The Europeana portal gives access to about 60 million digital cultural heritage items of all sort, from thousands of cultural heritage institutions throughout Europe. Rich and descriptive information to be associated to the images is vital for making this digital cultural heritage meaningful and searchable by users. In the remits of PAGODE, we are committed to improve the information available on Europeana for a minimum of 2.000 digital records. To do this, we recently launched a crowdsourcing campaign that allows researchers, students and culture lovers join the effort of annotating and curating photographic materials about Chinese culture that are currently published in Europeana.
By using a very intuitive crowdsourcing platform, anyone can look at selected heritage photographs from Europeana and add descriptive tags to identify places, historic periods, pictorial styles or photographic qualities (contrast, landscape, portrait, perspective…). The annotations will then be fed back by PAGODE to Europeana to improve the information available.
The PAGODE crowdsourcing campaign is entitled “Scenes and People from China”, currently comprising two volumes of images that offer a glimpse of life in China throughout the 20th century as well as portraits featuring people with Chinese roots or ancestors.
PAGODE – Europeana China is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility Programme of the European Union, under GA n. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2019/1931839
img.: Pekin, Mandarin et Bonze Chinois, Chinese mandarin et priest. Carte Postale; Etnografiska museet CC-BY-NC-ND via Europeana.
Flows of people, objects and knowledge went back and forth between Europe and China across centuries, and are witnessed by a wealth of China-related cultural heritage preserved in European Institutions. Discover the interesting stories that are told in digitized collections available on Europeana, carefully curated and selected by the Editorial Team of EU funded PAGODE – Europeana China project.
Today’s gallery is about “Mandarins of China“.
Mandarins were important public officials & bureaucrats, playing a vital role in the country’s imperial history. The notoriously difficult imperial exams were an important facet of social mobility, granting those who passed a privileged status.
EUROMED is an biannual conference organized in Cyprus and dedicated to Digital Cultural Heritage Documentation, Preservation and Protection. Due to the covid-crisis the event has been turned into a webconference, online via Zoom and also as a streaming on Facebook @UNESCO_DCH: https://www.facebook.com/Unesco.DCH
PAGODE – Europeana China presented a paper that was illustrated in the session “Preservation and Use and Re-use“, on 5th November h. 17 CET.
img.: poster by Sun Jingbo; The Royal Library: The National Library of Denmark and Copenhagen University Library; CC-BY-NC-ND via Europeana.
Flows of people, objects and knowledge went back and forth between Europe and China across centuries, and are witnessed by a wealth of China-related cultural heritage preserved in European Institutions. Discover the interesting stories that are told in digitized collections available on Europeana, carefully curated and selected by the Editorial Team of PAGODE – Europeana China.
Today’s gallery is about “Rice cultivation in China“.
Did you know that China produces almost a third of the world’s rice? As different types of rice crops are planted and harvested throughout the year, cultivating rice is a continuous and labour intensive job.
Originally a project event focused on dataset enrichment, due to the covid-crisis this event was expanded and transformed in an online gathering, to discuss and share knowledge on metadata curation, strategies for the use of vocabularies and thesauri, semantic enrichment by natural language processing and entity extraction methods, all with a strong focus on building capacity inside Cultural Heritage Institutions. With the participation of Europeana, a section was specifically dedicated to the process of aggregation of data for publication in Europeana portal, also considering the requirements of the Europeana Publishing Framework.
PRESENTATIONS FROM THE SPEAKERS
Kostas Kostas Kostantinidis, Postscriptum / Welcome and speakers’ presentations – PDF
Henning Scholz, Partner & Operations Manager at Europeana Foundation / Deep impact – digital transformation with high quality data – PDF
Maja Veselič, Dunja Zorman, Department of Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana / The Use of Thesauri and Vocabularies in Chinese and China-related Cultural Heritage – PDF
Valentina Bachi, Sofie Taes, Photoconsortium / “Scenes and People from China”: a crowdsourcing campaign to collect tags on heritage photography in Europeana – PDF
Haris Georgiadis, Head of e-Services Unit, E-infrastructure and Information Systems Department, National Documentation Center (EKT) / Semantic Enrichment Strategy for SearchCulture.gr – PDF
Vassilis Tzouvaras, Technical Consultant, PostScriptum / Semantic enrichment using natural language processing and entity extraction methods – PDF
Xiaoying Zhou, Digital Resources Integration Team at the National Library of China / Digital Resource Metadata Specification – PDF
Liyu Fang, Senior Engineer at the Department of Digital Media, Palace Museum / The Management of the Digital Resources in the Palace Museum – PDF
Additionally, with the occasion of this event, participants had the opportunity to discover the PAGODE Annotation Pilot and to be involved in an annotation sprint to “Scenes and People from China”, by looking at images available in Europeana and adding more descriptive tags. “Scenes and People from China” is a carefully selected collection that offers a glimpse of life in China throughout the 20th century as well as portraits featuring people with Chinese roots or ancestors. From casually posing families to stately portrayed celebrities and from evocative landscapes to impressive heritage sites, this gallery helps to paint a picture of China seen through the eyes of its residents and visitors. Chinese communities abroad are depicted as well, adding an extra dimension to this visual reflection of Sino-European relations. With the annotation sprint we easily reached 100% of the annotation target!
Kostas Konstantinidis, CEO at PostScriptum Welcome Note
Wang Chao Cultural Counsellor Embassy of People’s Republic of China in the Hellenic Republic Welcome Note
Mauro Fazio, PAGODE Project Leader, Italian Ministry of Economic Development Welcome Note
Antonella Fresa, Promoter, Technical Coordinator for PAGODE The PAGODE – Europeana China action Short bio: Antonella Fresa is the director of implementations at Promoter Srl and Vice-President of Photoconsortium. She is technical coordinator and communication manager of national and European projects on digital cultural heritage and project manager of digitalmeetsculture.net magazine of Promoter. Her interests lay in particular on virtual museums, digital cultural archives, participatory approaches in culture, smart cities, urban regeneration, digital preservation and e-infrastructures. She regularly serves as independent expert of the European Commission and of national and regional research bodies. She is an Enterprise fellow at Coventry University and member of the Advisory Board of CSI-COP project on citizen science
Henning Scholz, Partner & Operations Manager at Europeana Foundation. Deep impact – digital transformation with high quality data Mr Scholz presented European Foundation, its priorities and ecosystem while he focused on the importance of the quality and openness of data and the impact it can have on institutions which publish content on the web and the benefits that can be created. Short bio: Henning is responsible for the relationships with cultural heritage professionals. As a paleontology curator and BHL-Europe coordinator, Henning contributed digital objects to the portal even before joining Europeana in 2012.
Xiaoying Zhou, Deputy Leader of National Library Digital Resources Department of the National Library of China. Digital Resource Metadata Specification Ms Zhou presented the Metadata Application Framework (MAF), the Metadata structure, established in the National Library of China, the standardized the application process of metadata, and the research carried out from 1989 on standardizing data, the “Name Standardization Group” that was established in 1995. Short bio: Xiaoying Zhou, is a librarian, Digital Resources Integration Team and deputy leader of Chinese National Library Digital Resources Department. She is postdoctoral student of the Chinese National Library. Her research expertise is knowledge organization, data mining and digital resource integration.
Liyu Fang , Senior Engineer at the Department of Digital Media, Palace Museum The Management of the Digital Resources in the Palace Museum Ms Fang presented the Palace Museum and the organization infrastructure, the management of the digital resources and all information activities taking place at the Palace Museum. Short bio: Liyu Fang joined the Palace Museum in 2004 as a developer. Through 16 years of work, she has rich experience in museum informatization. Her research focuses on digital preservation of cultural heritage and the century-long history of visual documentation of the Forbidden City. At present, she is curating the museum’s digital resources, and collection of old photos.
Maja Veselič, Department of Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. Short bio: Maja Veselič is a sinologist with a PhD in anthropology. She works at the Department of Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana where she teaches courses on contemporary China and conducts research on religion in East Asia. She is also a member of the project East Asian Collections in Slovenia, which aims to digitize East Asian objects in national and local museums, rendering the vast majority of these collections publically accessible for the first time.
Dunja Zorman, Department of Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. Short bio: Dunja Zorman holds a university degree in sinology and sociology. She has been working in the outbound Chinese tourism sector for more than a decade, though she has also spent several years in the more general China-related business consultancy. Now Dunja works as a research assistant in the Department of Asian Studies at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, where she is researching new ways of presenting Chinese cultural heritage in Europe and the development of China-related cultural tourism.
Valentina Bachi, Photoconsortium Short bio: Valentina Bachi is a project manager at Photoconsortium, Europeana’s thematic aggregator for photography, and she is an expert in the management and dissemination of digital cultural heritage projects. For PAGODE, she is in charge of the coordination of content providers for the ingestion of datasets to Europeana, and of the sustainability task
Sofie Taes, Photoconsortium Short bio: Sofie Taes is an alumna of KU Leuven (Belgium), where she graduated in musicology and Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Currently she works at the Institute for Cultural Studies (CS Digital) at KU Leuven and at Photoconsortium, as a digital curator. She has curated a wide range of editorials and virtual exhibitions for Europeana as well as the physical exhibitions All Our Yesterdays, Thousands are Sailing and Blue Skies, Red Panic. Currently she is active in several European projects involving digital cultural heritage and user engagement strategies, among which Europeana XX: Century of Change, PAGODE – Europeana China and inDICEs.
Haris Georgiadis, Head of the Digital Services Unit at the National Documentation Centre. Semantic Enrichment Strategy for SearchCulture.gr Short bio: Dr. Haris Georgiadis is Head of the Digital Services Unit at the National Documentation Centre. In this capacity he is managing, as technical and scientific coordinator, several European and national projects that collectively contribute to the development of a national infrastructure for high quality, interoperable, open access, scientific and cultural digital content and data. In particular, he is the technical director and the main developer of the National Aggregation SearchCulture.gr and the semantic enrichment infrastructure Semantics.gr. He has co-authored 7 scientific journal and conference articles that present various aspects of the above-mentioned infrastructure. Before joining EKT Haris worked in the private sector, as a Researcher at Oxford University’s Computing Lab and he has been a Software Engineer at the Europeana Foundation. He holds a Bachelor degree in Informatics from the University of Piraeus, a MSc at Information Systems and a PhD degree at Information Systems from the Athens University of Economics and Business. His research interests include designing of digital content management systems, processing and optimizing queries on non-traditional data, search engine optimization, metadata theory, semantic web and linked data.
Vassilis Tzouvaras, Technical Consultant, PostScriptum Short bio: Dr. Vassilis Tzouvaras received the Bachelor of Engineering in the Department of Electronic & Systems Engineering of Essex University, the Master of Engineering in the Department of Automatic Control & Systems Engineering in Sheffield University in UK, and the Ph.D. in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of National Technical University of Athens in the field of knowledge technologies, and specifically in extending OWL with fuzzy set operators. Since 2005, he is a senior researcher at the Artificial Intelligence and Learning Systems (AILS) of NTUA and technical consultant at Postscriptum. He is carrying out research in the areas of machine learning, knowledge representation, ontology engineering, reasoning and semantic search. He is active in the Europeana developments and many related projects. He has published 15 journal papers and 60 conference papers. He is also member of the subgroup of the Digital Cultural Heritage and Europeana (DCHE) formed by the DGConnect which has been established to provide the DCHE with advice on certain aspects of the Europeana Digital Service Infrastructure, such as Europeana’s general objectives, governance, strategic priorities, evolution and sustainability. He is also technical consultant of the Enterprise Greece responsible for organising and promoting Greek startups.
Orfeas Menis – Mastromichalakis, Researcher Orfeas Menis – Mastromichalakis is a graduate of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). He completed his undergraduate studies in November of 2019 in the field of Information Technology and his diploma thesis was “Art Style Recognition of Artworks with Convolutional Neural Networks”. Since then he works as a Research Associate in the Artificial Intelligence and Learning Systems Laboratory of the National Τechnical University of Athens, where he holds the position of Ph.D. student and researcher since October 2020. His research interests include Artificial Neural Networks, Image Processing and Analysis with CNNs, Fuzzy Systems, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), and Natural Language Processing (NLP).
blog authored by dr. Martina Bofulin, Slovenian Migration Institute, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
After the implementation of the reforms in the 1980s the Chinese state started to embrace a more diverse understanding of heritage. After the adoption of the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Convention in 2003, China experienced the so-called “heritage boom” that also included the new stance towards the legacies of emigration from China. For a long time considered to be traitors and agents of imperialism, Chinese emigrants, or Overseas Chinese as they are most often called, turned from ideologically suspicious to patriotic with their material and immaterial legacies being celebrated through museums, rituals, and monuments.
According to some estimates, there were at least 30 such museums across China, including major metropolises (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou) as well as smaller places with strong emigration in Fujian, Zhejiang, Guangdong and even Yunnan and Heilongjiang provinces (Wang 2019). Among these, the flagship project is the National Overseas Chinese History Museum of China in Beijing officially inaugurated in 2014. As Wang Cangbai (2019) observes, these museums may differ in style and size but are very much alike in their monolithic patriotic discourse. This discourse emphasizes the contribution of the Overseas Chinese to China’s revolution (especially their contribution to the struggle against Japanese aggression) as well as subsequent modernization. Museums thus construct the Overseas Chinese as a highly unified “patriotic subject” who had suffered as a victim of Western colonialism and imperialism (Wang 2019).
A statue of Johann Strauss at Longjin Park in Qingtian. Longjin Park is described as “a community park characteristic of natural beauty, European styled structure, traditional culture and modern garden arts”, source: Martina Bofulin.
While on the national level the heritagization of Chinese emigration is highly ideological and does not depart in any way from the prescribed forms of the Chinese state’s metanarrative of the great revival of Chinese civilization under the CCP Chinese Communist Party, the heritagization at the local level pursues many more complex aims and gives local authorities more creativity for turning local practices and legacies into heritage. At the local level, the heritagization is much less ideological as it is practical – the main aims are local development through tourism, urban development as well as social cohesion, and successful town branding. But as the case of Qingtian county, a small “hometown of Overseas Chinese” in the southern Zhejiang province reveals, the migration legacies are mostly intangible practices that must be somehow made more palpable and material. In Qingtian, many resources are invested in creating an environment that reflects the century-long connection to Europe through migration. These legacies materialize in the local “European style” projects, including newly built monuments and buildings, as well as the celebration of particular consumption practices (e.g. coffee houses, wine drinking).
Qingtian as a coffee town – the presence of the coffee culture due to the emigration “to 120 countries and districts”, source 旅游青田/ Qingtian Tourism, 2019.
PAGODE – Europeana China is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility Programme of the European Union, under GA n. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2019/1931839
A series of very interesting teaching and learning materials about China, its culture and cultural heritage, is published by the renowned online magazine Ancient History Encyclopedia. An article by Mark Cartwright dives into the meaning and history of Chinese calligraphy which was considered more an artistic practice than a way to communicate in written.
“Calligraphy established itself as the most important ancient Chinese art form alongside painting, first coming to the fore during the Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE). All educated men and some court women were expected to be proficient at it, an expectation which remained well into modern times. Far more than mere writing, good calligraphy exhibited an exquisite brush control and attention to composition, but the actual manner of writing was also important with rapid, spontaneous strokes being the ideal. The brushwork of calligraphy, its philosophy, and materials would influence Chinese painting styles, especially landscape painting, and many of the ancient scripts are still imitated today in modern Chinese writing. “
Exquisite calligraphy was highly appreciated and cherished, by preserving the support in different ways; and talented writers could even become real celebrities so that their works were collected and faithfully copied (and sometimes even forged!) since the early days, irrespectively of the meaning of the text. “There are many scraps (tie) which may be very old and highly valued but are, in fact, merely comments on the weather or a note for a gift of oranges.”
EVA Florence is an annual appointment, that started as a small workshop in 1991, then becoming in few years a well-defined conference in the EVA (Electronic Imaging & the Visual Arts) international series. Due to the covid-crisis the conference has been turned into a videoconference to be held on 20th July under the coordination of the University of Florence, professor “emeritus” Vito Cappellini and professor Enrico Del Re.
PAGODE – Europeana China presented a paper that will be illustrated in the afternoon session “Access to the culture information”.
EVA FLORENCE programme: PDF – contacts: vito.cappellini@unifi.it
Paper “PAGODE – Europeana China” authored by Valentina Bachi (Photoconsortium) and Antonella Fresa (Promoter srl): PDF
image from the paper
PAGODE – Europeana China is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility Programme of the European Union, under GA n. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2019/1931839
The PAGODE Semantic Workshop is organized by the project team at the Department of Asian Studies, University of Ljubljana. Its aim was to set the common ground for the curation of Chinese cultural heritage in the Europeana Digital Library. The workshop was held as an online event on Zoom on 9-10 July 2020.
The purpose of the PAGODE Semantic Workshop is to discuss the semantic background and the metadata curation methods of the already existing as well as newly added China-related content in Europeana. We took this occasion to review the definition of Chinese cultural heritage as well as discuss the list of keywords and use of thesauri that are developed within the Activity 3.1. of the PAGODE Project.
Above all, the workshop gave the participants the opportunity to tackle specific problems arising from the practical application of semantic definitions and of the metadata specifications. The project partners and the associated content owners were invited to present the material that is difficult to categorise or otherwise problematic as related to specifications.
Ultimately, the PAGODE Semantic Workshop provided the means for an improvement of the existing metadata scheme and enable further development of methodological approaches.
Being so deeply embedded in the Europeana ecosystem, PAGODE – Europeana China fully embraces the advocacy towards more open access content to be made available online in repositories like Europeana. The effort of cultural heritage institutions in showcasing their gems in digital format goes hand in hand with their mission of sharing this cultural heritage at large, for the benefit and enjoyment of the entire community.
Also, the general trend in Europe about digitization of cultural heritage and associated rights comes from a lenghty discussion that is continuing for years: does the digitization action add new rights to the digitized object? Despite there is not a general consensus on this, the direction is on maintaining the rights status of the physical object also in the digital instance, and specifically this means that if an artwork is in Public Domain because of copyright’s expiration, also the digital reproduction should be labelled as “Public Domain”.
Irrespectively of the associated rights, however, there is always a problem of possible misuse for this content that is available online and easily downloadable. And while in our minds there is this idea of the “evil” user who breaks copyright on purpose, and stoles the images to e.g. make unlawful money out of them, the problem on the control of what happens to the online content is much deeper.
the Journal’s cover
An example of this, that particularly catched the attention of PAGODE – Europeana China because it relates to a Chinese cultural heritage item, has recently come to the stage: a beautiful image of a Chinese embroidered cloth (a so-called rank-badge) depicting a leopard, in PD from the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, was recently used to illustrate the cover page of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Journal, titled “Emerging infectious diseases”.
The Journal and CDC were immediately flooded with expressions of outrage and concern of many from the Asian-American community and beyond, at the inappropriate use of a Chinese work of art on the cover and tweet-posting of a journal issue devoted to scholarly articles on COVID-19 and other respiratory infections.
The power of imaging should not be underestimated, as the choice of this image in such a context may suggest an emphasis on animals in China as carriers of the disease, resulting in an unvoluntary but certainly irresponsible example of using a PD digital item. The sensitivity about associating the COVID-19 crisis straightforward with China is clearly understandable, especially in America in this moment of xenophobia concerns and protests; but the explaination of CDC cuts short, by stating this is all a misunderstanding, and simply confirming that the image was chosen just for decorative purposes, being a striking piece of art – as indeed it is. At the moment, no reaction is known from the Metropolitan Museum of Arts as the content holder of the misused digital image.
But the question about protection against digital content misuses is still very open. It is not always a matter of whom makes money out of the content, but more of what happens to the content once it is freely available for “any” purpose.
While advocating the open access approach, we really must think that the content holder completely loses any control and responsibility on the reuse of this content, and on the possible consequences that may arise. This is one of the many reasons for which some archives still have doubts about embracing the open access tout-court, especially when they deal with potentially-sensitive content.
image: Rank Badge with Leopard, Wave and Sun Motifs, China, Qing dynasty (1644–1911), late 18th century, silk and metallic thread, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 30.75.1025
PAGODE – Europeana China is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility Programme of the European Union, under GA n. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2019/1931839
