Digital meets Culture

online, 11-12 May 2021

Research and digital cultural heritage: new impact horizons

On 11 and 12 May 2021, Europeana will bring together cultural heritage professionals, policy makers, academics and researchers to discuss impact horizons of research when nurtured by digital cultural heritage.

Digital content and technology democratise access to cultural heritage and can stimulate positive social and economic change, especially when they support Research and Innovation. The cultural heritage sector is exploring new ways of community engagement, participatory and co-creation processes, in parallel with researchers in the Social Sciences and Humanities, who are the most interested in the potential reuse of digital cultural heritage. For their part, policy-makers and funders increasingly require social impact to be considered in research design and outcomes.

This symposium is the first event that brings together an impact-oriented approach and the research perspective within the Europeana context. The scientific committee has arranged the programme across four sessions to facilitate participation from different time zones. Twenty speakers will represent the research and cultural heritage sectors and the policy making sphere.

PROGRAMME AND REGISTRATION: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/research-and-digital-cultural-heritage-new-impact-horizons-tickets-150686406097

The application deadline is Tuesday, 1 June 2021

Immaterial Future Innovation Award

April 19–June 1, 2021

Immaterial Future association is calling for innovative solutions that contribute to unleash the full power of culture. The winner will receive €50,000 non-equity funding to be awarded during the ceremony at viennacontemporary art fair in September, 2021 in Vienna, Austria.

The open call welcomes projects that leverage technology to develop:

new business models that enable self-sustainable cultural production and distribution;
distribution models that allow wide access to cultural experiences without losing authenticity.

Applying projects can be run by a startup company, academic entity, for-profit or non-profit organization. For more information on eligibility criteria and application guidelines, visit

https://immaterialfuture.org/award/

The application deadline is Tuesday, June 1, 2021, at 11:59pm CET.

Six selected finalists will be invited to the Forum in Vienna to showcase their projects to potential partners and investors with a specific interest in culture and technology. The best submission will be selected after the showcase.

The Award ceremony will take place in Vienna, September 7, 2021, during the Immaterial Future Forum. The Forum itself is a parallel event to viennacontemporary art fair.

Dmitry Aksenov, Chairman of the Board of Immaterial Future: “We believe that culture has an intrinsic capability to support itself and to boost other spheres of human activity such as business, politics, science and technology”.

Pierre-François Marteau, Board Secretary of Immaterial Future: “Culture has the potential to reach far more people than it does today, and to change their lives for the better. Technology can play a major role in unlocking this potential”.

Contact email for any enquiries: opencall@immaterialfuture.org

About Immaterial Future association

Immaterial Future (IF), a Vienna-based non-profit association, is established in 2021 to shift our world’s growth model towards intangible production and consumption, with culture as main vector of change. It aims to leverage culture’s huge untapped potential to positively impact every single human, breaking away from its elitist confines and becoming more accessible to all.

For more details please visit https://immaterialfuture.org

The launch of the Craft Hub project: Investigating and Documenting Craft Skills and Processes

Craft Hub is a European project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme focused on Craft in the context of cultural heritage and its continuing relevance in contemporary practice.
This opening conference focuses on 3 pillars of sharing best practice and practical advice in the form of creativity, heritage and connectivity and aims to inform participants about how they can actively engage and benefit from the Craft Hub Project.
The project implementation is based on the investigation and documentation of craft skills and processes, their application in creative practice across Europe; questions of cultural specificity & individual motivations of practitioners.
Main goals of the project are:
– the creation of a Digital Repository in the form of a material library and multi-media content
– to heritage concerns by exploring and documenting at risk & lost/ recovered Craft skills & processes
– to identify cultural/transnational attitudinal differences to Craft and to test the emerging Repository
Main planned activities:
– 42 transnational maker residencies
– 305 days of outreach work
– 1 festival
– 7 exhibitions
– 2 conferences
Read more on the project’s website.

HERILAND Project: Cultural Heritage and the planning of European Landscapes

HERILAND 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.
The project is rooted in Europe’s long history of conserving its rich heritage and landscape assets in town and country. Throughout the 20th century, great progress was made in creating structures and promulgating principles to guide heritage and landscape conservation, but as the 21st century proceeds, society is challenged by new far-reaching changes. These include various forms of migration, greater digital connection, environmental degradation and climate change. Confronted with such a fast-changing context, heritage management needs new ideas, tools and training to ensure that interdisciplinary, research-based heritage, landscape management and spatial planning are positively integrated with business activity, with city and rural development, and with democratic participation in decision making that shapes the future landscape. This is HERILAND’s key challenge.
Through HERILAND, a consortium of 6 key academic and non-academic organizations, with 21 partners in civil society and business, aims to empower a new generation of academics, policy makers, practitioners, professionals and entrepreneurs.
The research design positions heritage in the frame of five transformation processes which are identify as key challenges to the heritage management of the 21st century: The Spatial Turn, Democratisation, Digital Transformations, Shifting Demographies and Contested Identities, and Changing Environments. Using this framework, 15 PhD researchers will be provided with advanced training combining theoretical and instrumental knowledge in a series of research seminars, living labs and secondments with the project’s public and private partners.
Project’s website.

discussing on how to engage citizens in heritage research

CitizenHeritage presented at DTCE 2021

The 1st International Online Conference on Digital Transformation in Culture and Education took place on 14-16 April 2021, hosted by the Serbian Library Association Section for Digital Transformation.

The Conference provided an excellent forum for digital librarians, researchers and practitioners to present and discuss the latest advancement and problems as well as future directions and trends in digital transformation in today’s ubiquitous virtual environment challenged by pandemic “new normal”.

In this excellent occasion for dissemination and networking, CitizenHeritage was presented by Antonella Fresa during the session “IT Infrastructure in cultural and educational institutions” chaired by Anton Purnik (Russian State Library for Young Adults, Moscow, Russia).

The conference was live streamed and all the recordings are available in the conference website: https://digital.bds.rs/conference-2021/

submission deadline 31st May 2021

Europeana Research Grants 2021

The Europeana Research Grants Programme is intended for cultural heritage and/or research institutions, comprising universities and foundations. The theme for 2021 call for proposal is Crowdsourcing & Research, with a focus on encouraging cross-sectorial collaborations.

While crowdsourcing is generally meant as a participatory method underpinning Citizen Science, we aim to move beyond this concept and consider the role that researchers can play both as contributors to crowdsourced projects and reusers of digital resources collected or enriched in this way. As potential contributors of content, they may feel that their expertise is not adequately rewarded. As potential reusers of content, they may question its reliability.

Europeana welcomes proposals for events that can help focus issues related to crowdsourcing and find constructive solutions to them, especially if these solutions come out from recent or ongoing experiences. More generally, the proposals must be relevant by reference to the framework defined by the EU’s strategies and programmes related to Research and Innovation. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

Participatory research focusing on cultural heritage (e.g Public History)
Data ownership, accountability and value in the context of crowdsourced research
Re-creation / Re-contextualisation
De-colonising of metadata
Community generated metadata
Post-custodial perspective

Proposals can address the field of cultural heritage in general or focus on one of its specific sectors (such as galleries, libraries, archives, or museums). They can also focus on challenges and opportunities for specific academic disciplines that use digital cultural heritage as a resource for research (for instance all the disciplines within the humanities, such as archaeology, history, linguistics, history of art and architecture).

Read more and apply: https://pro.europeana.eu/page/grants-programme

a new CEF project, focused on intangible cultural heritage, starts today with official kick-off, including all the partners and the representative of EU executive agency CINEA - HaDEA

WEAVE – Widen European Access to cultural communities Via Europeana

img. from the welcome presentation at WEAVE kick-off meeting.

Today 14th April 2021 the kick-off meeting of WEAVE takes place online, hosted by project coordinator IN2. This project aims to develop a framework to link the tangible and intangible heritage of cultural communities, safeguarding the rich and invaluable cultural heritage which they represent. All partners are now reviewing the tasks foreseen in the project and planning for initial work. The project officer Ms. Kyriaki Tragouda of CINEA – HaDEA executive agency of the European Commission is also participating in the meeting.

WEAVE will contribute to preserving for future generations the richness of the European identity and its cultural plurality. In particular, the project will aggregate 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. The project will carry out several capacity building activities to develop a closer connection between cultural heritage institutions (CHIs), minority cultural communities and Europeana.

group photo WEAVE kick-off

Additionally, WEAVE will develop a set of open and reusable tools which will employ a mix of AI, machine learning, natural language processing, big data analysis and innovative interface engineering. The toolkit will allow the management of annotations, semi-automatic recognition of specific gestures and movements and visualisation of performances and 3D models. Finally, it will offer training, capacity building and guidelines with a focus on proper handling of immaterial cultural heritage and working with vulnerable and marginalised communities.

WEAVE is a Europeana Generic Services project, and it is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility of the European Union.

Subscribe the SoPHIA Newsletter and take part to the social platform!

SoPHIA – Social Platform for Holistic Impact Heritage Assessment aims to promote collective reflection within the cultural and political sector in Europe on the impact assessment and quality of interventions in historical environment and cultural heritage at urban level.
The Newsletter number 5 brings light to the environmental impacts produced by cultural heritage interventions when envisaging a holistic assessment model.
The bibliographical research on several documents addressing the environmental, social, economic and cultural domains allowed the project to create a map of best practices in the field, identify gaps and opportunities and acquired an understanding of all four domains and an overview of the state of the art in impact assessment methods.
Two of the three insights faced by this number regard the connection between Cultural Heritage, environment and natural landscapes wihile the third one announces the upcoming SoPHIA’s stakeholder virtual conference “Cultural Heritage – Rethinking Impact Assesments” that will be held on April 21-22, 2021.
Stay up to date with the progress of SoPHIA, subscribe now!
Direct link to Newsletter 5.

Save the date: April 21-22, 2021

SoPHIA’s Stakeholders Virtual Conference Cultural Heritage – Rethinking Impact Assessments

SoPHIA –Social Platform for Holistic Heritage Impact Assessment –, an EU research and innovation Horizon 2020 funded project, reviewed the literature, policy programmes and practices and mapped existing gaps, issues and problems. After consultations during the first Workshop with members of the Social Platform, a draft model was designed. The draft model has been tested in twelve case studies across Europe.
Against this background, SoPHIA invited researchers, practitioners, policymakers from Europe and beyond and anyone interested to a collective reflection on the diverse impact of cultural heritage during the two days SoPHIA´s Stakeholder Virtual Conference.
The first day faced pressing issues of cultural heritage. Those issues have proven to be relevant to the cases of cultural heritage interventions analysed in the project. Representatives from the cases and invited guest discussed with the audience main challenges and opportunities that have been encountered, in parallel panels:

bridging the gap between culture and sustainability
access and inclusion in public spaces and in cultural heritage education
opportunities and challenges of evaluation requirements
dissonant European cultural heritage
over-tourism in urban environments.

In the framework of panel 3, focused on how to assess social capital and access to larger cultural areas, Prof. Gabor Sonkoly from Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary, presented the contribution of the UNCHARTED project to this specific topic.

Based on the discussions, the programme of the second day centred on the findings of the SoPHIA case studies and the debate on the cultural heritage draft model for impact assessment was spurred. A virtual World Café allowed Conference participants to provide feedback and input on issues that related the concrete findings and the discussions of the first Conference day.
Agenda.
Speakers.
Conference’s topics.
For queries, please contact info@sophiaplatform.eu

online, 30 April 2021

Using Vocabularies and Linked data: #ConnectingArchaeology webinar

This webinar explores some of the ways that cultural heritage institutions can use controlled vocabularies and Linked Data to improve the discoverability of their content in Europeana.

Three speakers will give short presentations after which there will be time for questions and discussion.

‘Speaking one language: how vocabularies can help organise information’, Kerstin Arnold, Archives Portal Europe Foundation

Kerstin will provide an introduction defining what vocabularies are, how they can be used, and why it is useful to consider their implementation – on a local level as well as in the context of larger scale aggregation services.

‘Linked Data Vocabularies for Heritage Data’, Marcus Smith, Swedish National Heritage Board

Marcus will talk about how controlled vocabularies can be taken a step further to become linked data vocabularies, the advantages of doing so, and some examples in use within the heritage sector.

‘Exploiting vocabularies and linked data: in practice‘, Kate Fernie, CARARE

Kate will talk about how controlled vocabularies and linked data can be used in systems and services, and will demonstrate some examples including the Share3D metadata capture tool and the Europeana Archaeology Vocabulary service.

Programme and registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/using-vocabularies-and-linked-data-connectingarchaeology-webinar-tickets-146977933957