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guqin and its music

cultural heritage / By / 9th June 2020
image: © Chinese Academy of Art sourced from the UNESCO website

China has a long and influential musical tradition based on the philosophy and culture of ancient China. The Confucians embraced a correct use and form of music matching to sociological and cosmological conceptions, thus to discover traditional Chinese music helps understanding Chinese culture. Unfortunately, there are still a number of barriers to online access for audio and audio-related materials, including the need of appealing content display to support user-friendly search and engagement, which is a difficult task also in physical museums. Efforts are ongoing to make this content more widely shared and accessible, such as the dedicated Europeana Sounds collections and the very specific materials disseminated in the UNESCO in Intangible Heritage platform.

Inscribed in 2008 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, in the UNESCO repository we can discover about the Guqin, the Chinese zitter: this musical instrument “has existed for over 3,000 years and represents China’s foremost solo musical instrument tradition. Described in early literary sources and corroborated by archaeological finds, this ancient instrument is inseparable from Chinese intellectual history.” As a demonstration of a different approach to music, guqin playing was not intended for public performance but it was more a personal art, that – along with calligraphy, painting and chess – Chinese scholars and noblemen were expected to master. “According to tradition, twenty years of training were required to attain proficiency.” it is explained in the UNESCO website and “Nowadays, there are fewer than one thousand well-trained guqin players and perhaps no more than fifty surviving masters. The original repertory of several thousand compositions has drastically dwindled to a mere hundred works that are regularly performed today. “

Discover more about the Guqin in UNESCO website >>

image: © Chinese Academy of Art sourced from the UNESCO website.

PAGODE – Europeana China is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility Programme of the European Union, under GA n. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2019/1931839

stakeholders group for pagode

cultural heritage, events, project / By / 3rd September 2020

PAGODE is a small scale yet very focused project, with a tight consortium of few, highly selected partners. But the project wants to be the seed for the nascence of a community of Cultural Heritage Institutions and organizations with a stake in Chinese-related heritage. In facts, objects that are connected to the mutual influence of Chinese and European cultures across time are cherished and preserved in many museums and archives in Europe, and only a minor part of these gems is showcased in physical format. While many porcelain artifacts and other bigger or smaller items such as laquered boxes, clothes, hair and personal accessories, precious jewels and jade statues are displayed in nice showcases, it is more difficult to provide museum visitors with access to e.g. heritage music and books. Digital collections can instead do much for allowing all Chinese-related heritage preserved in Europe to shine.

The main focus of the PAGODE Stakeholders Group is to establish connections with different organizations holders in Europe and also in China, to explore possibilities and challenges of digitization and online access, for current and future cooperation. Having the possibility of showcasing such heritage collections in a dedicated space on Europeana environment is the first step to enable compelling stories to be told, for the benefit of the user communities and also to improve sinology and SSH research.

PAGODE Stakeholders Group is open to cultural heritage institutions, sinology experts, metadata and aggregation colleagues, and anyone interested in Chinese cultural heritage. Everybody is welcome to join and bring expertise, content and passion, for expanding a community in which highly regarded European Cultural Heritage Institutions and partners are represented.

Discover here the core of associate partners in PAGODE Stakeholders Group >>

image: CC BY-NC-SA KIK-IRPA, Brussels (Belgium) – http://balat.kikirpa.be/object/121619

PAGODE – Europeana China is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility Programme of the European Union, under GA n. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2019/1931839

pagode at europeana aggregators forum

cultural heritage, events, project / By / 6th December 2021

The Europeana Aggregators Forum is the gathering where twice a year the community of Europeana most trusted partners meets to review strategies and collaborations, and make plans for the future. Like Photoconsortium, the domain aggregator for photography, all the aggregators work with cultural heritage institutions to gather authentic, trustworthy and robust cultural data and make it accessible through Europeana. Through the Europeana Aggregators Forum, we all work to exchange the knowledge and best practice that support the digital transformation of cultural heritage institutions.

Due to the covid-19 restrictions, that of 6-7 May 2020 was the first only-virtual meeting, and despite it was a bit sad not to meet in person, the plenary and the various breakout session were perfectly working and efficient. PAGODE was enthusiastically presented to colleagues with a video and a short pitch. A call to networking to other aggregators and cultural heritage institutions was also launched in the light of having PAGODE as a seed for a new community around Chinese cultural heritage in Europe.

access PAGODE’s presentation (PDF)

about PAGODE – Europeana China is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility Programme of the European Union, under GA n. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2019/1931839

understanding pagode’s context

cultural heritage, project / By / 7th May 2020

Following a rather peculiar kick-off meeting which was held in virtual form due to the covid-crisis, the new project PAGODE – Europeana China has already spread its wings to start its journey. To begin with, discussions are launched with sinologists and experts from the University of Ljubljana in the direction of defining relevant themes and keywords to depit the concept of “Chinese cultural heritage”. In facts, to set the semantic background for this project, it is important to define first what can be considered as Chinese Cultural heritage in Europe, distinguisching between “Chinese” versus “made in China” and analysing the (dis)connection between materiality and cultural connotations. Another aspect to be considered relates to migration processes: Europeans in China and Chinese in Europe. The discussion then needs to be extended to the type of objects which represent Chinese cultural heritage: tangible, intangible, natural (especially landscapes) and what examples of these types of heritage can be found in PAGODE’s partners archives. Final and crucial step of this phase in the project relates to the definition of metadata specification, for allowing a correct representation of the digitized objects in online environments, especially in Europeana, for granting the best user experience in the search and retrieval of content of his/her interest to meet various search purposes.

image courtesy of CRDI/Cinema Museum Collection

PAGODE – Europeana China is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility Programme of the European Union, under GA n. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2019/1931839

kick-off meeting

events / By / 7th May 2020

The launch of PAGODE was originally organized with a double event in Rome, hosted by coordinator MISE the Italian Ministry of Economic Development in the prestigious venue of via Molise, including the operative meeting reserved to project partners and a open event for associate partner and other stakeholders, with invited guests from Europe and from China. Due to the unprecedented circumstances connected to the COVID-19 crisis, we were forced to change our plans.

The operative meeting reserved to partners took place on 2nd April via a conference call, including the remote participation of our project officer Mrs. Kyriaki Tragouda from INEA. During this call we reviewed the operative plans of the project, aligned the various activities among all the partners and discussed with Europeana colleagues the best schedule for project’s editorials and for the creation of the new “Europeana China” thematic collection in the online portal.

The open meeting for associate partners and stakeholders will be rescheduled in due date, once the coronavirus will be behind all of us!

img. courtesy MISE

PAGODE – Europeana China is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility Programme of the European Union, under GA n. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2019/1931839

announcing a new project

project / By / 7th May 2020

A new project is starting, co-financed by the European Union under the CEF Connecting Europe Facility Programme that will contribute to generating rich user experience and high audience engagement with Europeana, the European digital library, by proposing a thematic approach in the aggregation, curation and presentation of Chinese cultual heritage preserved in Europe. PAGODE will aggregate to Europeana a minimum of 10,000 new objects, annotate and enrich more than 2,000 digital objects already in Europeana, and activate Cultural Heritage Institutions to plan new digitisation and enrichment of thousands and thousands of digital cultural heritage items.

This wealth of material will be organized in Europeana to create a new thematic collection rich in high quality content to explore, compelling editorials, galleries, blogs and a virtual exhibition. Focusing on the various forms of the presence of Chinese culture in Europe, the overall aim of PAGODE is to add further value to Cultural Heritage Institutions that own Chinese collections, to reach new end users, and to encourage creative reuse of the cultural heritage content in the domains of multicultural integration, cultural tourism, education and research.

PAGODE will promote further understanding of the cultural values of China and the cultural exchange between China and Europe, allowing Cultural Heritage Institutions to connect and share their collections and metadata across new sectors and borders and in this way to increase awareness and usage of Europeana to a wider audience, internationally. The project’s originality lies on the creation of a framework for a holistic overview of all Chinese collections within the scope of the pan-European area. As such, it would offer the foundations for further scholarship in this field, and even more important for the reinterpretation of questions of the circulation, trade, collecting and display of Chinese art in modern Europe with the aim to have a thorough understanding of the collecting history and Europe-China relationship from the historical and contemporary perspectives.

PAGODE – Europeana China is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility Programme of the European Union, under GA n. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2019/1931839