Digital meets Culture

deadline for submissions is 13th June 2021

Open Screen 2021 : Call out for disabled artists working in the digital realm

Developed in partnership with Shape Arts, Open Screen is seeking proposals for new works that respond to the theme of Realities, as part of arebyte on Screen, arebyte’s expanded and innovative online platform for digital animations, videos, web-based interactive experiences and curatorial interventions.

arebyte is inviting digital artists self-identifying as disabled to apply who work with technology to their advantage, or overcoming barriers, criticising matters of inclusivity within technology, and everything in between.

Dates and Times for submissions:

Open as of 28 April 2021
Deadline is midnight 13 June 2021 (BST)

Info and Application:

For more information and how to apply, please visit arebyte.com/open-screen

Phone Number: +4402045032205

students thinking about themselves as citizen historians safeguarding the memory of their past and paving way for the future of their ethnicity.

PAGODE – Europeana China at the basis of a students project

CC-BY Qian Songyan, Östasiatiska museet via Europeana

EU funded PAGODE – Europeana China project is making an impact on education, being included in a students project for the Master in Cultural Studies at KU Leuven. The organizing students of this “PAGODE group” are Gelan Cen, Lilia Chalakova, Shau Zou Fong, Jing Yun and Emily Jayne Benson-Kallman.

The project includes two elements, a video competition and an annotation sprint of digital collections. Both tasks are based on PAGODE’s crowdsourcing campaign launched in Autumn 2020, where a wealth of images about Chinese Heritage cultural collections, sourced from Europeana and carefully selected by PAGODE’s curator Sofie Taes, is available for users to play with.

In the video competition, participant students are expected to select one, several or a series of pictures from the Scenes and People from China campaign in the PAGODE crowdsourcing page and explain the reasons for their choices by recording a nice video to be shared on social media. The videos will be evaluated by an independent jury basing on a detailed evaluation system, to award the nicest one.

In the annotation sprint, participant students will be challenged to join the effort of annotating and curating photographic materials about Chinese culture that are currently published in Europeana, by looking at the images and adding descriptive tags selected from controlled vocabularies. Each addition counts points to the user, who is ranked in a lively classification of top-scoring. The annotation sprint will be open until 22nd of May and the overall target is to reach 24.000 annotations. The student who will have reached the higher score will be awarded as the winner. Afterwards, the annotations will be reviewed and validated by PAGODE experts and then sent to Europeana for publication.

The organizing students of the “PAGODE group” say “We are expecting to hear different voices from Chinese culture lovers by offering a unique opportunity for you to have an inner conversation with yourself. Every participant, in this case, can be recognized as a citizen historian who makes substantial contributions to safeguarding the memory of their past and paving a promising path for the future of their ethnicity. We hope, by holding an interactive and engaging event based on social media, we will be able to send the message that it is interesting and fashionable to talk about cultural heritage. Every piece of cultural heritage is a vivid and faithful reflection of daily life in the past. Therefore, people should be handed the power to share what they think about a particular cultural heritage and why they feel related to it.”

Social cohesion and development through Arts and Culture: the Tiro Association

“We believe that culture and arts can bring together people and bring together different social groups by engaging everyone in various creative and artistic activities.”

The Tiro Association for Arts (TAA) is a non-governmental organization that works since 2014 on bringing together youth of different cultural, religious and ethnic backgrounds to create an alternative and critical movement through arts and culture. Moreover, it works to foster culture in marginalized areas in the south of Lebanon to oppose the polarization, hatred and violence that are common for the areas it works in.
TAA believes culture and arts can be strong drivers of development, social cohesion and, ultimately, change. So, TAA aspires to provide young people in our community with independent spaces where they can freely express themselves, attend free artistic trainings and events.

Tiro promotes training courses, theater and music International festivals, arts exhibitions and community events.
Read more…

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.