Wikimedia Belgium/Micro-grant/Asking/Attending EuropeanaPhotography Final Conference

This micro-grant request to Wikimedia Belgium is actually vote submitted. (participate to the discussions)

Description of the project

Object: Participation of the association member Stefano C at the CS Digital Conference on Digital Photographic Heritage at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

When: 29-30 January 2015
Where: KUL, Justus-Lipsiuszaal, 8th floor, Erasmus building, Blijde-Inkomststraat 21, Leuven.
Goals of the participation: networking and lobbying with Europeana operators, Universities and Museums staff; guidelines and best practices for the constitution and administration of a database of digital photography; distribution of material of Wikimedia Belgium.
Conference programme [1]
Confirmation of registration: attached
Budget: 30.40€: Train Antwerpen – Leuven (with Railpass reduction) x 2 days.

--Ste.caneva (talk) 21:20, 26 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Approbation

approved by MADe (talk) 20:53, 26 January 2015 (UTC)
approved by M0tty (talk) 13:57, 4 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Report of the activity

As many partner projects of Europeana, the leading core of the member institutions has worked as an aggregator for other partners. In the case of Europeana Photography, the leaders are the research group of Digital Humanities at KUL for the theoretical part and the Italian company Promoter S.R.L. for the project management. Promoter also manages EAGLE, the Ancient History subsection of Europeana, where Wikimedia Italia plays a strong role as regards the software Media-Wiki. All Europeana networks are very big, but allow for a reasonably easy transversal access from one to another.

While the Europeana Photography project has come to an end, its network has decided to reshape itself as an association, Photoconsortium. To date, the Photography Museum of Antwerp is the only Belgian institution that has actively taken part in the projet (I have established a contact with a board member of the museum, Agnes Wijers), yet other institutions are interested in learning more about the possibility of digitising part of their archives and possibly of releasing them with a Creative Commons license. For this reason, Prof. Fred Truyen, the director of Digital Humanities in Leuven and the coordinator of Europeana Photography, has expressed a great interest in starting a collaboration with Wikimedia Belgium. Wiki Loves Art could certainly be a good environment in which to explore this collaboration. The Wikiverse is a perfect partner for Europeana because both networks advocate open culture (currently, only few institutions contributing to Europeana with their archives release their materials with a CC license, which produces a negative effect as for the homogeneity of the Europeana database).
Prof. Truyen and Antonella Fresa (Director of Promoter S.R.L.) have also invited us to consider the possibility that Wikimedia Belgium will become a member of the Photoconsortium. Because membership has a cost, this point remains an option that must still be explored within our association.
We are also invited to submit short presentations of our projects to the online magazine Digitalmeetsculture. This is a good chance to give high visibility to our projects on an acknowledged platform that gives voice to international projects and institutions in the field of digital innovation and cultural heritage.
The Final Conference of Europeana Photography has also produced another advantage: Wikimedia Belgium is invited to give a presentation at a conference that will be held in Leuven on February 20th, and which is organized by a smaller but highly interesting EU-cofounded project: Civic Epistemologies. Civic Epistemologies investigates the need of GLAMs, researchers and citizens for a closer collaboration as regards cultural heritage and the way we can foster this better interaction. The conference, entitled "Development of a Roadmap for Citizen Researchers in the Digital Culture" [2], gives us 15 minutes to present our mission and the way it contributes to the development of new participatory models of engagement with the cultural heritage.

--Ste.caneva (talk) 12:38, 4 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Follow-up: Presentation at KUL, 20 February 2015, 13.30-13.45

Speaker: Stefano Caneva Post-doctoral researcher in Humanities (specialized in Ancient History) at the University of Liège. Living in Antwerp, Belgium. Member of Wikimedia Belgium and Wikimedia Italia; co-founder and vice-president of the NGO weLand, working for the promotion of cultural heritage, tourism and ditigal innovation in South Piemonte, Italy.

Institution: Wikimedia Belgium Founded in autumn 2014, Wikimedia Belgium is the Belgian national chapter of Wikimedia Foundation. The mission of the association is to engage people in free knowledge. The tools include projects run by Wikimedia Foundation and collaborations between the Wiki community and institutions, operators and volunteers in the fieldof open culture at both national and international level.

Presentation: From Warburg to Wiki: Multidimensionality and Democratisation of culture in the age of the Semantic Web.

If you type Warburg + Atlas in a search engine, you will see a mosaic of images, yet not quite a normal one. All images represent other mosaics of images, which are serially and semantically organized around a theme. One of the most visionary intellectuals across the 19th and 20th century, Aby Warburg conceived a titanic project for one man: Mnemosyne, a visual Atlas of the Western cultural tradition from Antiquity to the Modern Age. Although the project remained unachieved, its utopic objectives ideally prelude the multidimensional and collective knowledge enabled by the Semantic Web. Collaborating to this democratisation of culture in an open digital environment is the essential goal of Wikimedia Foundation. The increasing variety of Wiki projects and their relevance in contemporary cultural practice and theory make the Wikiverse a prominent driver of innovation in the way individuals and communities share and actively construct cultural heritage.

Attached Pwp presentation for the Project Day, Brussels, 4 February 2015 [3]

Pwp presentation for the conference: forthcoming.
--Ste.caneva (talk) 12:39, 4 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]