The webinar ‘Cultural Heritage in Digital Age’, held virtually on 21st April 2021, served as a platform to present and discuss opportunities and challenges that lay ahead of Europe in fostering the involvement of researchers, innovators and other relevant actors in the process of digitisation of cultural heritage. A particular attention was paid to current policies and instruments, developed under Horizon Europe, Creative Europe or other programmes such as Digital Europe programme, Erasmus+, Next Generation EU, and their potential to preserve and enhance cultural heritage with advanced technologies. Also, it showcased some European funded research projects and other relevant initiatives on the digitisation of Europe’s cultural heritage. This online event was a unique chance to get up-to-date, first-hand information from various experts in this field, representing European Commission, European networks, universities, research centres and libraries. If you interested in main conclusions coming from the webinar, please read through the webinar summary and/or watch the video recording – both are available below.
The event, organised by the Polish Science Contact Agency ‘PolSCA’ of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Polish Institute Brussels, was attended by over 100 participants, representing R&I institutions such as research centres, institutes of the Polish Academy of Sciences, universities, academies of arts and various institutions of culture, like museums, libraries as well as theaters, opera houses and philharmonics. We also welcomed a wide range of national, regional and local stakeholders, including NGOs, enterprises and governmental authorities.It is worthy noting that during the webinar the presence of participants from all over Europe was greatly appreciated, inter alia, from Poland, Belgium, Lithuania, Slovakia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, Norway, Spain or Portugal. We strongly believe that this event was one of the examples of synergistic approach that will contribute significantly to create networking links with aim to protect and preserve European cultural heritage.
The webinar was officially opened by the organisers: Tomasz Poprawka, Director of the PolSCA and Agnieszka Bolecka, Director of the Polish Institute of Brussels. Both of them emphasized that coronavirus pandemic makes the digital transformation more relevant than ever, thus common efforts on preserving our European cultural heritage shall be intensified. A similar approach was also presented at the beginning of the event by the special guest, Dorota Walczak-Delanois (Free University in Brussels, ULB) who shared with the participants a brief reflection on the literature as the essential part of our common human heritage and the core of European identity. She stressed how fundamental is power of preserving thanks to ongoing digitisation which can be seen as a guarantee of preserving values, ideas, the most important legacy for future generations.
During the webinar, the speakers discussed in two thematic sessions. The first one, entitled Opportunities and challenges for digitisation of cultural heritage, was moderated by Mariusz Dzięglewski, Director of the InLAB Research and Innovation Centre at the Pedagogical University of Cracow. In its first part, Marita Kayamanidou (EC, DG RTD) provided participants with the general overview of Horizon Europe Cluster 2 and with some examples of digital dimension in different activities which will be developed in 2021-2022 under the Work Programme for Destination 2 of this Cluster. A slightly different perspective was given by Maciej Hofman (EC, DG EAC) who placed a special emphasis on EU strategic documents on culture, presenting a policy context, a strategic vision of European Union when it comes to the cultural heritage. He also underlined various digital components in EU actions by highlighting tools and programmes like Europeana or Creative Europe. The last speaker, Tomasz Parkoła (DARIAH-EU) described major challenges in digitisation from ICT R&D perspective. As he stressed out, to deliver effective digital transformation in the context of cultural heritage close collaboration between Cultural Heritage institutions, Digital Humanities and Computer Science is needed.
Second session, entitled ‘Digitisation of culture in practice’ and moderated by Justyna Kramarczyk (Polish Science Contact Agency PolSCA in Brussels), revealed how these opportunities and challenges are implemented in wide range of activities. Participants learnt why it is worthy to be involved and how to be more engaged in projects or actions on digitisation of cultural heritage. Additionally, they got some unique, practical and useful insides from those who have already done it and, what is more important, who have done it successfully. It is worthy adding that broad scope of topics – literature, music, art – was covered in the second session, at the same time underlining how crucial is the involvement of libraries, museums, cultural organisations, cultural heritage institutions, researchers in the entire digitisation’s process.
During this session, Maciej Eder (Institute of the Polish Language of the Polish Academy of Sciences) presented main achievements of the Institute in the field of digitisation of cultural assets, particularly handwritten index cards and further text analysis with advanced machine learning technics. In this context, two significant European projects were mentioned: COST Action Distant Reading for European Literary History and Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure (H2020). Next speaker, Sonia Wronkowska (National Library of Poland) pointed out four key aspects which are essential as it comes to digitisation of cultural heritage and which should be always taken into account: strategy, infrastructure, the scale of operations and challenges. Moreover, she shared with attendees few initiatives such as Polish Digital Library POLONA or International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) consortium that is driven by a community of research, national and state libraries, museums, companies and image repositories committed to providing access to high quality image resources. Interesting examples were also provided by Mike Kestemont from Antwerp Centre for Digital Humanities and Literary Criticism (ACDC) which is involved, for instance, in INSIGHT project on music iconography detection and classification, using AI to enrich of digital heritage collections. All of the speakers agreed that the digitisation of culture on the mass-scale with high-quality data should be continued. They also highlighted the importance of being part of international communities, of engaging in diverse activities and networks, stressing out the added-value of international collaboration that lies in great opportunity to learn from each other and to use already developed and tested solutions.
If you want to learn more about key opportunities and challenges, emphasized by speakers during both sessions, read the summary of the event. This document – available below – will provide you with all necessary information about EU current programmes, main documents and useful tools on digitisation of cultural heritage!
What is more, you are invited to watch the recording of the event on YouTube:
Published: 2021-05-28, J. Kramarczyk
Visuals: @PolSCA, @Polish Institute Brussels
