Digital meets Culture

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

Exhibition: “A Century of Technology”

img. The Goddard Space Flight Center control room reflected in a mirror during tests of IBM System 360 Model 75, c. 1965-1977 – Telemuseet, CC BY-SA via Europeana.

This exhibition explores different aspects of the technological revolution of the 20th century, highlighting the inventions and events that had a direct impact on habits and daily life. It focused on innovations such as travelling to space, computing and industrial automation, but it also explores how technology has invaded people’s homes and it points out how the production and use of energy has been a crucial driver of technological change.
The virtual exhibition was coordinated by Sofie Taes from KU Leuven – Photoconsortium and created in the framework of the “CEF-project Europeana XX. A Century of Change” which focuses on the 20th century and its social, political and economic changes as documented in photographs, videos, paintings and files.
Read more…

Pisa (Italy), 23 September 2021

PAGODE at Museo della Grafica in Pisa

img. from the event

[Show as slideshow]

All photos by Rudy Pessina.

As a complementary event in the framework of PAGODE final conference, an exclusive invite-only meeting at the Museo della Grafica in Pisa was organized on 23rd September 2021, to present the two major outcomes of the project: the virtual exhibition China in Perspective, showcasing gems of chinese heritage preserved by renowned European cultural heritage institutions, and the prestigious book that accompanies the exhibition.

The project coordinator dr. Mauro Fazio of the Italian Ministry of Economic Development, the technical coordinator dr. Antonella Fresa of Promoter s.r.l. and the Museum’s director prof. Alessandro Tosi met with a selected number of stakeholders to share thoughts, experiences and impressions from this exciting project, that highlights Chinese heritage in Europe via Europeana, the digital gateway to European cultural heritage collections. Remote participation of Sofie Taes, curator of the China in perspective exhibition, allowed participants to get a glimps of the concept and rationale which drove the creation of the exhibition and the corresponsing chapter in the book.

Discover Europeana China feature page

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

investigating the impact and added value on career from Master Courses in these specialist domains.

Online Survey on Master Courses on Digital Humanities and Digital Cultural Heritage

Within the framework of the UNESCO Chair on Digital Cultural Heritage at the Cyprus University of Technology, as well as the current work in different EU funded projects in the area of Digital Cultural Heritage, we are working to investigate the impact and added value on the career of all the graduated students (alumni) from Master Courses in the domain of Digital Heritage, Digital Humanities, Digital Social Sciences.

Therefore, we would like to hear from all alumni about their experiences, their knowledge, opportunities, and values gained from their studies in the different Master Courses. The survey takes max. 15 minutes.

The survey is online until the 31st October 2021: https://bit.ly/MasterCourseSurvey

The results will be available for UNESCO and will be published under open access by the end of this year.

Online, 18 October 2021

WEAVE LabDay presenting Europeana

WEAVE project is organizing a series of LabDays to engage communities with their tangible and intangible heritage and present novel ways of cultural heritage representation in the digital realm.

This workshop organized by Europeana engaged minority communities and Cultural Heritage Institutions to enhance their participation in Europeana. It was moderated by the Coventry University team in conjunction with Europeana and with collaboration of Photoconsortium and KU Leuven.

In particular, this event covered 3 main topics:

Introducing what Europeana is and why it is beneficial to share cultural collections in this environment and across the Europeana network of partners, stakeholders and followers
Understanding the copyright framework that is at the basis of Europeana and the labels which are included in the Europeana Publishing Framework, so to enable content partners find the best solution to share and showcase their collections in a lawful way
Explaining Europeana’s editorial strategy and publication formats to include partners’ collections, including engagement with Europeana audiences and stakeholders and the more specific WEAVE Editorials strategy. The LabDay included interactive moments such as small polls and Q&A time.

Speakers: Alex Stan (IN2), Julia Fallon (Community & Partner Engagement at Europeana), Adrian Murphy (Collections Manager at Europeana), Ariadna Matas (Policy Advisor at Europeana), Sofie Taes (KU Leuven).

Additionally, colleagues from Photoconsortium in its role of Europeana accredited Thematic Aggregator and from the Europeana Data Publishing team were available during the LabDay, to handle any possible questions which may arise from the participants about the more technical part of metadata sharing and aggregation-ingestion of content to the Europeana infrastructure.

The presentations are available HERE.

Speakers’ biographies:

As Collections Manager at Europeana, Adrian Murphy develops ways of engaging audiences across Europe with the digitised cultural heritage collections found on the Europeana website. He works on participatory campaigns, audience communities and editorial strategies, as well as curating and writing editorial features such as blogs, galleries and exhibitions. Often working in partnership with cultural heritage institutions and consortia across Europe, he has worked on Europeana’s campaigns: Europeana Migration, Women’s History Season, Europe at Work, Discovering Europe and Europeana Sport. Prior to Europeana, he was the Digital Manager at south London’s Horniman Museum and Gardens where he led on digital strategy, website and social media activities.

Ariadna Matas contributes to the management and development of Europeana’s policies and frameworks with a strong focus on copyright and supports their implementation throughout the Europeana Network. Ariadna studied law in Spain, in Germany and in France and has a Master’s in Intellectual Property Law. Before joining Europeana, Ariadna worked for the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) on copyright matters. Ariadna coordinates Europeana Copyright Community and Rights Statements Consortium. Ariadna is a member of: Creative Commons’ Global Network Copyright Platform, NEMO’s Working Group on Digitisation & IPR; Libraries and IP group at the Spanish Federation of Library Associations: ; Rights Statements Consortium Statements and Implementation Working Groups.

Sofie Taes is an alumna of KU Leuven (Belgium), where she graduated in musicology and Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Currently she works at the Institute for Cultural Studies (CS Digital) at KU Leuven and at Photoconsortium – Europeana’s thematic aggregator for photography – as a digital curator. She has curated a wide range of editorials and virtual exhibitions for Europeana as well as the physical exhibitions All Our Yesterdays, Thousands are Sailing and Blue Skies, Red Panic. Currently she is active in several European projects involving digital cultural heritage and user engagement strategies, among which Europeana XX: Century of Change, PAGODE – Europeana China, WEAVE and inDICEs.

online event, 11 October 2021

Roma Self-representation in the History of the Venice Biennale – WEAVE LabDay

WEAVE project is organizing a series of LabDays to engage communities with their tangible and intangible heritage.

In this LabDay organized by partner ERIAC, a discussion is launched to promote a more permanent exhibition of Roma art and heritage in the context of the prestigous Venice Contemporary Art Biennale.

Date: 11th October 2021

Time: 14:00 – 16:00 CET via Zoom

All information and registration link is available at: https://weave-culture.eu/2021/09/09/weave-labday2/

FaceBook Event: https://fb.me/e/1eyWfEhZq

In the past there have been various exhibitions of Roma culture at Venice Biennale, in 2007, 2011 and 2019, which represent the greatest efforts ever made by Roma to present Roma art in an international stage in the center of contemporary cultural diplomacy.

2007: The First Roma Exhibition was established in 2007 in the frame of the 52nd Venice Contemporary Art Biennale. The exhibition, entitled Paradise Lost, curated by Tímea Junghaus, included the work of 16 Roma artists from eight European countries. It was a stance and claim in the existing frame of European Roma representation, and it proposed a transnational, contemporary and up-to-date vision for thinking about the Roma experience. It had over 200,000 visitors. The location was Palazzo Pisani S. Marina (piano nobile), Venezia, Cannaregio 6103, Calle delle Erbe, Opening period: 10 June to 21 November 2007.

In 2011, at the 54th Venice Contemporary Art Biennale, Maria Hlavajova curated the exhibition Call the Witness (based on Suzana Milevska’s original idea), with a flux of live “testimonies”— works of art, performances, talks, and conversations by and with artists, thinkers, and politicians. It engaged many distinguished non-Roma artists, writers, and curators, including Salman Rushdie and Arnout Mik. The location was Palazzo Zorzi, UNESCO Venice Office, Castello 4930, Venice, Opening period: 1 June to 9 October 2011.

2019: FUTUROMA, curated by Daniel Baker, opened in 2019 within the 58th Venice Contemporary Art Biennale. FUTUROMA featured 14 Romani artists from eight countries: Celia Baker, Ján Berky, Marcus-Gunnar-Pettersson, Ödön Gyügyi, Billy Kerry, Klára Lakatos, Delaine Le Bas, Valérie Leray, Emília Rigová, Markéta Šestáková, Selma Selman, Dan Turner, Alfred Ullrich, László Varga. The exhibition examined the role of art in the enactment of social agency through an eclectic practice interrogating contemporary art discourse and its social implications via the reconfiguration of elements of the Roma aesthetic. The location was Dorsoduro 417 (Zattere), Fondamenta Zattere Allo Spirito Santo 417, Opening period: 11 May to November 24, 2019.

In the lack of collecting, archiving and museum institutions to house artefacts once these Roma exhibitions are dismantled, their histories become vulnerable and their achievements carry on only as interpersonal – and later transgenerational knowledge, which slowly – with the means of digital remembrance – constitute a new form of intangible cultural heritage. The Roma exhibitions are not connected to the prestigious locations, and known spaces of the Venice Biennale, but to the non-spaces of digital-discussions, oral histories, letter and in-person exchange, archival documents and digital exhibitions.

The “Exhibition” of the largest European minority is considered a “collaborative event”, and not a national pavilion. Roma do not have a national pavilion/building/space, while being the largest national minority to many of the exhibiting national representations. As a consequence, the precarious Roma minority’s presence at the Biennale is possible only if Roma pay the entrance fee as a collaborative event (30,500 Euros) to the Biennale Office, in addition to spending to rent the exhibition space in Venice. In these circumstances, the chance for permanent, tangible representation of Roma in the most prestigious European art event is unimaginable.

The Labday discussion mitigates the need for a permanent Roma Pavilion as the place to motivate the development of innovative projects and experimental cross-disciplinary work of Roma. In the context of the Venice Biennale, the Roma Pavilion has the potential to become the safe space won by the Roma struggle, a place of intuition, new ideas, discourses, and trends in European contemporary art.

PAGODE Final Conference: Discovering Chinese Cultural Heritage in Europeana

The PAGODE Project, is pleased to announce its Final Conference “Discovering Chinese Cultural Heritage in Europeana”. The event will be held under the coordination of KIK-IRPA and hosted online by the University of Ljubljana.
PAGODE is a Generic Service project granted by the European Commission in the frame of the Connecting Europe Facility Programme, in support to Europeana.
The main scope of the project is to increase the engagement with Europeana according to the EU funding programme, but a broader aim is to enable collaborations among European museums and archives, as well as to foster international connections with Chinese cultural heritage institutions.
The project allowed to:
• bring more Chinese collections into Europeana,
• exhibit Chinese Cultural Heritage from European content holders and memory institutions,
• open cultural connections to China and taking advantage from a wider knowledge of mutual cultures.
Several European cultural institutions participated in the project as partners and are associated to contribute with their digital collections about Chinese cultural heritage.
The conference will be the occasion to present the project’s results and the best practices that support the digital transformation of cultural heritage with a focus on Chinese Cultural Heritage hosted in European Cultural Institutions; the speakers will share their experiences of making collections accessible via Europeana.
More information at https://photoconsortium.net/pagode/final-conference/

Online, 1 October 2021

Digital Innovation of Cultural Heritage: 3D Modelling

WEAVE project is organizing a series of LabDays to engage communities with their tangible and intangible heritage and present novel ways of cultural heritage representation in the digital realm.

In this LabDay organized by partner ARCTUR (Slovenia) in collaboration with Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (Portugal) and Coventry University (UK), solutions for interactive experiences with 3D and cultural heritage are presented.

Date: 1st October 2021

Time: 11:00-12:30 CEST (10:00-11:30 GMT)

Venue: Online (Zoom)

Language: English

Registration: available here

Topics to be covered during the LabDay include:

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.

img. courtesy ARCTUR

The LabDay will be moderated by COVUNI. ARCTUR will be joined by Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (Portugal) to discuss the MotionNotes tool, an 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 also 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.