a summer annotation sprint is currently ongoing with participation of students of digital humanities master courses at the University of Ljubljana and at KU Leuven. Expected result from the students’ annotation sprint is to achieve additional 1.000 objects enriched with about 24.000 tags.

A dedicated seminar in the PAGODE Digital Festival series, set on 31st August 2021 h. 10.30, will showcase the impact of this crowdsourced annotation activity in terms of user engagement with digital cultural heritage and also in education.

PAGODE – Europeana China is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility Programme of the European Union, under GA n. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2019/1931839

in Karlsruhe (Germany) and online, 2-4 December 2021

EAI ArtsIT 2021 – 10th EAI International Conference: ArtsIT, Interactivity & Game Creation

image from EAI website © Badisches Landesmuseum, foto ARTSIT Uli Deck

ArtsIT takes place from December 2nd to 4th as a hybrid event at the UNESCO Creative City of Media Arts Karlsruhe, Germany, and in Cyberspace.

The conference brings together researchers, practitioners, artists, and academia to present and discuss the symbiosis between art and information technology. Since 2009 ArtsIT has become a leading scientific forum for the dissemination of cutting-edge research results in the intersection between art, science, culture, performing arts, media, and technology. The role of artistic practice using digital media is also to serve as a tool for analysis and critical reflection on how technologies influence our lives, culture, and society. ArtsIT is therefore not only a place to discuss technological progress but also a place to reflect on the impact of art and technology on sustainability, responsibility, and human dignity. Besides the main track, the event also focuses on the advances seen in two areas that have significantly contributed to the field in the last years, namely, virtualization and artificial intelligence with special sessions.

All information about the event is avialble here: https://artsit.eai-conferences.org/2021/

Calls for papers are open until 30 July:

online event, 29 November - 3rd December 2021

MTSR 2021, 15th Metadata and Semantics Research Conference

The 15th International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR 2021), as well as the SPECIAL TRACK on METADATA & SEMANTICS for CULTURAL COLLECTIONS & APPLICATIONS, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, will take place virtually on 29th November – 3rd December 2021.

Call for papers open – Submission deadline: July 25th, 2021

AIM AND SCOPE

Cultural Heritage collections are essential knowledge infrastructures that provide a solid representation of the historical background of human communities. These knowledge infrastructures are constructed from and integrate cultural information derived from diverse memory institutions, mainly libraries, archives and museums. Each individual community has spent a lot of effort in order to develop, support and promote its own systems, tools and metadata for the management of cultural information, mainly related to its particular resources and use.

In this framework, the management of the cultural information has to deal with challenges related to (i) metadata modeling, specification, standardization, extraction, (semantic) enrichment, mapping, integration, effective use, and evaluation, (ii) knowledge representation as conceptualization to provide the context for unambiguously interpreting metadata, and (iii) information integration from different contexts for the provision of integrated access, reuse and advanced services to users.

At the same time, there are also inter-domain efforts targeted to semantically align data (research data, educational data, public sector information etc.) to cultural information. New challenges are also emerged from the need to incorporate cultural information into the new publication paradigms, where a variety of resources (data, metadata, processes, results, etc.) are linked and integrated, providing better shareability and reusability. Currently, Linked (Open) Data, as part of the Semantic Web Technology, is having a major role in modernizing cultural heritage collections. Providing to users the possibility to re-use and integrate data into their own systems is currently more than a need, given that transparency and access to information is a prerequisite. A critical factor to the effectiveness of many aspects of all the above efforts is the quality of metadata, as interpreted by its context and use and evaluated by the proper measures and methods. Many institutions and aggregate infrastructures are dealing with the poor quality of metadata that inevitably results in poor integration, search and reuse, while their enrichment, in terms of contextualization, co-referencing, alignment, etc., is really challenging.

The aim of this Special Track is to maintain a dialogue where researchers and practitioners working on all the aspects of the cultural information will come together and exchange ideas about open issues at all stages of the cultural heritage information life cycle. The track also welcomes works related to semantics and applications for new approaches to cultural information publication and sharing, as well as to interlinking to other datasets published in the Semantic Web universe.

TOPICS

The papers in this special track should be original and of high quality, addressing issues in areas such as:

* Cultural Heritage metadata models, standards, ontologies, knowledge organization and representation systems

* Cultural Heritage information integration, interoperability and mappings

* Automated extraction of metadata, entities, and patterns from Cultural Heritage resources

* Metadata manual or automated (Semantic) enrichment and search

* Metadata quality metrics, tools and services

* Linked Open Data approaches in the Cultural Heritage domain

* Publication, linking and citation of Cultural Heritage information and resources

* Large volume content management

* 3D models-indexing, storage and retrieval approaches

* Infrastructures for sharing content

* Digital Curation workflows and models

* Provenance and preservation metadata for Cultural Heritage digital resources

More information on submission can be found at the MTSR 2021 call for papers web page.

IMPORTANT DATES

July 25th, 2021: Submission deadline

August 31th, 2021: Notification of decision (Acceptance/Rejection)

September 20th, 2021: Camera-ready papers due

November 29th – December 3rd 2021: the Virtual MTSR 2021 Conference will take place

SPECIAL TRACK CHAIRS

* Michalis Sfakakis, Dept. Archives, Library Science and Museology, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece (sfakakis@ionio.gr)

* Lina Bountouri, Dept. Archives, Library Science and Museology, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece and EU Publications Office – European Commission, Luxembourg (linabountouri@gmail.com)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE (TBA)

8th July 2021,Porto (PT)

Values in participation in cultural activities, UNCHARTED at KISMIF 2021 conference

This week, from 6 to 10 July, the KISMIF (Keep It Simple Make It Fast) 2021 conference, will be held in Porto, Portugal. This event is an international academic/cultural/artistic event based in the city of Porto, open for contributions from the global community of artists, researchers and activists working on all aspects of underground scenes and do-it-yourself (DIY) cultures.

The event aims to promote the debate on the most varied artistic fields: music, theater, performing arts, cinema, literature and poetry, graffiti and urban art, graphic design, drawing, architecture, radio, graphic design, drawing, architecture, cartoons and comics….
It intends to provide all participants with a unique sensory and scientific experience in terms of global DIY cultures and offers a cultural program formed by a set of artistic events, with a focus on underground music and its artistic expressions.

Each edition of the KISMIF Conference offeres a summer school where participants can analyze and discuss in depth some specific issues around the topics covered in the conference.

The 2021 edition is the fifth of the event and the topic will be ‘DIY Cultures and Global Challenges’.

The 8th July, UNCHARTED project will be present at the event with the Panel “Values in non-professional participation in cultural and artistic activities: examples from the UNCHARTED project” based on values from cultural participation.
The themes explored will be:

Values from Community-engaged artistic projects
Values from culture and community based creative tourism
Values of autonomous culture: Illegal musical events in the times of COVID-19
The Values of Remote Participation in Choirs and Cultural Initiatives during Covid-19

Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra (PT), CNRS-Université de Montpellier (FR) and Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths University of London (UK) are the UNCHARTED partners involved in the Panel with their presentations.

The ll Architecture POETRY PHOTOGRAPHIC PERFORMANCE by University of Bolton, School of the Arts (United Kingdom) will conclude this section.

The conference will have a hybrid format: on site and on-line.

More information at: https://www.kismifconference.com/
Read the programme at: https://www.kismifconference.com/programme/