>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. ^M00:00:04 [ Silence ] ^M00:00:24 >> Good morning everybody and thank you so much for being here. It's an absolute delight and we're looking forward to three days of very interesting and stimulating discussions. It's my pleasure-- I'm sorry. I should introduce myself. I'm Fenella France. I'm the chief of the Preservation Research and Testing Division and it's my pleasure this morning to introduce our associate librarian, Mark Sweeney, who will open the program. ^M00:00:46 [ Applause ] ^M00:00:54 >> Well good morning and welcome to the Library of Congress. As Fenella said, I'm Mark Sweeney. I'm the acting associate librarian for Library Services which is the part of the library that fulfils the national library functions here. So I'm please to open today's program. Part of our topics in preservation series and as you'll see, it was on one of the slides, I think this is our 73rd or 74th program but this one specifically on fostering the transatlantic dialogue on digital heritage and EU research infrastructures, initiatives and solutions in the USA and in Italy. Today's public program will be followed by two and a half days of discussions and presentations that will advance our current understanding of research infrastructures focusing on current initiatives, issues, challenges, solutions, and the future landscape of research infrastructures. Research infrastructures play an increasingly important role in the advancement of knowledge for humanities and heritage scientists. They are a key instrument in bringing together a wide diversity of stakeholders and offer unique research services to users from different countries, attracting new researchers to the humanities and preservation science, and help to shape our larger research communities. Research infrastructures help to create a new research environment in which all researchers, whether they're working in the context of their home institutions or whether they're part of a distributed research facility, multinational perhaps, they have shared access to the unique and distributed research facilities. This could include the data, instruments, computing, as well as the communications. Again, regardless of the location that they are in the world. So these initiatives are at the center of the knowledge triangle of research, education, and innovation producing knowledge to research, diffusing it through education, and then applying it through innovation. I trust you'll enjoy the presentations outlining some of the European Union and US initiatives in this area and we look forward to stimulating further collaborative efforts to make the best of our resources, encouraging standardization of procedures, and ensure access internationally to the advanced research for humanities and heritage sciences. So again, welcome here to the library. I trust that your next two and a half days will be very stimulating and I thank you for your participation. Thank you. ^M00:03:40 [ Applause ] ^M00:03:45 >> And I will now invite Giulio Busulini who many of you know very well to also welcome you. >> So just a few words. I'm Giulio Busulini [inaudible] to share the Embassy of Italy. For me, it is a big pleasure to be here today because that I think is an important moment, a technical conference. We are going to talk about research infrastructure mainly. Applied to cultural heritage, I think is just a starting point and this event should be considered one of these small milestone that put it in this kind of dialogue that we are trying to start between Italy and the US. I think we would like to underline that this event is organized under the Italian presidency of the European Union and I think it is very important that we are able to frame what we're able to discuss today also in the European dialogue. So I really happy to, and really would like thank also Dr. France and Dr. Barbara Barry that is here that are really working with us very actively and had this happen. So I give control to Fenella and happy to introduce also the avenue speaker that will be coming from the European delegation. Thanks a lot. ^M00:05:00 [ Applause ] ^M00:05:05 [ Background Sounds ] ^M00:05:13 >> Good morning everyone. My name's Errol Levy. I'm a science counselor, also deputy head of the science, technology, and innovation section of the European Union delegation here in Washington, D.C. I am one of a small team of people who work together with US government agencies, trade associations, university associations, and also individual universities, companies, entrepreneurs, and researchists. In order to develop the relations in research and innovation between the United States and the European Union, I am delighted to be here because a conference such as this is exactly about the dialogue that we need in terms of research infrastructure and a very important area of preserving our cultural heritage. So I'd like to thank Barbara and Fenella, Julio and Stefano, and the representatives of the University of Florence, the National Gallery of Art who put this together. My apologies to anyone I've forgotten. But I am giving this presentation on behalf of Philip Porter [phonetic] who is the deputy head of the unit for research infrastructures based in Brussels and the directorate general for research and innovation in the European commission. And I'm very happy to be able to substitute for Philip. He's a friend and colleague of mine that I worked together with in the international corporation area working with North America when we were both based in Brussels and so it's my pleasure to give you an idea of the European landscape when it comes to how we support research infrastructures, particularly in the area of cultural heritage. So I'm going to introduce, for those of you who are not so familiar the European scene, to you some strange concepts including that of the European research area. At the European Union level, what we are trying to do is to integrate and make the clearer the efforts of the 28 European Union member states and also many other countries who've signed up to the research programs of the European Union to create an area of about 40 odd countries where knowledge and information and data and technologies and people and ideas flow freely in order to develop our competitiveness, in order to increase our capacity to deal with society's challenges, and to enable us in an integrated way to collaborate effectively with our international partners of which the United States is number one. So that's the European research area. I'm going to say something a little bit about how we organize our research infrastructures at the European Union level addressing the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures or ESFRI and the ways in which we are developing research infrastructures using European international roadmaps. So I'm going to talk also about the mechanisms that we use in order to implement and operate and maintain our research infractures at European level and the means by which we do that, namely the European level research programs. We've transitioned away from the 7th framework program which provided funding during the period of 2007 to 2013 which supported research infrastructures and we started the new Horizon 2020 program which is the latest incarnation of the European Union level research and innovation programs which we will be using to support research infrastructures in cultural heritage in the social science and humanities and many other things, and I'll mention that later. So I've told you what the European Research area is. A group of about 40 countries including the 28 EU member states that are working together to develop our European capacity and European competitiveness in research and innovation science and technology. Our strategy when it comes to research infrastructures, including in the social sciences and humanities which would include preservation of cultural heritage, is to reduce the fragmentation of our efforts. As in many of the areas of research infrastructures, we're talking about sharing existing research infrastructures and optimizing their use, taking advantage of some of the crosscutting and underlying activities and facilities that are needed across the board for developing our research infrastructures, and developing [inaudible] and the policies and the activities to create new investments, to actually take what's existing in the EU individual member states and putting it together, synthesizing it and making it more coherent, developing it at European level by making investments, and then connecting those world class infrastructures in Europe with the best infrastructures in the rest of the world. So when I'm not becoming an instant expert in digital cultural heritage on behalf of my colleagues, what I do is I work with US government agencies like the National Science Foundation, the NIH, the Department of Energy and many others in looking at how what we're doing in Europe and what's been happening in the United States is where our interests and plans overlap and putting those together and when we're talking about European research infrastructures we could be talking about anything from synchrotron radiation sources through to biobanks through to databases through to research vessels for the outtake and astronomical telescopes. And so what we've done in Europe is to organize our research infrastructures across the board in all areas from social sciences and humanities through to the natural sciences, physical sciences, and environmental sciences. And we've done that using the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures or ESFRI where since 2004, beginning in 2004, we've been supporting something like now 50 projects which are addressing all of those areas of science research and innovation that I've mentioned and that command something like 20 billion euros or 30 billion US dollars of investment for the implementation of these European Union level research infrastructures and with up to 3 billion US dollars a year in commitment to their operations. So that view graph actually just gives you an idea of some of the areas that we're supporting. As I said, all the way through from social sciences and humanities where we include some of the cultural heritage aspects including products like CLARIN and DARIAH that you can see towards the bottom left in which you'll hear more about. In fact, we have representatives of DARIAH here, of course. And right through to, as I say, physics and astronomy research infrastructures and E infractures, some of which in fact do have relevance to all of the research infrastructures in terms of the management and exchange of data or information. So what you can see, some of the research infrastructures which are distributed that have several sites around the European Union and countries associated to the research framework programs there, presented in yellow. The ones in blue are where the research infrastructures are based mainly or entirely on one site. Some of these are at various levels of organization and development and that's indicated the ellipsis of circles, those in green being more developed and established than those in blue, which are establishing what are called European Research Infrastructure Consortia or ERIC. It's another strange European concept to introduce to you, the ERIC. So I'm going to say a little bit more about what those are in a minute as well as the European level ESFRI roadmap, we have national roadmaps which are developed, of course, for the individual companies involved but also linking their activities and their aspirations with European level roadmap that is ESFRI. And as you can see, nearly all European countries have roadmaps in place and a few are still preparing theirs or updating theirs. So a little bit more history. Before I talk, I'll give you some examples of what we're actually supporting and what that looks like. So in 2012, an official policy document of the European Commission was issued. On the European research area that I mentioned, and addressing among many other things, research infrastructures where it calls in the area of research infrastructures for member states to make financial commitments to remove legal and other barriers to the cross- border development and integration of research infrastructures that exist in their countries both in cooperation through the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures and developing overall crosscutting principles and implementation methods and best practice in order to be able to support these world class infrastructures that we're developing in Europe. ^M00:15:31 Also, urging the member states to use the financial instruments that existed at national and European level to support those in the, I'd mentioned already the Horizon 2020 program. I'll explain a little bit more about that in a moment for those of you who are not at all familiar with it. But that will be our main means going forward from now to 2020 to supporting the European level work on research infrastructures. Okay so this ERIC that I talked to you about, so this is a fairly new legal mechanism or instrument as we call it to healthy establishment and operation of European infrastructures of pan European interest and so these ERICs are consortia of academic institutions, research institutions, government institutions and that can include the private sector also who are coming together in order to develop and implement and operate a research infrastructure of pan European interest and they're given a special status in order to enable them best tool to go about their work and to invest in the most cost effective manner. And there are examples of new ERICs that are being formed including DARIAH that you will more about a little bit later this morning. So just some examples. So to give you an idea of the scale and scope of what we're talking about, I've got about six examples or seven examples. So CHARISMA, again who is represented again in this room and that you'll hear more about I believe, is about advanced research infrastructures for a multidisciplinary approach to conservation and restoration which is very much needed. And as you can see there are 21 leading European organizations with infrastructures, working together on infrastructures, to improve the restoration of artwork and a complimentary group of activities and facilities to do that. We're talking about European Union level support in the area between 7 and 8 million euros or more, approaching 10 million US dollars, with a duration of four years and lead by the University of Perugia in Italy while among over 20 organizations involved. Another example, 20 institutions in 13 countries developing European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, or have developed that, with 7 million euros, again 10 million US dollars of support at European Union level with a duration of four years coordinated by The Dutch Institute of War, Holocaust, and Genocide studies. CENDARI. I think they're here again today. Someone? Yes? Very good. Good to see you. Fourteen institutions, 6.5 million euros provided by the European Commission, coordinated by Trinity College, Dublin in Ireland. Again, duration of four years. ARIADNE for architectural datasets and networking. Twenty five partners, 66.5 million euros of EU support up to 2017, coordinated by the University of Florence and there are many august members of the University of Florence, including in this room, Dr. Franco Niccolucci, so welcome to you. And you'll be hearing perhaps more about that later today. So some ERICs that are in the preparatory phase are two that I mentioned already, DARIAH whom you'll hear more about and we expect that the construction costs will be something like 12 million dollars, 15 million US dollars of which European Union level support will be 2.5 and again crosscutting research infrastructure of activity is the common language resources and technology infrastructure which as you can imagine in European Union is well over 20 official languages. It's going to be a very important aspect of how we preserve our cultural heritage and it's going to be very important in the ongoing future. So another example of crosscutting activity is the Data Service Infrastructure for Social Sciences and Humanities which actually is federating the needs and the parts of the implantation of a number of ERICs including CLARIN and DARIAH and looking at issues like data quality, archiving, access and exchange, also some of the legal or ethical issues that will come up. Educational activities and outreach, again very important for all of the ERICs in cultural heritage and beyond and that activity being important is going to be supported to the tune of, it says 6 billion, I'm wondering whether that might be 6 million euros over that period. So the future. I'm going to tell you a little about Horizon 2020 because that, as I say, is going to be our main means of developing our research infrastructures at EU level and connecting them with our international partners during the period of 2014 to 2020. It's a program that brings together all of the science, technology, research, and innovation activities that we have at European Union level. It constitutes something like 10 percent, approaching 10 percent, of all the research and innovation funding that's available in the European Union, the other 90 percent being what's being spent at national level in the 28 EU member states and the associated countries. It supports everything from basic research right through to the commercialization of ideas. We are more than ever before emphasizing multidisciplinarity [phonetic] in order to make the best of the ideas and the crosscutting activities and collaboration across sectors, the private sector and the public sector. So there are three main parts to the program which I will explain now. Excellence science is one where we're talking about funding the best science in Europe and allowing the best scientists in Europe to work with the best in the rest of the world. We're talking about supporting emerging technologies with projects which have far-reaching implications. To give you an example of a future and emerging technology, we will be spending something like a billion euros of EU money on the human brain project which is a brain simulation project. We're also spending somewhere around, or will be spending somewhere around, up to 2020, on a project which is looking at the future of global properties and potential of the material graphene. So that's an example of future emerging technologies. We are also funding career mobility and development. We want European researchers to be able to move around the European research area and have excellent careers where their qualifications are recognized, where their social welfare is looked after. We want to facilitate excellent research and research careers and encourage the development of the best training and lability for our researchers. Also, not only for European researches going around Europe but also to help bring, perhaps for a temporary period, the best international researchers to Europe for a period or to allow European researchers to move abroad and there's a lot of that exchange happening between the European Union and the United States, of course. European research infrastructures is a very important part of the excellent science pillar-- that's why it's highlighted in red there-- and will benefit from a total of 2.5 billion, well over 3 billion US dollars in that 2014 to 2020 period. I'll mention the two other pillars. Societal challenges where we, of course, using collaborative research, that is consort Europe, of largely European countries, to get together to tackle societal challenges like energy, climate, transport, social sciences and humanities indeed. But it's also worth saying that in the societal challenges and in the industrial leadership pillows, social sciences and humanities, we encourage the mainstreaming and the social dimension in all of those areas. So we encourage the consortia, look forward to address proposals to include social scientists, to make sure that they are addressing issues of gender or of inclusion, the impact of their research on society, the attitudes of society, of the research that they're doing, and the use of the results and the implications of the results of their research. ^M00:25:27 So important thing to mention. And industrial leadership is support to again consortia-based bids, projects in order to address the key enabling technologies like ICT, biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, the overlaps between them. We also support advanced manufacturing and space research through that mechanism. We also give our support to small and medium-sized enterprises. This is a very important part of our program where we are earmarking something like 20 percent of the money that goes to consortia to go to small and medium-sized enterprises. It's not a quota, it's a target and it's something that we monitor and something that we are paying a lot of attention to. So research infrastructures and Horizon 2020. What are we trying to do here? We're going to continue our development of world class researching facilities. We're going to continue to encourage the member states to open up their national infrastructures to integrate their national infrastructures with those of others in order to create world class European infra structures. We are going to look at the crosscutting elements of not only the development but the operation and maintenance of those and making use of the crosscutting tools like ICT tools which are going to be very, very important to preserve our cultural heritage. The innovation dimension is something that's given much greater emphasis in the Horizon 2020 program than in the previous program, the 7th Framework program. And so well be looking at how we can involve a private sector in not only the development of activities which will contribute to the preservation of cultural heritage but also to make use of them and to invest indeed. And that's something that it will be worth examining during the next three days. And lastly, of course, we want to develop and enhance what we're doing at European level, developing our ideas, and that includes working with our American and other international partners in developing the best approaches, exchanging best practices. So I'm going to come to an end soon, but say that what we're going to use is all the means at our disposal to do that. So we're going to be using the Horizon 2020 program but we're going to be encouraging the ERICs, the European Research Infrastructure Consortia, to follow a coherent and systematic approach which would stop the design studies, go through a preparatory phase, and in a robust and understandable and systematic manner to support their implementation and operation. That includes clustering of individual projects that are relevant. We will be using the European Union Research and Innovation Funds, that is Horizon 2020, but we're also using what I call structural funds, another European concept. This is regional development funds which are given to particular regions within the member states that are behind in their development that we are providing extra support at European level to develop their capacities, their infrastructures, their institutions and that's going to be important in preserving digital heritage as well as simply increasing the capacity of those countries to do science and to innovate and to address a number of challenges that they may have in any area of policy support, agriculture, transport, environment, you name it. So we'll be using those tools and international corporation we see as an important and crosscutting area so we are encouraging the ERICs to look at what their international corporation strategies might be, who do they want to, need to work with and how can that be supported if you [inaudible]. As I say, part of my job is making sure that that happens. So to finish, using the European strategy forum for research infractures starting in 2004, we've made a lot of progress in the area of research infrastructures as a whole including in the social sciences and humanities and I've given you some examples of how we're trying to support that for cultural heritage and its preservation. We have been using the ERICs as a relatively new mechanism in order to do that systematically, coherently, and to provide important support at the European level. However, there is a lot to be done and it's conferences like this at which we will help to develop some of the ideas that will help us to implement, maintain those infrastructures and create new ones as they're needed and to exchange best practice and ideas and so with that I wish you a very successful conference and look forward to the outcomes of the proceedings and to know ways in which I, as a science counselor based here in Washington, D.C., can be an aid to your efforts. Thank you. ^M00:30:52 [ Applause ] ^M00:31:02 >> Thank you, Errol. Everyone we can just hold questions to the end and we'll have a panel session. Our next speaker today is Dr. Costis Dallas and you're going to be well-apt with acronyms by the end of this conference. As everyone knows the Library of Congress loves acronyms, but this is a whole new seat. So Dr. Costis Dallas, please come forward. Please welcome, Dr. Dallas. ^M00:31:28 [ Applause ] ^M00:31:32 >> Thank you colleagues and it's a great pleasure for me and for the DARIAH project which I represent here today to be here in this temple of cultural heritage, the Library of Congress. DARIAH. Before I start talking about DARIAH, I'll just say a couple of words about where I come from. I was trained as an archaeologist and then I moved into the field of museums and I worked through most of professional career in the field of what we call cultural heritage informatics. This is one part of the broader landscape of digital humanities, or as we like to say in DARIAH, digitally enabled humanities in order to give it a broader preview. We don't mean exactly or singularly that advanced applications of digital technology in order to sort of change the shape of disciplines because we feel that in the humanities in general and we find this very, very much in the field of heritage. The situation is such that some of the changes are subtle and they happen over longer periods of time and they really sort of go and meshed into the practice of humanities work. So what was the initial intuition? What did we start for? What was the sort of point of departure for DARIAH? In the arts and humanities, we see a scattered and heterogenous landscape. There are landscape digitization efforts in the public and private sectors. In Europe, they've been sort of notably, you know, sort of fueled by the support of the framework program for research of the European Union. There is a longstanding tradition in humanities computing, now renamed digital humanities, indeed is probably almost half a century now or even more than a half a century if you go to the 50s and the initial sort of research work with textual analysis in the humanities and there are already some success stories that were with us at the time in which we were sort of building, putting together DARIAH in the area of epigraphy, in the area of medieval studies, communities that were really strong, the Texting Coding Initiative that I witnessed in its very, very first steps when I was reading for my [inaudible] in Oxford with Susan Hockley [phonetic] being there, and still now there's a majority of researchers that have no real insight about the digital sources, the methods of publications, the resources that they need in order to be enabled in this new digital environment. This is quite important because in the digital realm, so if we see this pervasive nature of technology today entering all aspects of work that affects all aspects of work in research from sourcing and from sort of capturing data and assessing evidence and the traces of past human activity to publication. There is a general issue of preserving digital results from one research project to another. That's a very, very major problem that these digital infrastructures, these ERICs, are called to address in the European context. So challenges. Localization and hosting of digital sources. Documenting and connecting to analog sources and we know there's a vast, vast amount of such sources out there that are not really in digital form but still need to be accessible to researchers in the mostly idiographic research that lots of humanities researchers are conducting. Environments for managing, exploring, and enriching digital material. Communication of one's own results in the digital world. Multidisciplinary collaboration in computer science research. We see a lot of cross fertilization in research that spans between various disciplines in the humanities and information science, archival science, computer science, and those other disciplines. ^M00:35:30 And finally, community acceptance of paradigm changes in a transition period and this is quite, quite important. So what is DARIAH? It's an integrating activity bringing together digitally enabled research in the arts and humanities in Europe and hopefully beyond. It's a platform enabling transnational arts and humanities research. It's a research infrastructure for sharing and sustaining digital arts and humanities knowledge and it is made by researchers and for researchers. The difference in some major infrastructures that might be familiar with this, DARIAH is a lightweight infrastructure in the following sense: It isn't a little creating a large-scale repositories in which aggregates information and resources. It accepts the reality of the humanities world in which resources and actual work and the processing of the activities around these resources are going to remain local, they're going to be distributed so the real issue here is how to tap the knowledge and how to tap the collaboration between researchers so they stay a unified European research space in the arts and humanities. So the mission for DARIAH is really to use glue, effectively, and this glue can be conceptual, it can be glue that is methodological. It can be also technical in the form of standards or in the form of lightweight systems that connect other resources and other systems at the local level and the national level in order to allow digitally-enabled research across the art and humanities through these services and activities that again are centered around communities. So the difference perhaps to what some of you may be familiar from this side of the pond is really that DARIAH has adopted from the beginning an approach that was distributed in action that planned and coordinated in essence so the idea was really to bring together centers, research centers from around Europe that had an impact and had important input into the feed of digital humanities, of digital infrastructures for the arts and humanities and have them talk in order to decide what is needed for the field. This is why one of the major activities that we see in DARIAH is in the area of research, in the area of understanding practices, understanding the needs of researchers, and this is why we need another major area of investment being in connecting scholars allowing them to get onboard systems that would then allow them to be able to access resources, access tools, access information and finding aid since metal level information about other primary resources. Training researchers and working with communities in important area. Summer schools. Providing guidance about standards and best practices. Finally, providing a network of tools, information, people, and methodologies through registries. So DARIAH started in 2006 and very, very much in the framework of ESFRI that my colleague from the commission talks about a little a few minutes ago. Then from 2008 to 2011, we sort of created this. It was preparatory stage in which we built a study that identified were we going to do a roadmap for DARIAH? Then after a transition period, DARIAH was effectively legally adopted by the European Union on the 15th of August 2014 and was established as a European research infrastructure consortium. Fifteen founding members of DARIAH today and a further number of countries that are interested in participating. DARIAH has an ERIC as a consortium is sponsored by member states of the European Union. That means that in forty days it could in ministries, it could be national authorities of research, are really participating and sort of really sort of creating DARIAH. However they're operating our DARIAH is based on different feelers. One feeler is a central office, another feeler is a national coordination committee in which research institutions that are actually involved in the activities of DARIAH are involved, and the third element is what we call the VCCs, virtual competency centers. So these virtual competence centers work with communities and in these communities I mentioned some here, literary studies, archeology, medieval studies, strong communities that are around as well within DARIAH. What does DARIAH offer then? What has it produced so far? It is put together and brought together where creativity and the activity of national partners, national initiatives in each country, some of them funded, some of them not yet funded but very, very much in the process of being funded through the national roadmaps in different countries. From France, for instance, a series of activities including electronic journals, electronic blogs for scholars, and open access archives. Summer schools in Germany in [foreign language spoken]. Digital research taxonomy that was created by our colleagues in Germany actually in cooperation with a project in the United States, the Dorth [phonetic] Project, the tools project of bamboo and digital infrastructures project that you are probably familiar with. Finally, multilingual training materials. Other services. Collaboration tools. AAI infrastructure in order to be able to authenticate them, link together people with systems. Persistent identification of resources in major of research. So in particular fields, we've done more of just a few words because probably my time will be elapsing really soon, just a few words about what we're doing in the VCC, too, which is the virtual competency center on research and education. We're building there a project that seeks to understand what scholars do with resources, what kinds of activities they are engaging with in research, and what sorts of needs, digital needs, for services and tools emerge from these study. And whoever makes methods approach with a question or survey, then with the scholarly method scientology and with case studies. Questions such as how important they find group specific areas to follow their research. To prove fundability not just digital research resources or data. Digitization of data of resources that they're not already using, etc., etc. This study is going to be published sometime in the second quarter of 2015. We currently still at the stage in which we're running the research so note the URL, bit.ly/dh-survey, if you wish to participate or communicate with others who might. Together with the NeDiMAH project, the network for digital methods in health and humanities, we are building a methods ontology. We feel this is necessary in order to be able to pull together information about actual research methods that engage with digital tools or digital services and provide a cloud of information about projects that are using these successfully. How tos, suggestions, web shops where people can sort of learn more about each particular method. Information and guidance about the context in terms of the research questions that are appropriate in terms of their stage in one's research that is available for this to happen. And this is going to be expressed in our RDF/S and SKOS. So finally, what I'd like to say, I'd like to move very, very briefly in a final section in which I say where we are now with are key themes. First of all, what do we want to see to foster national capabilities and for this we have 15 countries with heterogenous developments and we want to sort of create synergy between these countries in order to be able to contribute to a European research space in the arts and humanities through digitization programs, through national technical infrastructures, multidisciplinary initiatives, national funding schemes, some of them funded by the regional frameworks cause problem with the European Union, and also as I said, with EU structural funds. The second thing that we want to encourage is attention in the broader community in order for inception of digital technologies and we see open humanities as being a major theme for that. So in this next year, in 2015, we'll be building on that theme in order to encourage researchers to come up with proposals, to come up with ideas, and that will sort of put on the table the need to make primary and secondary sources publicly available, openly available, communicate research results from blogs to repositories, and finally encourage good scholarly practices related to the delivery and the re-use of open content. So thank you and I would be happy to take part in the discussion further down the line after the end of the session in the final discussion and respond to questions and listen to your ideas. Thank you. ^M00:44:38 [ Applause ] ^M00:44:45 >> So our third speaker this morning is Dr. Luca Pezzati and he will introduce a new acronym for you. IPERION. ^M00:44:55 [ Background Sounds ] ^M00:45:06 >> Thank you, Fenella. Thank you and thank you also for your efforts organizing all this. I am speaking today on behalf of a community who is currently homeless. The community is that of the project CHARISMA that actually ended its [inaudible] in March 2014. This community organized a new proposal of which now I am the coordinator, but the idea is not just to continue ten years of service in Europe of advanced diagnostic for heritage conservation and restoration that was mainly the core mission of CHARISMA. This community had the idea of establishing a permanent research infrastructure perhaps in the ERIC for a consortium and this research infrastructure will not be limited to what projects like [inaudible], the predecessor of CHARISMA, and CHARISMA itself did since the last ten years but we are trying to establish a research infrastructure for heritage science including other communities who were not in, strictly speaking, in the CHARISMA initiative. First of all, opening to a wide community of archeologists and also under the pressure of several member states in Europe who have a wider picture to extend the concept of heritage to natural heritage and so we are speaking also of including polyanthropology, for instance, in these infrastructures. It is possible because the diagnostic methods and the procedures which CHARISMA used for several years are very similar across these new communities. And this is more or less what we are trying to do in the next four to five years. I have here a definition of European research infrastructure. However, they have been nicely introduced by our colleague in the commission. However, I must say that about 90 to 95 percent of European researchers don't know what a research infrastructure is. In our case, it's obvious what a synchrotron is, what an accelerator is, the [inaudible]. But what a distributed infrastructure is in social science and humanities is less obvious. I extracted some facilities here and you see that we can have also an integrated array of small research installation. This is a distributed infrastructure as well. But we can go beyond. We can have center of competence providing services for the community and these services are not only the instruments but more than the instruments are the expertise so the competencies, the capacities of researchers are a structuring part of the distributing infrastructure. We heard about the idea before. Last but not least in our field, it is very important that archives, collections, libraries are all considered by the commission as research infrastructures and what's this again? The infrastructure as well is founding part and is more and more important in the operation of the [inaudible] research infrastructure they use on digital support. I feel compelled to give a short definition also of the heritage science concept because it is quite a new term. You know in the UK, there is a heritage science foundation, but until the last years we were used to conservation science. But we felt that conservation science is a field that now is too restricted to allow us these over encompassing view about the possibility of inclusion of these communities that I described into the European infrastructure so we needed a new term. We are trying to see if we can use the heritage science term, but we want to use it in the most possibly inclusive way. This perhaps makes us [inaudible] one of the most multidisciplinary infrastructures in the landscape of Europe now and the better in the future. CHARISMA had multidisciplinary in the ties of the project and already being presented joined 22, 21, where is that? There's been an amendment during the project. But few were European research institutes but more than 22 research groups. It was being coordinated by Bruno Brunetti who should have been here but unfortunately has got six involvements with CHARISMA accounting by the way for the final closing, and so he cannot reach us. And the multidisciplinary of this infrastructure is in the participants. All the centers that you see here in the partnership, the conservation centers of large museums in Europe. They are very multidisciplinary institutions and altogether we have a very nice community of researchers in all demands and what we want to establish in Europe is kind of a common disciplinary scientific domain where there is no absolutely difference between and an art historian and a physicist because both are working for heritage science. The last point that perhaps is one of the most important difference between the concept of, let's say, conservation science and what we want to reach extends in the end users for years and years in Europe and in Italy in particular. We were used to see the art historian, the archaeologist as the end user of conservation science and this has been guiding the development of this domain in the very wrong way. It's like in medicine, the end user for an equipment is the physician. You develop diagnostic equipment and the end user is the physician. Something is sounding very bad here. The end user of heritage science is the heritage, is the cultural heritage and so in medicine, when it tries a new instrument, you end users must be the patient, not the physician. So what we will try to change is the view, and I must confess to you, this has been for at least the last 20 years a very strong view that is spoiling the possibilities of development of this disciplinary field. So the new project that we submitted and in something like one month we should have the outcome, the formal outcome, is called IPERION CH, Integrated Project for the European Research Infrastructure on Cultural Heritage. This is the followup of CHARISMA and so this is the project supporting the cultural heritage community. As I told you, the core mission of the project is, of course, going on providing the same services of CHARISMA for at least four more years but also to establish the European research infrastructure for heritage science. The proposal of IPERION is limited just by, let's say, mechanism in the European project range because we have assembled a partnership of the widest possible but we were limiting for more or less administrative matters to keep the sides of the CHARISMA project because the CHARISMA project was already a very big project from the point of view of management so it would have been impossible to increase the sides of IPERION where would have liked. However, we have more than 35 institutions now from 24 separate partners in 12 member states and we have a very important addition and it is not important because are in the US now, it's important in itself that we The Getty Conservation Institute as full partner in the project. And so we have international extension and this door that it has opened with the US to have a stronger collaboration between the projects and the landscape of infrastructure that is moving here in the US. However, about the activities. The activities are the common activities for European research infrastructure. The special feature of the IPERION project is in the kind of access that it's provided which is structured in three integrated platforms. And these three integrated platforms are one which is rather classical is the access to large-scale facilities, FIXLAB, the last one. In these sense, we are kind of an interface for easing the use of large-scale facilities to researchers in our community. But the more specific platforms that we have into the access provision offer the ARCHLAB which is a collection-- in the project we have 10 archives-- of scientific data from 10 conservation institutions. When I say archives of scientific data, I say only partially digitized archive is when you need to go there to do research and there a lot of non-digital archives around Europe. ^M00:55:55 So this one is a feature that is pretty peculiar of the project. Another peculiar feature of IPERION is the mobile laboratory. The mobile laboratory is no more a novelty in Europe because it was established 10 years ago by the predecessors of IPERION, the project [inaudible] when for the first time the commission considered a collection of portable equipment and the knowledge how to use them as a real research infrastructure. This was a big breakthrough for research in cultural heritage because you know that you are to move instrument 90 percent of times and cannot move art works and objects. And so now we have a mobile laboratory composed of five separate platforms in five countries with their offer of portable cutting edge instruments and we are to provide this service of in situ diagnostic for hopefully, if the project is approved, four more years. Another peculiar activity of European infrastructure is joint research. Joint research mainly dedicated to the advancement of the offer of access, better archives, better mobile laboratories, and better devices at large-scale facilities. Then we do a lot of international corporation, and this the good part of the European, we are really trying to establish what is called European research. In our case, we are a very old community, we know each other since years, and we reached a very good level of integration and cooperation. I must say this is a very big family in Europe is the cultural heritage community now. For the first time, we tried to focus on digital because you heard before the colleague, Costis, there's a lot of you humanists that are not using digital tools but also in cultural heritage digital tools are not common. It is not the routinely work yet. At least in Europe and institutions for cultural preservation in Europe. So there's a lot of work to do and for doing this, we made a strong alliance with DARIAH-ERIC. DARIAH is one of the 24 partners included in proposal and I am very involved with DARIAH because I am the Italian national coordinator, too, so I must say there's a good level of cooperation now. Then we will care about the impact of our activities especially now that we are in the roadmap to try to develop this permanent infrastructure so we want to do a lot of dissemination, we have to teach our researcher to use the tools that we provide, to use the digital tools, but also to use the advanced instruments that I have in your mobile laboratories. We do also education and training, summer schools and training camps at military. And we care about sustainability because that's something the colleague by the commission didn't told you that when establish an ERIC, all the support shifts from Brussels to the member states, so with Brussels you have just one reference point for going on with funding research. Then in the case of the DARIAH, you have to contract with 15 separate bodies, so the situation is more complex than it appears. However, there are tools around and so being a permanent European research infrastructure is not so bad after all. While we were preparing these in the last two and a half years, we succeeded in starting up three national projects that are now funded that are the IPERION CH in Portugal that has been approved and financed with 1.5 million euro and now it is in the Portuguese national roadmap. I think its pronunciation Greece, which has been admitted to the Greece national roadmap but not yet financed. And the last IPERION CH project in Italy which is in the Italian national roadmap and of which I am the coordinator. The national main node of the project is Florence where most of the partners of CHARISMA are from the scientific point of view were already located and this project is to support the IPERION Europe and also the establishment of the infrastructure in Europe. These are the four partners who contributed more to the activities of the first year because IPERION CH Europe is going on since eight months so it is actually a project, not a proposal. And you see the Institute of Nuclear Physics, the collection of universities in the chemical domain, more than 47 university. INSTM is something lost in translation with, the department center for science and technology of materials but is very long and complicated. And our diamond point, a [inaudible] in Florence, department from the ministry of cultural heritage, one of the better centers for conservation and restoration of cultural heritage in Europe. What we did in these months, we started with pilot sections and we did the first training camp in the city of Sansepolcro in Tuscany last summer. We got, in a very short time, 33 post call application. Twenty person were selected and we had five days of on field work. We particularly occupied the [inaudible] in Tuscany with instruments everywhere. You see in the cathedral, then in the civic museum. A lot of young people around. And I must say they were very happy with this first experience, so we will do this again. Even at national level, we proposed a European training camp in the IPERION proposal that perhaps we'll have European training camps. But we would also go on with national training camps. Then we issued the first pilot call for national access so to provide services with the platforms that you saw at national level and we got 18 proposals. We had money for five but we decided to make some economy and we are now about to perform seven diagnostic projects around Italy on pieces of several different measures. This you see, this is very, very important and beautiful mosaic from the Archaeological Museum in Naples so we got here something leading to archaeology. We have a project for diagnostic of [inaudible] of cave heritage. You see these from [inaudible]. But also more traditional for the CHARISMA group projects like the diagnostic of Piero della Francesca in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan and something more modern because one of the application that has been financed is doing more diagnostic in Venice to these series of Pollock paintings, Peggy Guggenheim, because we already did something with the MOLAB of CHARISMA last year but they called us again and the proposal has been approved by this panel of international reviewer that [inaudible] and when we are starting this operation we will have this access national campaign until end of spring. Adding to the confusion of this, I must say that the more obvious way to create a permanent research infrastructure in Europe is to be admitted to the ESFRI roadmap that has been well-defined and discussed before. The ESFRI roadmap is calling for the new infrastructures right now and the call will be closed on the end of March and as you saw from the table presented, all the infrastructure in social science and humanity are exiting the old roadmap because they all became ERICs and so we are applying for being included in the social science and humanities calling. We had the kickoff meeting of this group in Rome and here we didn't limit to the IPERION partners as I told because we had this general meeting with the other communities and we are now writing the application so the acronym will not be IPERION of the possible arrival of this roadmap but will be something like RIHS. ^M01:05:27 And together with other communities, archaeologists and paleoanthropologists, we put together an impressive community of international cooperations. Only the IPERION proposal collected more than 20 applications for not just genetic support but actually affiliation to the project once the project should start, and several applications came from the US. I must cite the Library of Congress here, but also the Chicago Art Institute, and from close to the US we had an application from the Canadian Conservation Institute. But one of the most important applications, and you see we got application from practically all over the world including Taiwan and perhaps we'll be left more application from China now because we had a meeting two weeks ago, but the most application perhaps that reached us was that of the intergovernmental organization, ICCROM which asked us more than this because really in recent times, I must say two weeks ago, we had this proposal from the Italian delegate in the group of senior officials, which is a group linked to the G8 plus 5 advisors of science ministers, a very special group that perhaps not one of you heard about. It's a group of advisors who are caring for infrastructure of potential global interests and we have the proposal to apply for consider infrastructure remains a science as a possible infrastructure of global interest. We submitted a question to this group just last Friday and the meeting of this group will be in a few days in Rome and the Italian delegate will apply his proposal to the table. Over this, with a very quick action I must say, the ICCROM proposed us to host the seat of this global infrastructure. ICCROM is hosted in Rome but it is a UNESCO organization set up by UNESCO in 1956 and with an agreement with the Italian government is hosted in Rome. ICCROM could be the lead seat of these European/global infrastructure. The game is now bigger but we are very happy to be playing it. I thank you for your attention. ^M01:08:21 [ Applause ] ^M01:08:31 >> And our fourth speaker this morning is Dr. Franco Niccolucci and he will talk to you about ARIADNE. ^M01:08:39 [ Background Conversations ] ^M01:08:52 >> Okay, so good morning ladies and gentlemen. I will briefly introduce myself shortly and with some more time, this lady ARIADNE which is a project for archaeological data networking in Europe. Well first of all, the project is about archaeology and you will be surprised to hear that it is led by a person with a degree in mathematics. Probably this is good for the project because archaeologists have a reputation of quality continuously so they need some order and who better than a mathematician complete this order. Well, that makes a nice acronym as you can see from here. It summarizes the proposal of the project. It is also a good metaphor because ARIADNE is intended to be the person, the character, who will help the research community and each researcher to get out of the labyrinth after hopefully killing the Minotaur that is the callus in archaeological deficits. So this is a research infrastructure project. Perhaps you at this point of the meeting, you are confused with all these European community jargon. You have heard about ERICs which are paramount structures like a paramount research center with basically [inaudible] which is stable, funded by governments, and has infinite direction. ARIADNE is not like that and there are other projects like the one that Luca presented before which are so far are still working integrating different infrastructures with the goal of getting older, become [inaudible] and be turned into [inaudible] like DARIAH which Costis presented before. Fine, we have not this ambition so far because are still in the kindergarten. The project started only two years ago and so we are looking around and collaborating with all these older sisters like DARIAH [inaudible] the forthcoming project by Luca to do something which I will try to explain. The project has a four-year duration-- we started about two years ago so we are midterm now-- with 23 partners from 17 European countries and it's coordinated by a small research agency of the University of Florence, not directed by the university but a research agency created by the university for managing such projects, and we are affiliated to DARIAH which already Costis introduced. So why? Why is it your project?. Well to have fun first of all but I could not put this into light. And actually there is a huge number of archaeological data available in the digital format and nowadays computers have made their way also into archaeology. But unfortunately, the way computing came up was very much based on individual activities so most of these archaeological datasets are not communicating. They are information silos. On the other hand there is an increasing interest of the research community for sharing such data, both passively, that is accessing data prepared by others, and actively, offer their data for sharing. There are impressive statistics and usually I refer to one made in the US which shows that almost all, a very high percentage, of archaeologists interviewed about this topic said that they were willing to reuse data prepared by others and also to make their own data available for others so there is a strong interest. And above all, there is a strong pressure by the society or the better informed parts of the society for opening said data vaults. It is becoming, people do not understand why, what is funded with public funds and the data that were collected and organized and stored with money coming from the collectivities is not available for such of a use. As you can see from this map, the ARIADNE partnership is placed all over Europe. There are a few exceptions here. We did not yet make the eastern campaign to collect the partners from easternmost Europe. But as of this hour, the core partners, the black spots, I should say the partners, the green spots. We are covering most of the European Union and also other nearby countries which are associated. Of course we do not limit our scope to Europe. We have connections with other institutions, especially in the US we have contact with two or three universities which are doing a similar work and we are looking for work there to be able to establish closer contacts and closer collaboration with them. Same with Australia. So what, to do what? Okay. Shape research community. We do not want to prepare a dropdown solution because it would not work. Of course, the goal is to share, access, use, and re-use archaeological data. Overcoming the current fragmentation of deficits. Support interoperability. Fragmentation is not just a matter of deficit [inaudible] different service and different laboratories. Then such deficits do not talk to each other. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to extend the user of archaeological data over referring to deficits. And to do this, we have to establish accepted standards and common protocols. Standards in our vision should come [inaudible]. There is no way of choosing a standard, having it approved by [inaudible] and then imposing that to researchers. And then enable resource discovery. That is being able to see where information about some topic, some subject is stored, and find it and perhaps not tomorrow but in the some years to be able to do faceted research, searches that ease search for what is available about the second century BC or what is available about [inaudible] for example. I don't think there is much archaeology in [inaudible] but you never know. And explore new methods of using the information in the framework of the traditional archaeological methodology. Of course to do this reading, we'll need to create useful tools for searching and browsing, but connecting not assembling. We do not want to create an overarching big brother of archaeological data extending all over Europe and possibly in the future all over the world. So linking, connecting, not assembling. Making data discoverable, accessible, understandable, and usable. Okay, so some diagrams and we're not going to read this because these are rather technical. I usually put this in slide set just to show I know about the technology and computer science, show off, but I will not base this on that. The idea, however, is simple. You have on the bottom here plenty of deficit created in several contact service projects, management and so on. And then what you do here, taking data actually, mostly metadata from all these deficits and these are some examples. These are deficits that-- oh sorry-- collect information from different laboratories and then, you may remember the horizontal layer as integrating them. So how are you going to do this? Well, networking, establishing collaboration among archaeologists to overcome fragmentation. So the first thing to integrate the deficits is to integrate people who created those deficits, to make these people talk to each other which is not easy with archaeologists but it can be done. And so far my estimate, and I told you I'm a mathematician so I like numbers, I estimate that there are about 100 researchers working in the project. I mean full-time equivalent. Which is not that little. ^M01:19:11 It's a good number of people. But these are, I would say, paid by the project, and there's about 1000 researchers in Europe collaborating with the project somehow, from inside or from outside, or part-time, or just looking at our new letter or participating in our special interest groups. These are a collection of perhaps 50,000 archaeologists in Europe. So we have space for enlarging and growing up the community. And we are currently collecting, recording, and providing information on what is available, which deficits are around, and this will be stored in a project registry, publicly accessible, so hopefully in humans, if you are interested to know where some information about some subject is stored, you can check our registry. What is going on? So checking what's happening around the world. And what needs to be done? So establishing a research agenda with our collaborators but also collecting information from relevant research centers and experts around the world. Training on innovation. Of course, training is needed. And joint research on, as I said, standardization of metadata schemas and reference work, so thesauri, gazetteers, authority lists and will you believe me if I tell you that this is not an easy task? When working archeology, there are for example time periods which look very simple are actually very complicated, not to say messy and it's very difficult to use them across different traditions, schools, campus, and so on. Design inoperability and implementing of interoperability. Creating tools for using at best all these interoperability framework. Carrying the data lifecycle. Most project deficits which I have seen being created maybe 20 years ago are no more available because they were put on a floppy disk and the floppy disk is no more readable, somebody has lost the floppy disk. The floppy disk is available but nobody remembers what is [inaudible] so caring of preservation. And also establishing new methodological tools as a tool. For example, this is a diagram of a mapping. I will not go into the details again just to show that I'm also an expert in knowledge engineering, but this means that if you have two different [inaudible] meta schemas, how you can mesh concepts between them and this example maps the Italian satellite created by scientologists of our ministry of culture. It maps to an international standard which is CIDOC-CRM. Perhaps those of you who know better archaeology have heard about it. And so it may establish crosswalks in between the deficits or great [inaudible] with those [inaudible] by other centers in the world. And this is a medium-term perspective which perhaps we will not be able to implement in ARIADNE but would be useful to get more funds to continue the project afterwards, after the four years. And we share but thrives to create a stronger integration, not just the initial discovery and then you are on your own interrogating different deficits but creating a strong level of integration availing of this standard reported will create. I think there is another slide. Oh well, okay. This is what we had done in two years but you may not be that much interested in this. So okay, we had done surveys, established the research agenda. All these things are available on our [inaudible] website. We had created the registry and, as I told you, some initial mappings as well as started establishing integration between different deficits. Actually, currently we have more languages used in deficits than official languages in Europe. In Europe there are 24 official languages. We have also deficits in Arabic, Calatan [phonetic], Catalan [phonetic] and I don't remember the first but more so, one big problem with this is the issue of multilingualism, for example, which is particularly hard when you try to experiment and make sure that we're processing. So we had started from [inaudible] English, then we're moving to Dutch, and to now French, German, and so on. Probably Catalan would be the last one because there are so few that [inaudible] language. Okay. Success indicators. Don't take it yet again that I want to show off for showing how clever we were and arrived to the targets in two years having two more years to do more. But just because I'm not better interesting. Okay for example, as I told you, we have reached about 3000 researchers which is a pretty good number I believe so of course only part of them are working, but most of them are aware of what is going on. And there's about 5 million [inaudible], currently 4, 700,000 records available for integration. We will not be able to integrate all of them but we hope to do that for as many as possible. Many of these records are not database records, they're documents. They are text documents, the excavator records for example, which are more difficult to integrate and that's why we are testing this [inaudible] processing tools. And I think that's all. I have to acknowledge support from the European Commission and actually the European Commission has made a great job of this, not only because they funded the [inaudible] which was a good idea but also because the European support enabled us to fight against some conservative approach which was to present in the main academic circles. So if these is made possible, it's not only because Europe pooled the money but because they supported the idea which is a great merit to [inaudible] archeology. Thank you very much. ^M01:26:35 [ Applause ] ^M01:26:45 And our final speaker this morning, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Dr. Mariet Westermann. We've heard a lot about the European framework and structure, and as many of you may know, we're not really that well-coordinated and integrated here in the US and Mariet has kindly agreed to give some comments and notes on the digital humanities in the US today. Mariet. ^M01:27:09 [ Background Sounds ] ^M01:27:13 >> Thank you very much, Fenella, for inviting me and introducing me was a cautionary note. About ten days ago, I was asked to speak at Netherlands Congress for the presentation of the National Research Agenda for art history. This was a congress in the Netherlands and I had to give the response from the American perspective. And of course, I started my response by saying that whatever was in that agenda I was absolutely green with envy that there was such a thing as a National Research Agenda for anything, in the Netherlands let alone art history, because we're just not used to thinking in that way in this country, although perhaps we should. And listening to these very impressive presentations this morning, I was wondering if my American colleagues here share my similar sense of envy, similar sensation, listening to this roll call of programs and initiatives, competitions, forests of acronyms for which you have roadmaps that are then to be navigated with boatloads of dollars, or euros rather, millions and even billions I saw past review. We have no such thing in the United States. Just to give you a quick comparison. I didn't do this. I should have thought of doing this again. I did this for the Dutch example. For the arts and humanities, the annual budget of this country of 320 million people is about 500 million dollars. That puts together the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Studies. So that's 500 million a year of federal funding. Of course, lots of money comes from other places. But that 500 million translates to about $1.56 per person who lives in this country per year for arts and humanities. In comparison, for the Netherlands alone, a country of about 16 million people, it's one and three quarter billion not counting 900 million in sort of university research support which mostly goes to science but also to the humanities. It comes to something like $130 per person. So that's sort of the difference of scale we're talking about and at this point it's not surprising that Fenella therefore asked a representative of a private foundation, which is what I am, I'm vice president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation which is entirely dedicated to the arts and humanities and gives out as much money a year as the two endowments I just mentioned combined. And I say that without any sense of pride at all. In fact, I find it very depressing and we would quite like to have more support for the sort of work that we do. So without further ado, let me try to give you a sense of the sort things that we at the Mellon Foundation are seeing when it comes to the digital humanities and digital infrastructure for cultural heritage research. I refer to this talk as a set of notes because it would simply be impossible to give a fair overview of the digital humanities in the US as I was asked to provide in 20 minutes. From its origins as a French field of humanities computing in the 1990s, digital humanities as we've already heard and seen, has become a complex set of practices and attitudes at the intersection of humanities' research, computational technology, and new media and communities in new media. Moreover, I am a real interloper because I'm not an active digital humanist myself and under normal circumstances, my colleague, Don Waters who I think is well-known to many of you and who is senior program officer for scholarly communications at the Mellon Foundation, he would be the one making these remarks. But he is today leading a workshop in New York upon the reconciliation of linked open data which is a highly germane topic certainly for digital heritage research. He and I work together frequently, however, or rather he advises me frequently on grant projects in the digital humanities, both in research universities and in cultural heritage institutions such as museums, libraries, and archives and I hope that I can get you at least a bit of a sense of the work that we are funding for the development of digital humanities infrastructure and of initiatives that we believe to be promising and then I'll close with a couple of concerns that we are seeking to address these days. So it is the mission of the Mellon Foundation to strengthen, promote, and where necessary to defend the contributions of the humanities and the arts to human flourishing and to developing of diverse democratic societies. I think it's always important to remember why we do the things we do at all. Now although we make most of our grants in the US, we believe that the health of the humanities and the arts in this country as elsewhere depends absolutely on robust international collaboration. It seems an obvious point that the forces of war, trade, migration, and colonial empire have long conspired to disperse cultural heritage objects around the world and evenly so. And therefore international dialogue and collaboration are vital to development of research infrastructure for humanities cumulative record of creative and cultural achievement and I'm therefore very pleased to be participating in this transatlantic conversation. The Mellon Foundation support digital humanities broadly conceived has evolved considerably over the past 15 years. Having initially focused on aggregation of digital resources and objects most notably in JSTOR and ARTstor and on experiments fledgling once in online education, we soon realized the importance of letting scholarly communities guide the agenda for a source of resources, tools, and protocols to be developed for the humanities in the internet age. Similarly, we have looked to curators and conservators, some of you here today, to define and develop new tools for the documentation of research and conservation that involved around the collections that these curators and conservators manage. I will try to show how our approach is affective the initiatives we support and how does activities connect to broader developments of digital humanities infrastructure we are seeing in the United States and internationally. Rather than support solitary digital humanists, we try to identify groups of scholars are thoroughly rethinking what humanity scholarship and teaching can become with digital content and with digital tools. These scholars, of course, invariably are contributing to the building of digital repositories of primary source materials but massive digitization is not the objective of our support. We are past the JSTOR and ARTstor mode. Instead, the foundation focuses on the ways in which scholars are building new research communities and modes of collaboration to advance knowledge quite in the way that we heard earlier today. The work of these groups of scholars clarifies requirements for tools that support data curation, joint research, information exchange, peer review, and also publication in the digital realm or even what digital publication means. Three areas of special attention that I'll spend a little time on now. These three areas are the digital provision of primary sources for the humanities, the development of virtual research environments, and the closely associated creation of annotation tools so primary sources, virtual resource environments, and annotation tools. And because I developed this paper quite late, it wasn't really clear that I would do this until recently, I have no power point. I also know that sets me apart as a humanist probably, but if you are interested in some of the things I'm talking about, I'm happy to give you references in the break since they won't just come up. Primary sources. In the humanities, primary sources, whether of a documentary, literary, or artistic kind are what observational data are for the sciences. They constitute a field of observation. They are a huge part of our collective humanities dataset, these primary sources, though not the only part, not the whole part. Don Waters, my colleague, argues that what data means may need to be redefined if the humanities are to participate in digitally enabled research and teaching. Today, data, as you all know, identified primarily with numerical definition and binary structure even though the basic meaning of the Latin is just the things that are given. ^M01:36:27 To humanists, the things that are given are of primary sources whether they are manuscripts, printed books, works of art, maps, musical compositions, field notes, photographs, newspapers, video broadcasts, or websites. While some of these things that are given such as census records or corpora of literary text can be transcribed with ease and make susceptible to quantitative analysis, for humanities research most of these data need to retain and convey something of their physical quality online. So that's a challenge, I think, for data and digital humanities. And as it is in the nature of humanities questions to be pretty much qualitative and as it is in the nature of these questions that there will be limits to what quantitative analysis is ever going to tell us that we might want to know, we are unlikely to see in the humanities the fundamental sort of transformation that turned genetics into systems biology once genetic code could be quantified or made numerical. We're not going to see debt due to shift. I think we have to be really realistic about debt if we're still going to recognize the digital humanities as to humanities. The foundation's efforts in the digital humanities are therefore focused on the identification, description, and presentation of our data or primary sources. Our efforts are also focused on new modes of scholarly exchange and collaboration around those data and on digital publication that in humanities itself becomes a form of data because the humanities are very discursive and primarily discursive. And I think, well I can't get into it, the distinction between primary and secondary sources which is always a slippery slope in humanities is perhaps in fact becoming a little more meaningless in the realm of digital data. Someone's opinion also becomes a data point very quickly in the humanities. But these questions, I think, are for another conference. The foundation has supported the development of scholarly communities in ancient, medieval, and early modern studies. That's where we focus this digital humanities work. All of these initiatives involve textual corpora as well as other types of cultural heritage objects. One instructive example is the integrating digital papyrology initiative, IDP, the integrating digital papyrology initiative, which was an effort to bring together three digital databases for the study of papyri which are of course vital resources for the study of Mediterranean heritage from the Egyptian old kingdom all the way through late antiquity. Once of these papyrological resources, the Duke University Databank of Documentary Papyri, was established three decades ago to provide transcriptions of Papyri in Greek and Latin, just a transcription effort. Another resource, the Heidelberg [foreign language spoken] contains rather bibliographic information on pretty much the same dataset that the Duke database had but they were completely separate projects. So that's bibliography. And at Columbia University, the Advanced Papyrological Information System, or APIS, provides images of, and metadata about, Papyri from two dozen different cultural heritage institutions. Although each of these resources and their project leads have strong feelings about the proper transcription, cataloguing, and presentation of Papyri, ten years ago they at least agreed to encode their databases using a common XML standard and then make them searchable through a shared interface. This was a painful effort but it did get done. Then what happened? As soon as scholars in the community at large could see the images, transcriptions, and the bibliographic data in one place, they started peppering the project team with objections and corrections. Of course, they could see all these mistakes, right? Undeterred, the project team developed an editing environment in which registered users could submit corrections, translations, and in fact, contribute previously unpublished Papyrus fragments. Contributions are vetted by a board which can authorize super editors to make changes. So after touch initial negotiations and many years of pain, the integrated system has become a runaway success. The community has added hundreds of unknown documents, corrected countless records and transcriptions, and it's begun to use the system in teaching in Germany as in the United States. One of the leaders of this effort is Roger Bagnall, the director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at Munich University, and he has noted that the collaborative editorial process fundamentally distinguishes this shared resource from the three static databases that it aggregates. It's really a different kind of animal now. As he has written and I quote him, "This resource no longer represents at any given moment a synthesis of fixed data directed by a central management. Rather we see it as a constantly changing set of fully open data sources governed by the scholarly community and maintained by all active scholars who care to participate. But I might go so far as to say that we see this nexus of papyrological resources and ceasing to be "projects" and turning instead into a community. Lines between curating a database, editing records, and publishing what we used to call a critical edition have become blurred." So now I will turn to [inaudible] of the virtual research environment. This first was about primary sources and how they really become sort of new kind of critical editions online. The Papyrology Initiative was driven by university scholars and supported by robust information technology that universities can provide more easily than museums but it draws on collections of papyri that are held by many cultural heritage institutions. I believe that the initiative has much to offer museums and archives that have struggled long with notions of what is a curatorial publication. Curators usually publish collection catalogues only when they are satisfied that they have gathered all available information and written up their analyses of all objects to the highest possible, most inconvertible standard and that the catalogue can therefore stand, if not a test of all time, at least perhaps 20 to 30 years. This is the standard for publication that's based on print modalities. The digital dispensation and its expectation of timely provision of information is putting a lot of pressure on this practice today. The papyrological example shows how the scholarly world, stewards of collections, and ultimately the public can benefit from a more transparent system that allows information to be available quickly for scrutiny, correction, and shared scholarly discourse. In 2009, the Getty Foundation which is an important funder together with the Getty Trust of which is a part for arts and humanities in this country. In any event, in 2009, the Getty Foundation funded an online scholarly cataloguing initiative that encouraged experimentation with online cataloguing publication in nine museums include the National Gallery of Art which responded very well to this. Although the initiative hoped to find a common model for publishing collections research quickly and interactively and perhaps more dynamically, the initiative soon had to relinquish the goal of a common format. Each institution developed its own modalities of catalogue publication appropriate to its culture with varying degrees of flexibility and responsiveness to research updates. Most held to the view that there should be a set date of publication for a catalogue rather than a more fluid system of knowledge production of the kind I've just described that would allow for updating, information exchange, and external contributions and corrections. Attractive publication models ensued to be sure, but it will be a stretch to call these catalogues virtual research environments which essentially the papyrological resource has become. Initially by happenstance, the Mellon Foundation ended up supporting the development of such virtual research environments or VREs in a fledgling sort of way. If museums are protective of curatorial prerogatives in relation to their collections, and there are often good reasons for that but they are protective, if museums of protective of these curatorial prerogatives, conservation departments have historically been even more cautious about releasing information about treatment of their works. In 2007 and 2008, international meetings of conservators convened by the Mellon Foundation surfaced considerable dissatisfaction in the community with this protective state of affairs and interest in improving the management and exchange of data that are generated every day in conservation departments. Much conservation documentation after all is not of interest not only to the conservation disciplines but also to scholars who are interested in materials and processes of art making. This is an area of research often called technical art history in the United States. Consensus emerged more or less that the internet could and should facilitate interinstitutional communications and joint research in conservation. In response, the foundation funded the collaborative developments of conservation space, an open source software application that addresses the need for an effective documentation management system but which I'm happy to say you will hear from the National Gallery's Merv Richards who was a PI for the project. ^M01:47:27 So I won't say more about it. The foundation also supported, at that time, five pilot projects that sought to develop vigorous collaboration online around developers of particular artists. That was a good organizing system it was felt. [inaudible] Rembrandt, Rafael, the Maestro de Frutilla [phonetic] and also the South Britain Halls Photography France inventory. Unlike the papyrological initiative, each of these experiments digitized primarily visual materials and artifacts as opposed to manuscripts. The projects developed tools for the analysis and representation of knowledge about these works and they developed collaborative workflows and discussion mechanisms for contributors in different institutions talking to each other. Two of the resources scaled up to viable long-term projects we still support today, the Rembrandt database and the [inaudible] digital archive, and they have become open-ended alternatives I would say to the traditional catalogue Raisonné. There are really not single author objects like catalogues Raisonné or Renoir. All of these projects I would say were effective use cases for what a virtual research environment specifically focused on works of art might be. Scholars collaborated with digital technology teams to design these resources and they tailored process and product to the state of research and opportunities for developing a shared database for the artist at hand. They were very focused on specific materials which is an important way to generate methods probably. Now that customization for each project was both a strength and a weakness because as you already figured out, each database was structured to suit a legacy technology of the lead institution or the needs of one particular community. There's a strong sense of if it isn't made in my house I can't work with that other one, right? And we realize that that's an unsustainable model in the end. In 2009, in consultation with the projects, the foundation decided to support work towards a technological solution that will make knowledge in these differently structured databases of cultural heritage institutions accessible to semantic search. Out of this resolve, to get more sustainable technology that would be more as independent of underlying databases, out of that resolve emerged a project called research space. Research space, a project that is led by the British Museum to create an environment for cultural heritage research online. The environment utilizes the CIDOC CRM, conceptual reference model data structure and contextual search technologies to allow data from different sources, wherever they are accessible on the web, to be discovered and then presented in an integrated fashion through an interface that's homogenous, it looks the same from wherever the data come from but the data themselves, of course, retain original characteristics and context in the way that humanists like. Research space's ontologies and tools are being developed with the British museums vast own store of linked open data along with those Rembrandt database and a few others and I hope that within a year the project will be ready to release its first open source production version for testing by others. A few more comments. First on annotation. That was my third example. For virtual research environments, like research space or any others that aggregate and present digital heritage objects to flourish, they need to be equipped with analytical tools that are useful to humanities scholars and understandable to them. Perhaps the most common and time-honored tools of the scholar are those that support annotation backed with antiquity of course. Scholars annotate to reference other materials, to present comment, to present critique, or to suggest emendations. While many online resources will, of course, allow for annotation of all sorts, scholars complain of the cacophony of annotation standards across projects and platforms or among different media such as text, images, and video, sharing annotations with others or even with yourself across platforms, or discerning who said what when often proves very difficult. In response to this problem, a community of computer scientists and humanists working together from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of Illinois at the Urbana-Champaign and the universities of Illinois, Maryland, and Queensland in Australia, these folks have together formed the open annotation collaboration, OAC. We have acronyms, too, sometimes. This group, this open annotation collaboration, has developed an open annotation core data model which specifies a framework for associations that you can make between related resources using again link data standards of the semantic web. Open annotations with this data model can easily be shared between platforms and they are focused on very simple tasks that we do such as attaching a text to a single bed resource in an ambiguous way. The open annotation collaboration is now refining standards in nine news cases that range across media from medieval manuscripts to streaming video content both in research context and publication context. I will conclude these remarks with a cautionary note that helps explain the current direction of the Mellon Foundation support for digital humanities infrastructure and protocols. Along with many others who support digital humanities infrastructure, we've learned quickly that aggregating and making a favorable large collections of primary sources for manuscripts and works of art to maps and video is a lot more difficult technologically. These cultural heritage objects are harder to be made available at scale, harder technologically, harder financially than the online provision of secondary sources such as digitized journal articles or born digital commentary to which you can just link. And within the primary source category, it has turned out to be more difficult to agree on the most effective presentation of materials that need to be studied in their visual and even physical form in contrast to text that can be reformatted reliably thanks to inventions such as OCR and a texting coding initiative that's been hugely successful. To make a required investment in rich digital heritage object infrastructure worthwhile, we need to grow communities of scholars and curators that are interested in using and contributing to it. This community is at present too small. A gap persists, we think and we think it may be growing, between those who-- and someone spoke to it already this morning-- a gap persist between those who create resources for digital research and the majority of humanity scholars and students for whom these resources are intended. Well, I know they're intended to support the humanities and the digital heritage but nonetheless, we think that people are going to use these things. Although in most universities the digital reshaping of humanities is indeed quite evident, it is far from pervasive or unanimously shared. While all faculty and students use online resources today, the fundamental transformation of academic practices that is encompassed by the term digital humanities is still limited to small groups of scholars who are dedicated to the sort of the initiatives I've been describing. To bridge the ravine between these two levels of familiarity with digital frameworks for humanities research, the foundation is now funding initiatives that familiarize new cohorts of faculty and students with the conceptual frameworks, the lines of inquiry, and the very skillsets that are required for work in the digital humanities. With these grants to particular universities that are also connected to each other, the doctoral students who are the faculty of the future conduct digital humanities research, build it in to their dissertations, reflect, importantly they reflect on the evolution of the humanities in the internet age, and they learn to teach undergraduates in digital humanities protocols although I think a lot of the time it's the undergraduates teaching the doctoral students, not to mention the faculty. Now to this really well-informed community here of digital humanity scholars and scientists, this effort may sound like a remedial education distraction from the urgent infrastructure development tasks at hand, but we believe that it is critical to the future of digital heritage research. ^M01:57:08 The tools that we build will only be as good and robust as the communities of scholars, students, and yes citizens at large that will use them and benefit from them. We need scholars and students to develop the questions as yet dimly envisioned that our digital tools may allow us to pose. We don't know yet even what the questions really are, do we, a lot of the time. Having larger cohorts of scholars ready to use digital humanities resources is not enough, however. We also need scholars to help curette the data that make digital resources come alive. Given entry into the realm as many of us have seen, most humanists see very quickly that making manuscripts or works of art available online for scrutiny, analysis, and critique is itself a creative scholarly act on a par with the development of the critical editions and catalogues of the great print tradition. To enable emerging scholars to participate in the development of primary sources online and tools needed to curate them in fact, the counsel on library and information resources in Washington has launched three sets of data curation fellowships for postdoctoral scholars in medieval, early modern, and visual studies. These areas were chose because of their complex interdisciplinary requires access to data in textual, visual, and spatial media. The fellows are placed in universities or institutes with a track record of developing digital collections and digital scholarship. They perform all sorts of specific data curation activities and hold joint appointments in the university departments where they then can help familiarize fellow humanists with the wonders and opportunities of digital data curation and research. As early as 2002, John Unsworth articulated a view that for now the best hope for the digital humanities is the semantic web which will make possible formal representations of the human record in ways that can be contextualized and ask questions of meaning rather than number alone. As Unsworth put it, those representations should be produced by people trained in the humanities in concert with computer scientists. I hope that these field notes which isn't really all that they are will have indicated that the Mellon Foundation subscribes to that view. We are very curious how you think we might all together accomplish that goal. Thank you. ^M01:59:56 [ Applause ] ^M02:00:03 [ Background Sounds ] ^M02:00:16 >> So thank you Merit, and I think, I know from discussions previously with colleagues that we are incredibly envious of the integrated long community in the European community. Could I please ask the other speakers to come up and join Merit here at the front and we'll now open the-- open to questions. I will repeat the question because this is being webcast and I will in a moment check to see if we have any questions from our participants as far away as Europe and right across the road. So questions? >> I'm sorry to jump in right away. That was an incredibly stimulating bunch of presentations and I want to make sure that I have a chance to ask this question of this particular group. The question is really for most of you and it's about inclusion and exclusion and winners and losers and particularly what I want to hear from anybody who is willing to address this is your ideas about what to do with the much broader world of people who are producing digital data and who could benefit from sharing it or borrowing it but who because of the shrinking pool of funding and because of the way funding opportunities work are going to be excluded from the consortia or the granting programs that most of you are involved with? And I speak as an academic field archaeologist at a large state institution. >> Could you please state your name and the university? >> Yeah, I'm sorry. My name is Adam Revenowitz [phonetic]. I'm at the University of Texas at Austin. And thank you, many of you, for the things you said today which really set me up for some things that I will say on Tuesday morning. But I am very well aware that what happens with opportunities to participate is not dictated by the quality of the project involved in all cases but rather a series of fairly random circumstances depending on the lineage of panel of experts who's reviewing you, depending on your institution's gatekeeping for things like the Mellon Foundation, and if the NEH funding rate for projects of digital humanities is down at about 12 to 15 percent. That doesn't mean that 85 percent of the projects are bad. It just means that they only have room for so many. So what do you envision in terms of expanding the resources and communal efforts to a broader community of people who don't have the money to fund the TARDIS-Xern mapping of their datasets to who don't happen to be at institution that has the virtual resources of that research environment? >> And I'm just going to repeat that for those who are webcast. >> That was very long. >> This will be a very brief revision. So the question was from Adam Revenowitz, the inclusion and exclusion and ideas about people producing digital data, what do the panel members envision in the expanding of research to funding the sustainability of TARDIS-Xern from people who may not be able to get funding? >> Everyone's looking at me. I don't know why. You guys hold the money. ^M02:03:41 [ Laughter ] ^M02:03:45 I'm happy to address the American context. As I've already said, I am not a terribly technologically enabled person but I certainly am somewhat often optimist or I certainly feel at least that it's very important for these projects to be as open as they possibly can be and for mechanisms to be designed, technology to be developed that makes ingestion of data that are relevant to particular projects easier, simpler, the sharing of them more cost effective. After all, even people who produce datasets in institutions are still supported by those institutions to do that in some way or another just because they work there or they have IT infrastructures and so forth so I am really interested in, as I already said, in a way about broadening this cohort of participants in the communities, finding good enough solutions and not only the very latest, best, and optimal because I think that's the only way you're going to skill these sorts of things. I think an inspiring figure in this regard is Will Knowell [phonetic] at the University of Pennsylvania who oversees very special collections and is a huge advocate for maximally open sharing of materials and also generating of participation to the point of [inaudible] information so technologically I don't really have an answer but I know that there will never be enough private or public funding in this country to give everyone his or her own personal resource environment. >> If I may just start by your qualification of financial situation for humanities research in Europe. I have the benefit or probably the trouble of weighting on both sides of the pond. So in Toronto, I've got students, doctorate students, who would have research grants in order to come down to Washington, D.C. and work in the collection of the Smithsonian Institute. They have fully paid fellowships in order to conduct doctoral research. In Europe it's a different situation. What happens especially in the humanities is that the humanities [inaudible] these projects with the anticipation that they will be able to sustain basic, basic research funding and support. And this one of our troubles. So to go back to the positive side and to respond to Adam's question, not to the side that has to do with limited funding of the arts and humanities. This is not something that I am the one that could respond but to what we can do as infrastructures, I would [inaudible] qualification. I like the fact that we talk about something being fun because I remember [inaudible] notion of the archive being really an object of desire and I say an object of desire like all the objects of our research that is also consequential, that is a meaning that is consequence, a pragmatic impact on people's lives, on our understandings, and our human development. So I like that but I'd say that words can cut both ways. As you may have noticed, all of you, we use a lot the word science when we talk about humanities research in these projects and this is no accident. In our languages, the Greek language, the Italian language, there's no firm and hard distinction between the notion of the humanity and the science. This is consequences and these consequences percolate out to the kinds of research that are privileged by our projects. What we try to do-- and we try to do that in DARIAH, we try to do it in ARIANDE as well, through the opportunities that we give to researchers to come up and have residential fellowships and to be able to participate in summer schools is really to allow the community to take hold of what they can do because otherwise we'll be in a situation in which we'll be sort of dictating in a sense. ^M02:07:42 [inaudible], sociological methods, hypothesis based research, and that alone and in some disciplines within the art and humanities this can work but in many ways the humanities are idiographic, in many ways the humanities are [inaudible] and some of the challenges of using meaningfully digital technology have exactly to do with how we can tap the ability of representation systems and representation is central in this, remains central, knowledge representation and being able to account with the discursive nature of all our construct. So these are things that are open. There are doubt there. For archaeology, I see with some envy, a less well-funded project satisfying such a sustainable archaeology lab of my colleague, Neil Farris [phonetic] over at the University of Western Ontario. Why? Because I see that Neil and his colleagues have a commitment to different alternative understandings of [inaudible] and First Nations Archaeologies. He brings in the communities, so he engages in a different discourse and I say so probably for the benefit of my colleague from the commission who is at the funding end of this table, in order to be able to sort of put the point in that what happens in this continent is meaningful because of that. I would see more, for instance, funding for the study of under-curated, unpublished archaeological datasets and collections is already there. All the documentation, the archives of past excavations. That is so meaningful, it's so important, which is very, very humanistic in nature. But what I'd say is yes, I mean what one expects and what we try to do in Europe with little money, with the 2.5 million that we got in hard money because the rest of the 8 million in DARIAH is in time contributions. It's work that people put in their institutions, it's not money in that sense, right? So what we try to do is really to put that money to function like a glue, like a connective agent, like a conduit that allows people to work together. A lot of them try to fund primary research with that money, but we feel that some of the stuff that we do at the secondary level is important in that [inaudible]. >> Giulio, you had a comment? >> Yes, I have a general response as a generalist and I don't know if it really be satisfying for Dr. Revenowitz, but I wanted to say that at a time of shrinking budgets and fiscal constraints, it's the collaborative approach that's going to allow us to put together our resources to have a greater impact and to be able to share those resources and use those optimally so the European approach to that is to encourage transnational research within Europe but also, you know, connecting European infrastructures with those in the rest of the world and I think that logic extends internationally, so I think it's something that the current US administration understands and that the annual guidance is given by the offices of management and budget in the United States and the office of science and technology policy. The annual guidance for this year for the, I think it's the 2015 financial year budget, advocates two science funding agencies and departments to use intellectual collaboration wherever it makes sense in order to extend the efficacy of the funds and budgets that are available here in the United States and so we welcome that in Europe as a means as putting together what we have with what you have where it makes sense and where there are mutual benefits to make sure that as many people as possible have access to the ideas, the expertise, the facilities, the data as possible and to put those together sensibly so as a response to fiscal constraints, more intellectual collaboration. >> We have one question from a remote viewer, Mike Nestfield [phonetic] and this is for Professor Nuccolucci. >> Yes? >> This question is whether ARIADNE is including-- I'm sorry, I'm trying to read my terrible writing now. It's-- focusing on the long-term preservation and access of CAD and 3D files and if so, which file format do you prefer to preserve? Do you encourage others? You probably have three minutes to answer what will probably will take about 25. >> So if I understood correctly, the question is about long-term preservation and formats for special and complicated [inaudible]. Well first of all, long-term preservation is not an activity which we are currently carrying out because the purpose or the goal of ARIADNE is integrating already [inaudible] activities. In Europe there are actually already, I think at least, three or four national centers. One is ADS from the University of York, the other one is TRANS [phonetic] in the Netherlands, [inaudible] Sweden and many others which now I don't remember, but it's not worth quoting, which are already providing long-term preservation for archaeological letter. So what we are currently doing is establishing guidelines for preparing data suitable for long-term preservation and then addressing interested centers or research [inaudible] centers which I mentioned. As regards to 3D storage, it's a bit more complicated because there are currently not so good management systems for these deficits. Or there are no established systems for managing CAD data concerning archaeology and cultural heritage. There is a plethora of formats which sometimes create some sort of difficulty, particularly for heritage researchers and for archaeologists because it's unclear which one is better for the purpose. ^M02:14:12 Sometimes there are some formats which are theoretically preferable to others because of simplicity and also because of their better suited for long-term preservation. Other formats which have better performance on computers so there is still a need of [inaudible] research. One of the services which ARIADNE will provide will be a visualization service for CD data and a storage service for CD data. Both, I should say, at an experimental level, but from what I have seen and what will be presented in the next few days, almost you know at the level of being used by the public. There are some issues. These are mainly, let's say, organization and political. There was a kosher proposal by the European Union to establish a 3D, well to establish a framework for [inaudible] of 3D for cultural heritage. I'm not sure that we'll be able to have a good end, so probably if this happens, if no good thing comes out from this call, we will have to take on us also the work of establishing standards, what means involving the community because ARIADNE is a community-driven project involving the community to set up a sort of accepted and shared standard for using 3D for archaeology. >> Thank you and I'd just like to follow on one thing we hope will come out of this meeting is to try and share the links to a number of different initiatives. I know I have colleagues and KU Leuven who are actually with the UNESCO chair and they are actually working on standards for 3D formats and here at the library also we're very focused on through the office of strategic initiatives really focusing on sustainable formats. One thing we've started to look at his preferred formats where we can't exactly tell people, but we can tell them what we would prefer in terms of sustainability. And do we have other questions? >> Thanks for all of you presentations. First all, Dr. Westermann pointed out that there's a gap or the potential for a gap between what's being offered and reaching an audience. Right? Making sure that the data, the information is being used. And having an audience that uses the data and making a community presupposes, I think, that the system that they're accessing is reliable and that involves the time factor, so and I guess my question is, in a community data landscape where technology is evolving quickly and our main initiatives we can buy into with our very limited time, do your initiatives have a lifespan built into them? How long do you predict your tool will be useful? And is there a structure administrative provision for keeping them going? Because it's not just about the community keeping it going and building it. I think there has to be some structural organization that's committed to making these last at least a decade. ^M02:17:51 [ Background Noise ] ^M02:17:55 >> And the question is, and I love this, they've got this wonderful, wide, overarching questions which would probably take us three days to discuss one but really is talking about the gaps in reaching the audience and in terms of the landscape and the tools that are available, is there some sort of life structure built into the initiatives which ensure that the technology stays up to date with people being able to access? >> Yeah, that is where European infrastructures are coming into the picture. As we discussed today, we can do very nice things over projects but projects have the problem of having a determined lifespan and then what? And one of the example is the bamboo project for instance. So we are trying to set up infrastructures like DARIAH, the first established in the humanities, to have a longer time span of organization and perhaps, I cannot say of long-term preservation because long-term preservation goes beyond anything, it's a very, very complicated issue, but however to preserve digital results of successful project is one of the measured commitment of European research infrastructures like DARIAH and like will be the heritage infrastructure for heritage science because they give stability to the picture. The initial commitment for the European infrastructure by member states is five years but the lifespan of infrastructure is much longer expected. If you consider how long the SAN infrastructure is going since tens of years. ^M02:19:33 [ Background Sounds ] ^M02:19:38 >> John? >> Thank you. This has been an extremely interesting series of presentations. The picture that's be overreaching or overarching that's been presented is sort of the high level. I'm curious a bit about the lower level. In order to put datasets together, especially visual datasets, there needs to be some aligning and adjustment and reshaping of the data so it can be viewed in a variety of tools that are available. For example, in the case that was mentioned about the sort of virtual online catalogue, we spent a lot of time developing a tool to register all the different imaging modalities that conservators and curators use so that one can do the overlay very quickly and new information pops out. In most of the presentations today, people didn't talk about how big that effort is. Do you have a feeling for what the scope of that is in the different programs? >> And so the question from John Delaney at the National Gallery of Art was we've heard from you the higher level, what are the lower level whereby on tools to align data more effectively and just quickly note that I know that some of the presentations will be down into the area for the next couple of days. >> Well, yes, of course it's complicated as I see it and even more complicated to make those deficits interpretable and that's clear. The partial solution we are giving to this issue is to go by steps. The first step should be and this as perhaps I already mentioned, is a discovery, so having a homogeneous interface to know where are things and how you can access them which is not absolutely interpretability but it's facilitating access and at that level you work on a, let's say, meta, meta, data level that is description of deficits only and then this can be done in a synthesized way. ARIADNE have developed an own model which is pretty well working and since there is not previous experience in this field, it is easy to convince people to adopt this model. When you set a goal today, you knew the records, that is go beyond the collection level but go into the individual data, preservation as you say is much more complicated. Actually we have discovered that there are several datasets which are adopting either fully or in part or are inspired by the [inaudible] standard which has been used by the [inaudible] museum for research [inaudible] but is also being at the basis of several important deficits. So we start from the easy part of it. Since there is so much work to do, we start from where it is simple and one of the pictures I have showed you in my presentation concerned a mapping between a huge [inaudible] 100,000 records and the standard which will be adopted by the project. The same is being done for example for the deficit of the [inaudible] which is another huge deficit. We then resume what [inaudible]. We have a collaboration. It would be also be feasible because they aren't adopting [inaudible] so when things are better than one expects and in any case starts with the easy thing and then the problems will come, there will be time for problems, and as you see I'm pretty old so it'll be my grandson who will be in charge of all those problems. ^M02:23:35 [ Inaudible Comment ] ^M02:23:38 >> I just want to add to a qualification about what we do in my [inaudible] circulation unit in Athens. Very specific. I say so because the DCU is involved international DARIAH effort, also we're involved in ARIADNE as a partner. Now what we do, we take information integration as one important aspect of the work but we feel from our experience and projects such as [inaudible] these are projects that aggregate metadata records for then resources covering the European Digital Library. What we found is that there is a red heading in the notion of significant properties or future fitness or purpose if you don't sort of situate these significant properties and this fitness or purpose within a specific context of use so in this case we've got a clear scenario of why we aggregate these resources so what we do is we provide crosswalk mechanisms and mapping mechanisms within one metadata schema and another metadata schema with exiguously preservation, long-term preservation in all the aspects of these metadata schemas as they're stored and protected in the repository and then some work in that dimension. We use all aggregations in order to be able to bring different aspects of complex subjects into views that are meaningful in context of use, for instance how to present information resources that relate to one particular cultural object or no cultural object that is a representation with another cultural object together in a single view. So this is what we do in this sort of constrained environment. But what I want to say for the discussion is really that I think that there are limits to the notion of synthesization. And I say this, don't take me as, I mean this is not an official view, it's my personal view. That we need to review very, very seriously efforts that are almost in unilateral to the community and also almost unidimensional in terms of effort directed in tainting individual views, emergent views about the realities of the cultural world and standardize the means of common representation formats. In my experience with students because I gave them open possibility of working with no SQL database with really open, nonqualified representations, what I find that people, smart people with a humanities background would create completely different representations of those that are imposed by our common schemas. And I think we should be careful not to stifle progress by imposing too much synthesization. ^M02:26:10 [ Background Sounds ] ^M02:26:15 >> That seems a very important cautionary tool indeed and suggests that even the semantic web can solve everything even when all data in the fullness of time will be linked. John, your question seems very important to me and I want to go back to it and say two things related to these very important online scholarly cataloguing initiative for projects which really did make a lot of progress in some ways and often turned out very, very high quality product including the first catalogue put out by the National Gallery of Art. I would say two things, however. In universities, in academic cultures, it is just a standard observation to make, I think, that faculty and scholars are extremely good at inventing new things. They are very creative. They are very, very bad at letting go of what they have, even if what they have is perhaps no longer quite as necessary if you have that other thing. They're not very good at calibrating these things. This is true across universities in many ways and it's one of the reasons higher education is often yelled at now from all directions right and left about being wasteful and so forth. And I think there is a lesson there to be learned probably in that online scholarly cataloguing initiative as well in that everyone again wanted to have their own way of doing things and doing things to a standard that was off the traditional, real high-quality, print catalogue. I don't want to belittle that. I think it's great. I'd love to have them all this way, but to Adam's earlier point, I think it's hard for us to get there for all institutions. So I continue to sort of advocate not mediocrity but solutions that recognize the dynamic and fluid quality of research so that we can make progress maybe a little bit more quickly in getting things out there. And the second thing that relates really to that point is what I think is sometimes of forgetting in the digital environment because we're so used now to these really high-quality images on our screens, they're so pellucid, they're so alluring, the desire, you know, the image is also an object of our desire that we've forgotten that for most of the history of digital heritage studies of all kinds including archaeology and art history, the image was always just a surrogate. It was never the real thing. Only for digital art, actually turns out not to be the case. So I think we really have to think very hard about when we can live with something that perhaps can be standardized a little bit more and that is really good enough to advance the kinds of questions we want to ask. >> Just a quick followup question. Mark Walton from North Western University. That's a really intriguing idea and with all this talk about digital data, the object still reigns supreme, and this is something you can't forget but you have the tantalizing ability to start to be able to digitalize these data in a virtual environment and I'm wondering where is this research going? Can virtual reality actually be realistically brought in to these databases to provide a realistic understanding of that object in a nontraditional sense? >> Mark Walton from North Western and the question for [inaudible] was how can virtual reality be used to give us a better integration and understanding of the original object through digital surrogate? >> Well it depends on your definition of real. So well I can explain. Let's assume we are analyzing this thing here and I am an art historian and I say okay this is a shape which is typical of the first water of the 21st century and that's enough. And perhaps I can do this just using a two dimensional photograph. If I am archaeologist, perhaps I want to go in depth and analyze what's in there, some cracks, something more and I then can do my job using a very good 3D replica of the object and so my visual model must include 3D because I can look at it from different sides and understand it better. For some archaeologists and particularly for conservationists, for conservation people, an excellent visual 3D model is not enough because they need to know the material. So the 3D model must convey not only information on the shape but also information on chemicals, chemical composition, especially when they're excited with particular [inaudible] only Luca can explain better, all this kind of manipulation that you can do with objects. So the replicas must convey different characteristics which depend on the use you are going about them. In any case, in any case, there is a very important aspect which concerns the quality of the replica. Part of the replica is not a feature, it's a process so you must document how you created this replica and which instruments you used and how was the environment in which the replica was created so that anybody-- that's not saying this is a good replica and this is an excellent replica. The degree of excellence of the replica is a 10. That doesn't count but everybody must be able to trace back the process with which you created the replica and you incorporated in it different features-- shape, color, texture, information about the [inaudible], information about the chemical properties [inaudible] and so on. And so you are the judge, if the replica is good enough, is real enough for your purpose. ^M02:32:52 [ Inaudible Comments ] ^M02:32:58 >> To that point you made about replicas and surrogates, also at the Library of Congress, there's a wonderful group. It's called-- ^M02:33:07 [ Multiple Speakers ] ^M02:33:09 And federal agencies, digitization guidelines initiative and we've spent a lot of time on two dimensional objects and three dimensional objects and audio and video and workflow is pointing to formats that are acceptable but with deep documentation on how we got there just as you discussed. Three D is the next challenge, and I'm sure this group will be undertaking that, but that's an ongoing-- >> [inaudible] was just pointing out the FED D group which is open to federal agencies and, I believe, other interested institutions. I'm afraid I haven't been to a meeting for a while but the focus is on sustainable and developed, structured, robust file formats for a range of different formats from still images to moving sound and it very well integrates the needs of a range of different institutions. >> Okay. >> Well, I know everyone has been sitting for a long period of time and I just want to thank our speakers very much for an incredible introduction to the next two and half days and very thought-provoking discussions. A few things I noted came through very strongly was the focus on standardization which is something I think we really need to discuss and also the effect of data sharing. I really liked, I think it was Luca who referred to, it might've been Franco, the idea of passive [inaudible] to providing that data and I think that's something we have to think about as we really integrate the whole community of people from the curators to the physicists and stop that demarcation between the different fields but see us all as a community focused on cultural heritage and the preservation of it. So thank you very much. Please all the delegates if you wait, I want to send a huge thank you to the National Gallery of Art who has sponsored lunch today, so we'll thank you and right now a huge than you to our speakers from this morning. ^M02:35:19 [ Applause ] ^M02:35:25 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.