George Oates and Seb Chan at Europeana Tech. By: Europeana (CC-BY-SA)

“Making the beautiful thing”; this was the theme for the EuropeanaTech 2015 Conference in Paris at the National Library of France on February 12 and 13. But what is the beautiful thing? 

Most people would say that art, paintings, photographs, stories and sculptures, are beautiful things. Though this is true, this was not a gathering of artists – at least not in the traditional sense. EuropeanaTech 2015 instead brought together a crowd of expert developers, innovators, and technical pioneers in the field of digital cultural heritage. The beautiful thing they are united in making? Meaningful interaction between the public and their cultural heritage. And, as Tim Sherratt from Trove reflected, it’s “an ambitious undertaking”.

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Television has, throughout its existence, been regarded as a window to the world as well as a reflection of national and regional identities and cultures. The art of film has left us with a wealth of works which contribute to our visual world heritage. Television and film archives provide rich collections of images, sounds, and artefacts related to television broadcasts, film screenings, and production practices of both. As with so many archival collections, archive items not digitally born are being digitized, and increasingly collections are made accessible through the internet, providing worldwide access to television’s and film’s history.
Researchers working with online (audiovisual) archives find a wealth of online digital materials. However, to understand such sources, researchers largely depend on metadata, usually provided by the content provider (archives, broadcasters), often in an incomplete and inconsistent manner. At the same time, separated from their original context within a programme, film, or practice, archival material becomes detached from its original meaning creating environment, and may be taken up in a new setting by the researcher, giving it a novel, or additional, meaning. Thus, the use and re-use of archival material by researchers provides opportunities for confirmation as well as resistance to the original, to its context, and its meaning. Re-contextualization opens spaces for reinterpretation, for renewed understanding, and for alternative readings.

A panel on Visual Culture working group is proposed here to create a stage for the discussion of the use of online audiovisual archives in research. It may include but is not limited to:

• theories of the digital archive:
• on forming collections
• the role of metadata for research
• researchers as metadata creators
• ethical issues of metadata creation and publication
• sustainability of the online archive
• collaboration between public and private bodies
• the need for interdisciplinary work
• ontology and epistemology of the digital
• ethics of digital research
• methods and tools for searching, researching, and analysing digital sources:
• epistemologies of research tools
• various uses of tools (black box vs critical)
• challenges of access to online audiovisual archives or archival material
• research practices:
• use of online audiovisual archives as sources of primary material
• challenges of using and re-using digital audiovisual sources (remix, mash-ups)
• publications: academic videos / online publications
• research projects
• digital audiovidual collections and their management and maintenance

Audiovisual history online
On the use of online audiovisual archives in scholarship
Call for proposals
IAMCR 2015 – panel Visual Culture working group

IAMCR

The International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) is a worldwide professional organisation in the field of media and communication research. Its members promote global inclusiveness and excellence within the best traditions of critical scholarship in the field.
In line with the CfP of IAMCR’s Visual Culture working group, only abstracts in English will be accepted. However, presentations and sessions in English, French or Spanish will be facilitated.

Proposal submission

Proposals for this panel of up to 200 words are welcome and can be submitted to w.sanders@uu.nl. The deadline for submission is Friday 16 January 2015.

Queries about this call for proposals can be addressed to:
Willemien Sanders, PhD, Utrecht University, w.sanders@uu.nl
Berber Hagedoorn, MA, Utrecht University, b.hagedoorn@uu.nl
Liliana Melgar E., MA, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, lilimelgar@gmail.com

Relevant websites:
www.iamcr.org
http://iamcr.org/s-wg/working-group/visual-culture
http://congresiamcr.uqam.ca

Media & Learning provides a platform to those responsible for creating, promoting and using media in the classroom, on and off campus as well as in training and lifelong learning centres.

 

Headlined ‘From passive to active use of media in teaching and learning’, the aim 2014 conference – aptly hosted by the Flemish Ministry of Education in Brussels – was to promote the sharing of best-practice, exchange of know-how and hands-on amongst practitioners. With its clear call for action, it also gave policy-makers and decision-makers the opportunity to discuss how to develop digital and media literacy in the broader context of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship and the value and impact of such skills in relation to the European work-force.

The conference programme covered a wide variety of themes grouped around the topic of media education and literacy. 300 participants from 44 countries learned about the value of using video and new media in education and were able to dip into master classes on programming, data mining, creating media productions and educational games.

As a freely accessible multilingual media resource, the EUscreen project effectively complemented the manifold European projects engaged in media and ICT-supported learning introduced over the two days.

In the year that commemorates the centenary of the First World War, media-supported remembrance education represented a special conference highlight with showcases from Europeana, BBC , INA, the VIAA platform  and the IWU Institut Film und Bild.

 

All was wrapped up very glamourously with the MEDEA Awards ceremony, rewarding eight finalists for excellence in the production and pedagogical design of media-rich learning resources.

 

All in all a lot of food for media-related thought to take away and act on …

EUscreenXL gathered in Rome last week for our conference on the users and usage of audiovisual archives: “From Audience to User: Engaging with Audiovisual Heritage Online”. In this series of blog posts we fill you in on what happened.

Tom and his archives

After lunch, the conference rode on with its first day packed with presentations.

The slides Deutsche Welle’s Kay Macquarrie showed, opened with a colourful animation about Tom the reporter. Tom is not a big fan of the complications of his work, it seems, and would like smart technologies to help him out. Luckily, the AXES project has spent some time figuring out his wishes and aims to provide for his every search and sorting need.

The search engine uses all sorts of automation and enrichment to decrease the searcher’s time effort. It assumes that researchers have wishes fully different to those of home users and media professionals who want to reuse content. The software will be made available under an open source license for those enthused and willing to try it out.

AXES with Tom – If Only You Knew What’s In Your Archive!

When television is not enough

The demo Lotte Belice Baltussen and Lyndon Nixon showed, was dedicated squarely at the home user – and smart web editors. The LinkedTV project has the noble assumption that television audiences are not willing to switch off their brains when watching, but are most willing to use their smart devices to make themselves smarter too. In order to assist editors in providing a wealth of contextual information, the project searches for for that sweet spot where automatically enriched and linked metadata can provide a world of new experiences.

In the Linked Culture demo the duo showed, the Dutch version of the Antiques Roadshow was enriched with images and explanations pulled in from Europeana. During the coffee break, we saw some conversing going on between the developers in the project and those involved in EUscreenXL, so keep posted to hear if this turns into pretty new uses of our linked data pilot.

LinkedTV demonstration of LinkedCulture

Crowdsource this

Mark Williams took to te stage again to this time root for his own project. The Media Ecology project, or MEP in short, is a fantastically ambitious and wide ranging project that brings together researchers, librarians, archivists and computer scientists and aims to harness the powers of two library and archive buzzwords: linked data and crowdsourcing. MEP provides access to the Library of Congress via Mediathread and allows a selected group of academics to update and improve on descriptions. The archives can then harvest back metadata generated through MEP project. The project’s access point provides enhanced search capacity for the LoC’s materials, enhances search capacity for other archives and helps the academic & scholarly community help in their workflow at the same time. An important aid in this process is the use of a controlled vocabulary, which in this project is baptised the Onomy. The project makes use of a wide range of open source tools, such as the Computational Cinematics Toolkit in Python and the related Tiltfactor, doing metadata games.

The big launch

Kamila Lewandowska, Sian Barber and Rutger Rozendal all work on the EUscreenXL project. The three of them have been the main drivers behind the EUscreen portal redesign, and therefor the honour was bestowed upon them to present its feats and design choices. The new portal is made adaptive so it can be seen on all sorts of devices, search is made more intuitive and all together it boasts an editorial approach, feeding users more content in more appealing ways. Also, some important steps in providing subtitles for selected clips have been provided. Meanwhile the strengths of the portal – rich, interchangeable metadata and descriptions – are still there and improvements will be taking place over the next few months, as well as new possibilities for contextualisation. We do suggest you go there straight after reading this post to find out all that’s new and shiny: http://www.euscreen.eu

The Q&A session focused on the benefits of crowdsourcing and lessons learned in this space, including how to convince archive personnel of the usefulness of involving non-professionals in describing archive content. The presentations led one commenter to describe his response as a Faustian dilemma, where he needed to choose between using one of the many fantastic tools available but unable to solve the growing gap between their development and their integration into teaching & digital/audiovisual literacy. As far as we could understand from the panel members, they all seemed to have good trust in their visions of smarter, connected, wired, searchable and automated collections – and the people we hope will be using them.

Drawing made at the conference by Montse Fortino.
Pictures taken at the conference by Maria Drabczyk/Quirijn Backx/Erwin Verbruggen

EUscreenXL gathered in Rome last week for our conference on the users and usage of audiovisual archives: “From Audience to User: Engaging with Audiovisual Heritage Online”. In this series of blog posts we fill you in on what happened. Session II was dedicated to audiovisual stories & best practices.

Digitization, media education, live performances – all under one roof

The session, moderated by Marco Rendina from  Cinecittá LUCE was opened with a presentation by Michał Merczyński, director of  National Audiovisual Institute (NInA). This public cultural institution is based in Warsaw, Poland and was set up in 2005 as a publishing house, then transformed into NInA in 2009. The focus of NInA lies on digitizing and publishing the archives documenting Poland’s audiovisual heritage and becoming a leading cultural institution in this field.

The key objective of the Institute is to enrich its audiovisual archives by creating context and making access more user-friendly. In its video on demand service, launched last year, NInA started building thematic collections concentrated on one single access point. One such example is the portal Three Composers, which was shortlisted for the FIAT/IFTA Archive Achievements Awards in 2014.

A short video tutorial explaining how to navigate through Three Composers music collection.

NInA cooperates with national and international partners specialised in film, music and theatre, Google Cultural Institute and many more. Around 98% of the content available on its main access point - NINATEKA – is free of charge. Through NINATEKA EDU – the biggest educational project of the Institute, there are more than 1700 items, special collections and additional educational recources available for teachers. Although the web is the most natural environment for NInA’s activities, the Institute engages in various programmes in the real world to create an interest in the use of digital archives and to engage the end users.  With a new venue to be opened in May 2015, NInA keeps being in transition between the analog and the digital era and tries to link the old with the new. After Michał Merczyński’s presentation a shared feeling was visible among the audience: we may not be able to pronounce any of the names or tools but NInA surely got us engaged!

Breaking News: 1914 can still inspire!

From Poland to France. After a packed and inspiring presentation about a freshly set up AV institution Laurent Duret from Les Films d’Ici took us on a journey into the past. The aim of his long-term, interactive and in-depth narrative project 1914:Breaking news was to bring back the collective memory from the First World War. As the understanding of the events of 1914-1918  obviously differs in France and Germany, a decision was made to focus on these two. Even though the contract for the project was signed in Berlin in 2009, it took Mr. Duret and his international team of historians, archivists and museum experts four long years of research before the documentary was finally finished. All scenes in the film were inspired by 14 diaries from all over Europe, in order to get a broad view of the daily life of the time. In cooperation with ARTE and various newspaper publishers in Europe, the material was broadcasted on a mobile website first, that kept a calendar of daily events leading up to the war. Only later was the documentary shown on television.

1914 Breaking news trailer from Laurent Duret

In order to attract wider attention of various target groups in an innovative and interactive way, Mr Duret and his team drew special attention to shareability and presence on social media. Moreover an online music quiz was developed in which users had to find out if the lyrics of a particular song belonged to a 1914 pop song or a contemporary hip hop song from 2014. This website had over one million unique visitors and about 30 million people saw the documentary on TV. 1914: Breaking news is a marvelous example of digital storytelling and shows how to engage millions of people with a challenging topic, depicting one of Europe’s darkest times.

A DIVE in Digital Hermeneutics

Lora Aroyo from the VU University Amsterdam added an academic perspective to the conversation by holding the last presentation of the session with a special focus on digital hermeneutics and the CrowdTruth platform – a framework for crowdsourcing ground truth data. The aim of the project is to get the data to train, test and evaluate cognitive computing systems. In terms of user engagement, the question for Aroyo remains: how to make this engagement possible in a more scalable and reusable way? In contrast to the common approach – namely asking experts – engaging a large crowd allows different interpretations (harnessing disagreement) and annotations. The CrowdTruth workflow involves three main steps: exploring and processing input data, collecting annotation data, and applying disagreement analytics on the results.

Mrs. Aroyo pointed out that when in a museum, people are guided through exhibitions. On the internet, they are left to themselves. A support is missing. The web is chaos! The argument led Lora Aroyo swiftly to the second part of her speech, in which she presented the DIVE browser - developed to provide innovative access on heritage objects from heterogeneous collections, using historical events and narratives as the context for searching, browsing and presenting of individual and group objects. DIVE is supposed to help people in their online exploration and research. Its interface invites users to continue their explorations by “diving into” a topic and get to infinity of exploration. DIVE is definitely a wonderful “How to…” approach on user engagement – you should want to try it for yourself.

Drawing made at the conference by Montse Fortino.
Pictures taken at the conference by Maria Drabczyk/Quirijn Backx

Last week we attended the annual Baltic Audiovisual Archival Council Conference in Riga. For the first time we presented a sneak peak of the new portal!

The Baltic Audiovisual Archival Council (BAAC) is a non-profit organisation that aims to foster cooperation between public and private broadcasting and AV archives, libraries and museums in the worldwide Baltic diaspora. Since the Baltic States are represented both in the EUscreenXL collection and in its consortium, we were invited to take part in the yearly BAAC conference. ‘Safe versus Reusable: Ideals versus Real Life’ was this year’s theme; the venue (in many ways reflecting the theme) was Riga’s recently opened National Library of Latvia, the magnificent ‘Castle of Light’.

Maria Drabczyk (NInA), Eve-Marie Oesterlen (BUFVC) and Kamila Lewandowska (NInA) presented on ‘Going EUscreenXL’, sharing the joys/ideals and real life challenges of making European audiovisual content accessible for future re-use. While Maja spoke about the benefits for NInA of being both a content partner newbie and the lead of project dissemination, Eve-Marie offered an inside view into the challenges involved in co-ordinating the delivery of enriched and standardised quality metadata and content from over 18 European providers. The icing on this pan-European AV cake was supplied by Kamila, who presented a sneak preview of the new EUscreenXL online platform, which will officially be launched in October 2014 as part of the EUscreenXL Rome Conference. We received a warm welcome from the audience and a positive feedback regarding the project results.

Our colleague, Marco Rendina from Instituto Luce – Cinecittà (EUscreenXL partner) presented the Presto4U project which aims to foster research in digital audiovisual preservation, e.g. the use of technology by service providers and media owners, as well as to raise awareness in the area of AV preservation. Helle Bech Madsen from the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR), also a EUscreenXL partner, presented a range of projects conducted by DR, illustrating the benefits of adopting a user-oriented approach. Richard Ranft, Head of Sound and Vision at the British Library in London, introduced the Europeana Sounds project, which brings together major European audio archives and web innovators in order to make high-quality audio collections accessible online. This project aims to aggregate over half a million audio metadata records and 200 000 related music scores, images and videos. Jolè Stimbirytė talked about users expectations and how the archivists should try to meet them.

Overall, it was great to share ideas with such a diverse audience of experts. It was impressive to learn about the variety of initiatives undertaken on an international, national and even individual level to both safeguard audiovisual cultural heritage and to ensure its accessibility for future generations.

More information:

Register now for PrestoCentre’s Preservathon on AV Preservation Storage Solutions, taking place in Turin on 25 – 26 June 2014.

Learn to select the best storage solution for your AV archive
There is no such thing as ‘everlasting’ data storage. Digital preservation requires the indefinite, error free storage of information, together with the means for its retrieval and interpretation, irrespective of changes in technologies, support and data formats, or changes in the requirements of the user community. Any choice of storage solution, therefore, involves careful consideration, needs assessment, long-term cost evaluation and so on. Where and when do vendors become involved and what do you need to know about them and their products before you make your decision?

Target Audience
Library and archive technologists, directors of collection care and IT advisors interested in the various motivations and priorities of storage for digital audiovisual media across different domains.

Learning Objectives
After this Preservathon you:

• Will have a better understanding of the concept of procurement and vendor rating;
• Will be able to map organisational requirements to the market of storage solutions;
• Will have a better understanding of functionality vs technology;
• Will have a better understanding of costs (full costs of ownership).

The Preservathon will take place on 25-26 June at Rai “Museo della Radio”, Turin, Italy. The first day will be a hands-on workshop where teams will learn what is involved selecting the best long-term audiovisual storage solution. The second day will host a mini-conference. This Preservathon is made possible by the Presto4U project.

More information: www.prestocentre.org/events/preservathon/storage-2014

EUscreenXL Conference 2014 Rome

CALL FOR PAPERS AND WORKSHOPS

From Audience to User: New Ways of Engaging with Audiovisual Heritage Online

EUscreenXL welcomes You to the EUscreenXL Conference 2014 on October 30-31 in Casa del Cinema in Villa Borghese, Rome (Italy)!

Attracting audiences and engaging users with content has become a key issue for archivists, broadcasters, educators and anyone publishing content online. With growing amounts of digitised content online, heritage projects and collection holders are increasingly aware of the need to engage with their users. Knowing how and why users interact (or don’t) with the resources and their presentation online helps inform what strategies are most insightful for the development of sustainable communities of users to participate in archival projects, enrich collections and disseminate their content. A user-oriented approach is crucial for both promotion and dissemination of online content as well as for developing sustainable future for projects and institutions in the heritage sector.

With the upcoming conference “From Audience to User: New Ways of Engaging with Audiovisual Heritage Online” the EUscreen network wants to address the current challenges for online cultural heritage initiatives and discuss these with archivists, scholars of cultural – and particularly audiovisual – heritage, web designers, data specialists and policy makers.

We invite proposals for papers and workshops that address – among others – the following questions and issues:

• How to read statistics of usage to better understand what users do, want and engage with?

• How to increase usage and and encourage engagement of the users – focus on the user experience (UX)?

• How to build and engage sustainable communities with online content?

• How to extract quantitative and qualitative data in order to be more responsive to the needs of the audience/users and those of the professionals?

• Which marketing strategies, business-oriented approaches can be identified as useful for the future development of audiovisual heritage platforms?

Please submit a paper abstract of 250 words including short abstracts and titles of each prospective paper to events@euscreen.eu. Include name, affiliation, address, and e-mail address of each author/participant.  

All proposals will be evaluated by the Conference Board.

Timeline:

Deadline for applications and abstracts: 21st May 2014

Notification of abstracts acceptance: 9th June 2014

If you have any questions about submissions, please contact Kamila Lewandowska, EUscreenXL communication specialist (kamila.lewandowska@nina.gov.pl).