Digital meets Culture

online, 16-17 June 2021

On June 16 – 17, the Europeana Aggregators’ Forum will open their virtual doors to cultural heritage professionals and anyone with an interest in high quality, open cultural heritage content at the Europeana Aggregators’ Fair.

The event is a a great opportunity to find out more about how high quality cultural heritage content is being made accessible to new audiences through Europeana, and how you can get involved. An exciting programme will give participants the opportunity to listen to inspiring speakers, join panel discussions, take in training webinars and ask questions of the people working in aggregation.

If you’re interested in bringing your content to new audiences, meeting the people who work behind the scenes to make cultural heritage available through Europeana and receiving guidance and training from experts in this field, register now!

Coordinated by the European Commission

“Towards gender equality in the cultural and creative sectors” the new report by the OMC working group of Member States’ experts

The report “Towards gender equality in the cultural and creative sectors” focuses on the role that culture plays in promoting gender equality and how to achieve gender equality within the cultural and creative sectors.

It was drafted by the OMC (open method of coordination) working group of Member States’ experts and implements the Council Work plan for culture 2019-2022 when, for the first time, the promotion of gender equality and the fight against gender discrimination were identified as goals of the EU, including in culture.
The document focusses on the following key challenges:

gender stereotypes
sexual harassment
access to the labour market and the gender pay gap
access to resources
access to leadership positions and female entrepreneurship

A chapter is dedicated to examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women working in the cultural and creative sectors.

The report provides recommendations on how to achieve gender equality and diversity and use the potential of culture and arts as a vector for promoting these values.

It also displays an overview of over 250 good practices from all over the EU.

More information at https://ec.europa.eu/culture/news/new-report-recommends-how-close-gender-gaps-cultural-and-creative-sectors

Download the report here.

a three years journey across cultural tourism in Europe

Kicking – off the INCULTUM project

On the 4th of June 2021, the large group of partners from all over Europe met online to officially start the INCULTUM project. The core activities are about researching and empowering cultural tourism in peripheral areas, also unlocking their potential by the implementation of a series of local pilot projects.

Spanning from North to South and including a variety of natural and historical sites, the pilots will enable cross border collaborations and innovative approaches to sustainabel tourism and development. In facst, tourism is more than travelling and consumption: it is a way to learn and improve oneself, to enrich one’s vision and improve mutual understanding. Thus it has great potential when it comes to culture, nature, knowledge and personal experiences.

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

Nemercka Mountain in the Vjosa Valley (Albania)

The INCULTUM project deals with the challenges and opportunities of cultural tourism with the aim of furthering sustainable social, cultural and economic development. It will explore the full potential of marginal and peripheral areas when managed by local communities and stakeholders. Innovative participatory approaches will be adopted, transforming locals into protagonists, able to reduce negative impacts, learning from and improving good practices to be replicated and translated into strategies and policies.

The ten pilot cases of living territories and communities will be investigated and on the basis of the findings innovative customised solutions will be co-created. Additionally, pilots will be used to identify and compare drivers and barriers that account for the success or failure of participatory models. Pilots will also allow to assess outcomes and analyse the pre-conditions needed for a future full implementation and scaling up of potential solutions. Pilots will provide new quantitative and qualitative data that will be combined with official statistics and novel data gathered by the use of self-developed IT applications and the exploitation of previously untapped data sources.

The research behind the project will eventually generate recommendations for effective and sustainable policies, and will create new synergies among public and private stakeholders and new investments.

Ireland, photo by John Tierny

discussing the concept of citizen science as a participatory research methodology in cultural heritage

CitizenHeritage presented at NTNU event

CitizenHeritage project partner Katerina Zourou (Web2Learn) was invited by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Brussels office, to give a presentation about CitizenHeritage project on June 4.
The topic of the talk was “Citizen science initiatives in the cultural heritage sector: insights into open cultural data”

Citizen science — active public involvement in scientific research — is growing bigger, more ambitious, and more networked and supports the open science ideal through open knowledge circulation and open data (Irwin, 2018; European Commission, 2020). The presentation discusses the concept of citizen science as a participatory research methodology in cultural heritage and reviews good practices in creating and communicating open cultural data in citizen science initiatives.

A sample of 25 practices of European Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) that we analysed between December 2020 and March 2021 will be presented through the following nine dimensions of openness: Open access; Open data; Open metadata; Open metrics; Open-source software/hardware (use or development); Open access results; Open file formats, Open datasets and Open documentation. The analysis will take the form of data visualisations for the public. This presentation contributes to the understanding of barriers and enablers in the documentation of tangible and intangible cultural heritage in participatory, citizen-enhanced ways

Link to Abstract: https://www.ntnu.no/machform/view.php?id=946685

Katerina Zourou, PhD, is a senior researcher in learning and teaching from an open perspective (open educational resources and practices) and from a networking and collaboration perspective (collective learning, social networked learning). She is also head of Web2Learn in Greece. She acts as project leader or partner in transnational projects funded by the Council of Europe, the European Commission, and national funds.

Registration is now open for the 2021 European Research and Innovation Days

The EU annual meeting has recently opened the door to registration. This second on line edition is planned for the 23^th and the 24^th June 2021. As every year this Research and Innovation event organised by the European Commission, will bring together policymakers, researchers, entrepreneurs and the public to debate and shape the future of research and innovation in Europe and beyond.

The rich two-day programme will foster connections and collaborations between individuals and experts from all areas and will assure a dynamic and interdisciplinary discussion. The virtual event consists of two main areas: the Event Area (which hosts Live Sessions, Workshops, the Horizon Village, the Networking and the Game Zone) and the European Research and Innovation Exhibition featuring over 100 of the best research and innovation projects. Participants will be able to move easily from one area to the other and discover all interactive features available.

The European Research and Innovation Days is an unmissable event for all those who are willing to build a greener and more digital future.Participate!!! Register now and reach more information here. Follow the event on social media! #RIDaysEU

online 23-24 September 2021

Discovering Chinese Heritage in Europeana – PAGODE Final Conference

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 participate in the project as partners and are associated to contribute with their digital collections about Chinese cultural heritage. PAGODE project has set out to increase rich user experiences and high audience engagement with Europeana by proposing a thematic approach in the aggregation, curation and presentation of Chinese culture related content that is hosted in European museums and 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.

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.

#EuropeanaChina

#CEFTelecom

#ConnectingEurope

#allezculture

online 16-17 June 2021

PAGODE at Europeana Aggregators Fair

In June 2021 the Europeana Aggregators’ Forum and Europeana Foundation held the first ever Aggregators’ Fair, and PAGODE had a prominent participation with one ignite talk by Kostas Kostantinidis (Postscriptum) on day one and a dedicated session entitled Behind the scenes of PAGODE: building an aggregation value chain by Antonella Fresa (Promoter), Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik and Maja Veselič, (University of Ljubljana) and Sofie Taes (PHOTOCONSORTIUM) on day two.

At this online web conference, the Europeana Aggregators’ Forum opened their virtual doors to cultural heritage professionals and anyone with an interest in high quality, open cultural heritage content. The exciting programme gave participants the opportunity to listen to inspiring speakers, join panel discussions, take in training webinars and ask questions of the people working in aggregation. It was a great opportunity to find out more about how high quality cultural heritage content is being made accessible to new audiences through Europeana, and how institutions can get involved.

about Europeana Aggregators >>

CitizenHeritage webinar - online, 26th October 2021

From mainstream citizen science to new conceptualizations: insights from the cultural heritage sector

The European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) and its Working Group “Citizen science and universities” in the series of monthly webinars, will host a webinar on October 26 (16 CET) with three partners of the CitizenHeritage project. The topic of the 1h webinar is “From mainstream citizen science to new conceptualizations: insights from the cultural heritage sector”.

Presentations:

Katerina Zourou, Web2Learn. “Review of practices of Higher Education engagement in citizen enhanced open science in the area of cultural heritage”
Fred Truyen, KU Leuven. “CitizenHeritage: giving citizens a voice in Heritage studies”
Trilce Navarrete, Erasmus University Rotterdam. “Measuring the benefits of civic participation in academic research”

This webinar is held by the Erasmus+ KA2 project CitizenHeritage: Citizen Science Practices in Cultural Heritage: towards a Sustainable Model in Higher Education.

The participation of the UNCHARTED project in the WCFIA webinar

On May 14 2021, Professor Arturo Rodríguez Morató, UNCHARTED project’s Coordinator, gave a lecture on the topic “Research Perspectives on the Societal Value of Culture” at the Cultural Politics Seminar of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. The center, active since 1958, it is dedicated to confronting complex international, transnational, global, and comparative issues.
The UNCHARTED project was presented in that context. Within the WCFIA, the seminar on Cultural Politics offered a Interdisciplinary Perspectives and functioned as a forum for lectures and intellectual exchanges on cultural politics across disciplines and national or historical boundaries. The seminar was chaired by Panagiotis Roilos, professor of comparative literature and of Greek studies at Harvard University.
More information…

Widen the network: 5 new collaborations for the UNCHARTED project

During the last month, 5 new projects joined the UNCHARTED community, contributing to enrich the exchange of knowledge and expertise in the debate concerning the identification of cultural values and the impact of cultural policies in Europe.
INVENT is a research project funded under the H2020 Programme of the EU. It was selected under the same call of UNCHARTED, H2020-SC6-TRANSFORMATIONS-2019 and, on the basis of the similarity of interests and goals, the two projects started a fruitful collaboration that was recently formalized. The INVENT consortium aims to contribute to a “social turn” in cultural policies, that takes into account how the way of life and cultural participation of European citizens has been influenced by the mega-trends of globalization, European integration and the migrations that accompany them, the digital revolution, and rising social inequalities. The bottom-up approach of the project will provide insight into multiple, often mutually contradictory, concepts of culture and understandings of societal values of culture among various social (demographic, socio-economic, ethnic, religious…) groups in European societies.

Citizen Heritage (2020-2023) is a Strategic Partnership project funded by the European Commission in the frame of the Erasmus+ Programme aiming to provide Higher Education Institutions with novel approaches to include citizen science activities into Higher Education Institutions curricula, teaching and learning activities. Students and teachers can find a selection of good practices on how to benefit from knowledge circulation in and outside academia and how to adopt a more vibrant role in civil society.

HERILAND – Cultural Heritage and the Planning of European Landscapes – is a pan-European research and training network on cultural heritage in relation to Spatial Planning and Design. It is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 813883. Its major aim is to create a new generation of cultural heritage mediators. The mission of HERILAND College for Heritage Planning is to create socially, economically and environmentally sustainable landscapes, fostering social inclusiveness.

WEAVE –Widen European Access to cultural communities Via Europeana – is a new CEF project (2021-2022), focused on tangible and intangible heritage of cultural communities, to enrich Europeana with great content and develop new tools. WEAVE will contribute to preserving for future generations the richness of the European identity and its cultural plurality. In particular, the project aggregates over 5,000 new high-quality records to Europeana related to the rich and invaluable cultural heritage of minority cultural communities, and showcase these collections in a set of engaging editorials and a virtual exhibition.

CHARTER – European Cultural Heritage Skills Alliance– is a four years Erasmus+ funded project which brings together the expertise of some of the leading organisations in cultural heritage to ensure a long-lasting and durable sector. The Alliance will map the needs of the CH sector to identify skills shortages and mismatches in order to develop fitting training programmes for already active CH professionals. CHARTER unites 47 European cultural heritage actors covering 5 fields of analysis: safeguarding and preservation; crafts and traditional knowledge; dissemination and communication; knowledge and planning and management.

In the framework of its communication and dissemination activity the UNCHARTED project fosters new collaborations and welcomes projects and cultural institutions willing to share studies and experiences with the common goal of discovering the societal values of culture in a dynamic and pluralistic perspective.