Computational Museology: Cultural Heritage and the Digital Museum

*Jazz Luminaries*, Montreux Jazz Digital Archive, Sarah Kenderdine, Andrew Quinn, Davide Santini, Kirell Benzi, 2019

*Travelling Kungkarangkalpa*, Sarah Kenderdine, Peter Morse, Cedric Maridet, 2017

*Look Up Mumbai*, Sarah Kenderdine and Jeffrey Shaw, 2015

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4 April 2024
Online on Zoom
3pm — 5pm (CET)

About

Computational museology is a scaffold that unites machine intelligence with data curation, ontology with visualisation, and communities of publics and practitioners with embodied participation through kinaesthetic interfaces. Computational museology empowers cultural organisations to link all forms of culture and materiality: objects, knowledge systems, representation and participation. Research at the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+) reaches beyond object-oriented curation to blend experimental curatorship with contemporary aesthetics, digital humanism and emerging technologies.

This lecture curated by Sarah Kenderdine explores key themes including interactive archives and emergent narrative, deep fakes and blockchain sovereignties, embodied knowledge systems and performative interfaces and scientific visualisation for museums in the age of experience. She will also give an overview of EPFL Pavilions exhibitions and focus the discussion on Deep Fakes: Art and Its Double.

Lecturer

Sarah Kenderdine

She researches at the forefront of interactive and immersive experiences for galleries, libraries, archives and museums. In 2017, Sarah was appointed professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland where she has built the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+). Sarah is also director and lead curator of EPFL Pavilions a new art/science initiative. In 2020 and 2022, she was named in the top 10 of the Museum Influencer List by Blooloop and in 2020 and 2021, Switzerland’s Top 100 Digital Shapers by Bilanz. In 2021, Sarah was appointed corresponding fellow of The British Academy. Her upcoming book is Deep Fakes: A Critical Lexicon of Digital Museology (2024).

Digitisation and valorisation of Venetian Music Archives

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22 November 2023
Onsite at ARCHiVe / Online on Zoom
2pm — 6pm (CET)

Reference

about

A study seminar on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, in collaboration with the Institute for Music and the Intercultural Institute of Comparative Music Studies of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini.

The meeting was created to take stock of the state of the art of projects for the description, digitisation and valorisation of the main sound and music archives belonging to various city institutes actively engaged in this regard. The aim is to share methods and technologies, good practices and virtuous choices adopted by the various institutions called upon to participate, highlighting the peculiarities of each archive and emphasising the links that unite them.

Programme

New IISMC proposals for audiovisual archives in ethnomusicology

Giovanni Giuriati | Fondazione Giorgio Cini
Marco Lutzu | Università degli Studi di Cagliari
Simone Tarsitani | Durham University
Costantino Vecchi | Fondazione Giorgio Cini

The IISMC (Istituto Interculturale di Studi Musicali Comparati) archive of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini holds documentation on the Institute’s activities since 1969. In addition to working on the preservation and enhancement of the archival materials (paper, audio, photographic and video), since 2004 the Institute has been systematically documenting its initiatives in audiovisual form.

The talk intends to present recent work carried out using digital technologies for the IISMC archive with particular reference to audiovisual documentation (S. Tarsitani), cataloguing and restitution (C. Vecchi) and the creation of audiovisual materials for educational and dissemination purposes (M. Lutzu).

LeviDigiLab: the digitisation project of the Fondazione Ugo e Olga Levi

Giulia Clera | Fondazione Ugo e Olga Levi

With the LeviDigiLab project, the Fondazione Ugo e Olga Levi in 2023 started a digitisation process for the preservation and online consultation of the documentary heritage of the Gianni Milner Library.

The project aims to bring the culture of digitisation into the Fondazione Levi, making the structure and the staff involved capable of dealing with the digital transformation of the holdings for conservation and enhancement and to increase the public’s accessibility through a dedicated platform searchable by the user through a dedicated front-end (Opac).
The foundation has equipped itself with an in-house laboratory that is currently being implemented thanks also to the numerous grants obtained.

Design and development of the digital archive of the Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono: an interweaving of knowledge between musicology, archivistics and computer science

Alessandro Russo | Centro di Sonologia Computazionale (CSC) Università di Padova
Michele Patella | Centro di Sonologia Computazionale (CSC) Università di Padova

The Luigi Nono Archive was founded in 1993 on the initiative of Nuria Schoenberg Nono with the aim of collecting, preserving and promoting the composer’s precious legacy. Since 2015 the project of the creation of the Luigi Nono Digital Collection has been launched in collaboration with Paul Sacher Stiftung and funded by the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung. Between 2015 and 2017, a preservation and valorisation project took place, promoted and coordinated by the Soprintendenza archivistica e bibliografica del Veneto e del Trentino Alto Adige, which also involved the magnetic tapes of the Luigi Nono funds. The intervention was entrusted to the Centre for Computational Sonology of the University of Padua. In 2019, the online migration of the Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono’s database began with the intervention of the company Audio Innova, a spin-off of the University of Padua.

ARMID@Venice: Music and Digital Humanism in Venice. The musical sources of the "Benedetto Marcello" Conservatory

Paolo Da Col | Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello di Venezia
Alice Martignon | Università Ca' Foscari Venezia
Giulio Pojana | Università Ca' Foscari Venezia

On 1 October 2021, thanks to a new scientific collaboration between the “Benedetto Marcello” Conservatory of Music in Venice and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, it was possible to launch ARMID@Venezia (ARchivio Musicale e Iconografico Digitale A Venezia), a research project dedicated to the digitisation, virtual restoration and non-invasive diagnostic study of ancient musical sources (manuscripts and printed books) kept at the lagoon music institute. After a brief excursus on the main digitisation, cataloguing, conservation and valorisation projects currently active at the Conservatory’s “Mario Messinis” Library (Prof. P. Da Col), the technologies adopted and the results achieved within ARMID@Venezia will be described (Dr. A. Martignon, Prof. G. Pojana).

The Archives of the Institute for Music of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini

Francisco Rocca | Fondazione Giorgio Cini

The Fondazione Giorgio Cini’s Institute for Music works for the acquisition, preservation, protection, and valorisation of 20th and early 21st centuries archives, with a focus on those produced by prominent personalities from the worlds of music, dance and audiovisual, which can be consulted through digital archives.

The presentation aims to illustrate this archival heritage and the enhancement initiatives implemented in recent years, focusing in particular on digital archives and their huge potential.

Building the Historical Archive of the Future: the case of Heritage Lab

Hitstorical images from the photo archives © Italgas

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13 November 2023
Online on Zoom
3pm — 5pm (CET)

Reference

HeritageLab Italgas

about

Online class on the challenges of the Corporate Digital Archive, digital formats, integrated processes and the role of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The seminary is dedicated to the potential of a digital company archive and the methods of preservation and sharing, in particular of the extensive documentation tracing the history of the Italgas company.

Digital transformation and technological innovation — which are Italgas’ main drives in the energy transition — are at the heart of Heritage Lab. The centre is committed to achieving several objectives, including the systematisation of the historical archive and the management of the current archive, the sharing of digitised documents and their conversion into big data, through a highly automated acquisition cycle thanks to the use of artificial intelligence algorithms for post-production and optical character recognition (OCR).

Programme

The Heritage Lab model

Katya Corvino

Heritage Lab is Italgas’ digitisation museum-laboratory, developed entirely in-house with specialised machinery, technologies and skills from the field of cultural heritage and applied to the massive digital acquisition of Corporate and Industrial Heritage. Their heritage consists of 3 linear kilometres of documents, and it is digitised by a team of specialists, composed of 4 archivists in charge of identifying and selecting the documents, 2 palaeographers with expertise in ancient texts, 3 librarians cataloguing the material, and 15 operators, who carry out the digitisation and append metadata.

Digitisation stream

Matteo Allasia

The digital transformation process can be illustrated with a sequence of nine steps, from the premises of the Italgas Historical Archive, to the cataloguing of documents on the xDams platform, and the selection of the most valuable bulks for digitisation.

At the Heritage Lab laboratory-museum, we select the most appropriate digitisation system based on the document’s format and type.
The scanned images are processed through the Time Machine server, which derives the compressed images from the master copies and applies measurement and OCR scripts. The user copies are then imported into xDams and enriched with a set of metadata, which adds meaningful narratives to the material.

Building the Historical Archive of the Future

Daniela Marendino

Building and feeding the Historical Archive, with the creation of a shared procedure for identifying, preserving and substituting paper documents, is essential to the management of the documentation flow of the current archive.

Heritage Lab has established a new procedure for the management of analog documents and is working on the creation of a new classification and record preservation system, and a management manual, together with an internal communication campaign to raise staff awareness.

Managing the digital heritage of business archives

Giovanni Michetti

The speech will cover the topic of the digital heritage of business archives, focusing in particular on the following points:

– Not just paper: digital objects as archival documents;

– The business archive as an integrated system;

– Digital formats;

– Management and preservation processes in the digital environment;

– The role of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Lecturers

Matteo Allasia

A Heritage Lab expert, he was a fellow at the ARCHiVe Centre, and was then a Regesta.exe contributor for Heritage Lab Italgas. Graduated in Classical Literature and Communication, with a Master’s degree in Digital Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University, he is a digital humanist at the service of corporate cultural heritage. He collaborates in the digital transformation process of the Italgas Archive and works on the maintenance and development of digitisation machines and algorithms for automatic post production.

Katya Corvino

Head of Heritage Lab Italgas, she was also responsible for Corporate Social Responsibility at Italgas. Graduated in Political Science with a Master’s degree in Business Administration, for 30 years in the Eni Group, then Snam and finally Italgas, she has gained 20 years’ experience in the field of relations with institutions and the territory. For 7 years she was responsible for Relations with Local Authorities in the Snam group. Over the years she has also dealt with relations with European institutions as Snam’s representative for the European Union in Brussels.

Daniela Marendino

With twenty years of experience as a professional archivist, she has worked in public, private and corporate archives. She is the curator of the collections of the Italgas Historical Archive, where she oversees the preservation of the documentary heritage and the preservation of the company museum collections, the Library and the Emeroteca, as well as the valorisation of the historical heritage of the Italgas Group companies. She monitors and manages the flow of documents in the historical and current archives, preparing preservation lists and procedures for discarding them.

Giovanni Michetti

Associate Professor of Archivistics at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’, he has also taught at the University of Urbino and the University of British Columbia. An expert in digital archives, he deals with document management, descriptive models, digital preservation and new technologies applied to archives. He is chairman of the ‘Archives and document management’ sub-committee in UNI (the Italian standards body) and represents Italy in some ISO working groups on archives and document management. He is a member of the executive committee of the International Council on Archives.

From Costume to Fashion Archives

Digitisation of Santuzza Calì's Archive © Joan Porcel Pascual

ROMAISON, exhibition view, Costumi d'arte Peruzzi © ROMAISON

Santuzza Calì, *Chi la fa l'aspetti*, 1994 © Fondazione Giorgio Cini

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17, 19, 24 October 2023
Online on Zoom
4pm — 6pm (CET)

about

From Costume to Fashion Archives, an online course in partnership with the Fondazione Giorgio Cini’s Institute of Theatre and Opera and Clara Tosi Pamphili, former director of the Accademia Costume e Moda in Rome as well as the creator and curator of A.I. Artisanal Intelligence.

The course is split in two modules: The archives of costume: digitisation, description and reuse, consists of two lectures by Maria Ida Biggi (director of the Institute of Theatre and Opera) and Amin Farah (digital fashion designer, Theblacklab Digital Studio) and New Archives Visible and Invisible: the Archive as a Place for Digitising Memory, a talk by Clara Tosi Pamphili.

Programme

October 17, 2023

The Archives of Costume: Digitisation, Description and Reuse (part I)

Maria Ida Biggi

Starting with a reflection on the Foundation’s collections, the lectures present a number of examples of costume archives, with a focus as much on the aspects of archival description and the digitisation of assets as on digital fashion, an executive application that represents the marriage of virtual reality and tailoring.

October 19, 2023

The Archives of Costume: Digitisation, Description and Reuse (part II)

Amin Farah

October 24, 2023

New Archives Visible and Invisible: the Archive as a Place for Digitising Memory

Clara Tosi Pamphili

The digital archiving of costumes for the performing arts constitutes a point of contact between artistic production and craftsmanship: costume, unlike fashion, concerns transversal fields of definition where information for traditional filing is added to that evoked by the protagonists (such as tailors and costume designers) and those useful for in-depth study of the history of theatre, cinema and fashion.

Lecturers

Maria Ida Biggi

Associate professor at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice and director of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini’s Institute for Theatre and Opera. She is curator of exhibitions and author of numerous books, essays and articles on the history of theatre and set design, theatre architecture, directing and the history of the actor. Her research deals with the history of stage design and theatre architecture and is an expert of prominent personalities such as Eleonora Duse and the theatre actresses of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Clara Tosi Pamphili

Works in the Applied Arts, combining the skills of art, design, architecture and fashion with cinema as an essential part of the Italian creative DNA. Vice President of PalaExpo, the largest museum centre in Italy, with an exhibition and performance vocation. Creator and curator of “A.I. artisanal intelligence” event to promote the made in Italy in collaboration with museums, contemporary art galleries and institutional or non-conventional spaces. Creator and curator of ROMAISON exhibition that aims to become an extended museum to preserve and promote the incredible work of tailoring and costume studios.

Amin Farah

3d Artist and AD class of ’89. Graduated in product design and design management at the Poliarte Academy of Design; he is co-founder of Theblacklab Studio, university lecturer in 3D design applied to design. During his professional career, he has participated as a speaker at various national and international events related to the 3D world. Theblacklab Digital Studio is an independent laboratory for research and creative development in the field of 3D and CGI rendering. The studio has always been committed to the continuous creation of original 3D visual solutions with a strong emotional impact.

1/3 From Costume to Fashion Archives

2/3 From Costume to Fashion Archives

3/3 From Costume to Fashion Archives

Across the Planet. The Past and the Future of Libraries

De scientia venandi per aves, MS 446, fol. 1r (1450 –1475) © Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University

Treatise on falconry, MS arabe 2831, fol. 1r (1444) © Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

Kitāb na‘t al-ḥayawān, MS Or. 2784, fol. 229r (13th century) © British Library, London

key details

14 September 2023
Online on Zoom
4pm — 6pm (CET)

Reference

Factum Foundation
University of Oxford

About

Cristina Dondi, Professor of Early European Book Heritage at the University of Oxford, where she also leads the 15cBOOKTRADE project, will present a research on the lost Benedictine Library that was once part of the monastery at San Giorgio Maggiore, now home to the Fondazione Giorgio Cini and ARCHiVe – Analysis and Recordings of Cultural Heritage in Venice. The monastery was suppressed in 1806 and its rich collection of manuscripts and incunabula was dispersed. Dondi and colleagues have identified the location of over 180 important works and continue to add new titles as they are located in museums, libraries and private collections.

While Dondi’s research is focused on a disbanded library, the work of the Middle-East Falconry Archive (MEFA), commissioned by the Mohammed Bin Zayed Raptor Conservation Fund (MBZRCF) and carried out by Factum Foundation based within ARCHiVe, is centred on bringing all known medieval Arabic manuscripts on Falconry together online in one place.

Carolina Gris (Factum Foundation, Madrid-Venezia) will present a summary of the first two years’ work and discuss the role of IIIF and inter-library sharing to make specialist areas of interest available to a wider audience of both scholars and general interest users. This approach to the creation of specialised repositories of knowledge is paving the way to a new future for libraries and library users.

lecturers

Cristina Dondi

Cristina Dondi is Professor of Early European Book Heritage, and Oakeshott Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. She is also the Secretary of CERL. In 2009 she created the international database Material Evidence in Incunabula (MEI). She is the editor of Printing Revolution and Society, 1450-1500. Fifty Years that Changed Europe (Venice, 2020, open access), and, together with Dorit Raines and Richard Sharpe, of How the Secularization of Religious Houses Transformed the Libraries of Europe, 16th–19th Centuries (Turnhout, 2022).

Carolina Gris

Carolina Gris is responsible for coordinating and implementing 3D digitisation projects for Factum Foundation in Italy and other locations in Europe.
She has taught theoretical and practical workshops on digital preservation, and has lectured and published on new modes of access to cultural heritage. She has managed the Middle East Falconry Archive (MEFA) since 2021.

Across the Planet. The Past and the Future of Libraries

The Third Thing. On Digital Photography

Villa Farsetti, Treviso #12 © Ljubodrag Andric

Venezia, Fondazione G. Cini #9 © Ljubodrag Andric

Napoli, Casa Morra #11 © Ljubodrag Andric

key details

26 April 2023, 4pm — 6pm (CET)
27 April 2023, 9am — 1pm (CET)
Online on Zoom / Onsite at Fondazione Giorgio Cini

about

Two days dedicated to the digital image and its role in the contemporary world, through the work method of photographer and artist Ljubodrag Andric. His research investigates the relationship between space and architecture and revolves around the re-contextualisation of the urban landscape.
The programme includes a lecture and a photographic promenade around the spaces of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice.

Programme

April 26, 2023

On Digital Photography

Starting from an investigation into the technical evolution of photography in the digital era, Ljubodrag Andric proposes a reflection on the current over-production of “weightless” photographic images, as much due to their ephemeral nature as to their lack of adherence to a narrative of reality.

April 27, 2023

Photographic Promenade

Symposium around the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, in order to explore the methodological part of the artist’s work and the themes raised during the previous lecture from a practical point of view.

Lecturer

Ljubodrag Andric

Born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1965 into a family of artists, Andric started his involvement with art and photography at the age of 15. He studied humanities at the University of Belgrade, then dedicated himself entirely to photography in 1987. At age 21 Andric received his first professional commissions of mostly architectural photography. He had his first exhibition – at the gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade – at the age of 23. In 1987 Andric moved to Rome, Italy where he had successful studio practices in both Rome and Milan over the following 15 years, before moving to Canada in 2002. He won numerous international awards.

On Digital Photography by Ljubodrag Andric

ARCHiOx. Exploring the potential of photometric stereo 3D capture

Heatmap render of the Aršāma Sigil © ARCHiOx

Render highlighting the conservation state of an object © ARCHiOx

Copper printing plate recorded with Selene © ARCHiOx

key details

24 May, 7 June 2023
Online on Zoom
3pm — 5pm (CET)

about

Funded by the Helen Hamlyn Trust, ARCHiOx – Analysis and Recording of Cultural Heritage in Oxford – is a collaborative project, bringing together Oxford University’s Bodleian Libraries and the Factum Foundation. Based in Madrid, the Factum Foundation specialise in high-resolution 3D imaging and have worked in cultural heritage institutions throughout the world, producing exceptional, three-dimensional facsimiles of artworks and artefacts. The very latest 3D recording technology conceived and developed by the Factum Foundation is being piloted at the Bodleian and has been used to reveal near-invisible text and artwork from originals in the Bodleian’s collections. The ARCHiOx recordings serve two purposes: data can be used to create renders which show the 3D surface of an original in order to reveal what is difficult or impossible to record through conventional photography, or for the purposes of creating incredibly accurate 3D facsimiles. Working closely with researchers and experts, the project has been responsible for making and documenting multiple exciting discoveries.

curator

John Barrett | Senior Photographer for the Bodleian Libraries

Programme

Class 1 May 24, 2023

Recording and dissemination of 3D data, captured using the Selene Photometric Stereo Recording System

John Barrett | Senior Photographer for the Bodleian Libraries
Jorge Cano | Head of Technology at Factum Arte and Factum Foundation
Richard Allen | Software Engineer for BDLSS

In this session John Barrett presents a collection of incredible new recordings made using the Factum Foundation’s latest 3D recording system, the Selene. The recordings have been made from originals from broad range of the Bodleian Libraries’ world-class collections. Jorge Cano, designer of the Selene, explains the philosophy behind the Selene and discuss the technology and specifications of the system. Richard Allen demonstrates online viewers for dissemination of 3D recordings, and newly developed tools which will allow users to interact with them.

Class 2 June 7, 2023

Analysis and interpretation: How 3D recordings and other technological innovations are supporting research

John Barrett | Senior Photographer for the Bodleian Libraries
Jo Story | Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Leicester
Jessica Hodgkinson | PhD candidate at the University of Leicester
Alessandro Bianchi | Manager of the Bodleian Japanese Library
Elaine Anstee | Head of Imaging for the Bodleian Libraries

In this session John Barrett introduces a panel of experts who will explain how 3D recording and other technological innovations have assisted with their research. Jo Story and Jessica Hodgkinson discuss how photometric stereo recordings and other technologies have aided their research into Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and medieval book culture. Alessandro Bianchi explores how 3D recording may hold the key to understanding how Japanese prints were made, and how 3D renders can be used for assessing their condition. The session begins with a description of how ARCHiOx was established and structured, by Elaine Anstee.

contributors

John Barrett

John Barrett is a Senior Photographer for the Bodleian Libraries. Since 2005, John has provided photographs of Bodleian originals for numerous publications. His work involves the development of new methods of recording special collections material. He is the author of Imaging Guidelines for the Digitization of Rare and Special Materials, a document commissioned by the Bodleian Library.

Jorge Cano

Jorge Cano is currently Head of Technological Research & Development at Factum Arte and Factum Foundation. He has developed a multidisciplinary career working in the intersections of art and technology. Cano is an expert in 3D recording, image filtering and Geographical Information Systems. For Factum he has developed several scanners and numerous tools for data processing. His latest design, the Selene Scanner, has been used by the Bodleian Library allowing imaging specialists and researchers to look at ancient objects with new eyes.

Richard Allen

Richard Allen is a Software Engineer for BDLSS (Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Services) where he works primarily supporting Digital Bodleian and the Imaging Studio DAMS. He is also CEO of an Oxford University spinout company that specialises in photogrammetry.

Jessica Hodgkinson

Jessica Hodgkinson is a PhD candidate at the University of Leicester funded by the Midlands4Cities doctoral training partnership. Her research explores the participation of women in early medieval book culture in Western Europe through the analysis of surviving manuscripts commissioned, copied, owned and/or used by them.

Jo Story

Jo Story is professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Leicester. Interdisciplinary methodologies and approaches to evidence are central to her research and publications. Her current research centres on ‘Insular Manuscripts’ that were made in Ireland or the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms or in monasteries founded by Irish or Anglo-Saxon missionaries on the Continent in the period between c. 600–900 CE.

Alessandro Bianchi

Alessandro Bianchi is the manager of the Bodleian Japanese Library and curator of the Bodleian collection of Japanese rare books and manuscripts. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, he worked at the British Library, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, and taught at Haverford College. Alessandro is also a Visiting Researcher (2022/23) at the Art Research Centre of Ritsumeikan University.

Elaine Anstee

Elaine Anstee has been Head of Imaging for the Bodleian Libraries since October 2021. With a background in Administration and Finance she focuses on the policies and procedures supporting the ARCHiOx project in addition to the business as usual work in the Imaging department

1/2 ARCHiOx. Exploring the potential of photometric stereo 3D capture

2/2 ARCHiOx. Exploring the potential of photometric stereo 3D capture