Tag Archives: SHIFT

SHIFT Consortium Advances Cultural Heritage Accessibility: Highlights from Athens Event

Heritage Management Organization Director Dr. Evangelos Kyriakdis addressing the SHIFT Consportium

The HERITΛGE team was very happy to host our colleagues from the SHIFT project Consortium in Athens last week to discuss progress made and the next steps the consortium will take in its work to make cultural heritage more accessible, inclusive and appealing for all. The consortiun also presented the project which is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe program, to a select group of heritage professionals, policy makers, and stakeholders on Friday May 24th, during an event at the Athenian Museum.

HERITΛGE’s director, Dr. Evangelos Kyriakidis, opened the event, underlining the significance of the project: “We are very proud of the Organization’s participation in the SHIFT program and happy to be able to present here in Athens the first samples of the partner’s work with the aim of making cultural heritage more accessible, inclusive and attractive,” Kyriakidis said. 

Razvan Purcarea from project coordinator SIMAVI briefly presented the project with help from representatives from Queen Mary University of London, the Technical University of Munich, the Foundation for Research and Technology (FORTH), and the technology company audEERING, all members of the SHIFT consortium. During the event, Dr. Angelos Giokas from the Athena Research Center gave a brief presentation of PREMIERE, a project for accessibility and inclusion in the performing arts, which is also funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe program.

Learn more about SHIFT: https://shift-europe.eu/ 

 

SHIFT Project update: Metadata and a Text-to-Speech tool

The SHIFT project has produced two new videos for heritage professionals. They are part of the work being done by the 13 partners (including heritage) to make cultural heritage more accessible, inclusive, and appealing using the latest advances in technology.

The first video explains some of the work SHIFT has been doing to produce a Text-to-Speech tool for cultural heritage. The tool uses affective speech synthesis to link emotions with acoustics. In one example, a video provided by the Balkan Museum Network was not only translated and voiced over using AI, but the voice was processed to carry affect, that is, to convey relevant emotions.

Watch the video below and subscribe to the project’s YouTube page:

 

 

Webinar Video: Webinar: Metadata in museum collections

The second video the team released is a recording of the recent webinar on Metadata in Museum Collections, organized by the Balkan Museum Network in February. Webinar instructor Fetja, an information and communication expert researching and practicing in the fields of data science, information sciences, knowledge management, and communications, explored the importance of metadata and descriptions in managing museum collections and artifacts as well as strategies for effective digital cataloging of collections and sub-collections.

Watch a recording of this SHIFT webinar that was designed for museum professionals, curators, and anyone interested in the intersection of culture, technology, and information management.

 

 

About SHIFT: SHIFT is funded by the European Commission’s Horizon Europe program. It brings together 13 leading research and industrial organizations and SMEs with a common vision: to strengthen the impact of cultural heritage assets. SHIFT will produce an array of tools taking advantage of the latest developments in fields such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Haptics, and Auditory Synthesizers to increase the appeal of historical artifacts, improving their accessibility and usability for everyone through better content representation, enriched user experiences, inclusive design, training, and more engaging business models. Find out more here: https://shift-europe.eu/

 

 

Europe’s Common Data Space for Cultural Heritage

By Rob Davies

The European Strategy for data focuses on putting people first in developing technology and defending and promoting European values and rights in the digital world. Data is seen as an essential resource for economic growth, competitiveness, innovation, job creation and societal progress in general. The aim is to create a single market for data that will ensure Europe’s global competitiveness and data sovereignty.

Common European data spaces will be developed and funded in key strategy sectors and areas of public interest, such as health, agriculture or manufacturing. They are intended to ensure that more data becomes available for use in the economy and society, while keeping the companies and individuals who generate the data in control. Data driven applications will benefit citizens and businesses in many ways such as improved health care, safer and cleaner transport systems, lower cost public services, improved sustainability and energy efficiency, more business innovation and by generating new products and services.

The plan is to adopt legislative measures on data governance, access and reuse, e.g. for business-to-government data sharing for the public interest. And to make data more widely available by opening up high value publicly held datasets across the EU and allowing their reuse for free. A big investment in data processing infrastructures, data sharing tools, architectures and governance mechanisms. Thriving data sharing and federated energy-efficient and trustworthy cloud infrastructures and related services.

Among the 14 data spaces initially envisaged, The European Commission has published a recommendation on a common European data space for cultural heritage. The aim is to accelerate the digitisation of cultural heritage assets like cultural heritage monuments and sites, objects and artefacts for future generations, to protect and preserve those at risk, and boost their reuse in domains such as education, sustainable tourism and cultural creative sectors.

Currently cultural tourism represents up to 40% of all tourism in Europe, cultural and creative industries contribute 3.95% of total EU value added (€477 billion) and more than 8 million people are employed within them, through 1.2 million firms – 99.9% of which are SMEs; Member States are encouraged to digitise by 2030 all monuments and sites that are at risk of degradation and half of those highly frequented by tourists. This will contribute to the objectives of the Digital Decade by fostering a secure and sustainable digital infrastructure, digital skills and uptake of technologies by businesses, in particular SMEs.

Europeana, the European digital cultural platform, will be at the basis for building the common data space for cultural heritage by allowing museums, galleries, libraries and archives across Europe to share and reuse the digitised cultural heritage images such as 3D models of historical sites and high quality scans of paintings. Europeana currently offers access to 52 million cultural heritage assets, 45% of which can be reused in various sectors. Images and text make up 97.5% of Europeana’s assets, with only 2.47% audiovisual content and 0.03% in 3D. The collection of 3D assets in particular should see a massive boost, thanks to this latest initiative.

It is envisaged that the common data space for cultural heritage will include a wider variety of data types than the current digital content of Europeana. While these are still to be fully defined, they might be about any aspect of tangible or intangible Cultural Heritage – its creation, description, storage, presentation/performance, transmission, access, preservation, reuse, rights etc.- or possibly even more widely drawn from across the whole spectrum of cultural activity, including data coming from scientific or other fields which eventually constitutes our heritage.

Alongside this, the European collaborative cloud on cultural heritage (ECCCH) is a European Union initiative for a digital infrastructure that will connect cultural heritage institutions and professionals across the EU. It is intended to help protect European cultural heritage while answering to the new requirements of a digitized world. In doing that, it will provide practical benefits to all cultural heritage professionals and museums, developing specific digital collaborative tools for the sector while removing barriers for smaller and remote institutions. The goal is to help cultural heritage institutions, research organisations and other professionals of all sizes and types work with their digital objects in a more visible, interconnected, harmonised, and informed way, allowing them to successfully cope with the challenges the digital transition poses to the sector.

The ECCCH, funded by Horizon Europe, will aim to add a new digital dimension to cultural heritage preservation, conservation, restoration and enhancement by providing cutting-edge technologies for digitising artefacts and researching artworks, paving the way for new transdisciplinary collaboration in the field of cultural heritage, bringing together specialists from a range of disciplines, including scholars, curators, archivists, and conservators.

This ambitious project for a new cutting-edge platform will work in tandem with other European initiatives, such as Europeana and the common European dataspace for cultural heritage, to add a new dimension to the way we approach, conserve and enhance our shared cultural heritage. As part of the ECCCH, two calls for proposals were open until September 2023 to fund. projects which will contribute to setting up the foundations of ECCCH. With an envisaged budget of €110 million until 2025 from Horizon Europe, the ECCCH will be a unique infrastructure that will enable unprecedented transdisciplinary and large-scale collaboration between specialists.

*Rob Davies is HERITΛGE’s Head of European Programs and Chair of the Management Board of the Europeana Network Association (ENA).
*HERITΛGE offers a number of training opportunities on Digital Tools for Cultural Heritage. These include a 3-day workshop, a summer field school, and a credit bearing Certificate in cooperation with HOGENT University.

Critical challenges in the way we experience heritage in the realm of museums

 

By Dr. George Margetis

The SHIFT project, funded by the European Commission’s Horizon Europe Program, comes to revitalize how we experience cultural heritage by matching innovation with tradition and creating multi-sensory heritage encounters that transcend boundaries and welcome everyone.

More specifically, SHIFT aims to unlock the past for everyone and is committed to accessibility and inclusivity, ensuring that cultural heritage becomes accessible to all, and allowing everyone to connect with their heritage regardless of background or ability. Emphasizing also that diversity matters, SHIFT pursues to empower people with disabilities to enrich their perspectives and foster their understanding.

SHIFT is addressing the critical challenges we encounter in the realm of museums. These are: 

Challenge 1: diverse heritage, diverse needs.
Our cultural heritage often excludes individuals of diverse backgrounds from fully engaging with it.

Challenge 2: physical barriers transform heritage exploration into a struggle for individuals with mobility challenges.
Limited access narrows their ability to engage with exhibits, diminishing their capacity to immerse themselves in their stories.

Challenge 3: language and cognitive barriers.
The language barrier and cognitive disabilities create a divide leaving visitors disconnected from heritage stories.

Challenge 4: exclusion of sensory diversity.
Many cultural experiences focus on sight and sound, excluding those who experience the world differently.

Challenge 5: theater of inclusivity.
Museums should prioritize inclusivity for all visitors but certain interactive elements and live performances may unintentionally exclude individuals with varying abilities.

The SHIFT project consortium that consists of 13 European partners, is tackling these challenges head-on, reimagining accessibility to cultural heritage through innovative and inclusive approaches.

By addressing these issues we pave the way to a more accessible and enriching cultural experience for all.


Dr. George Margetis, is a postdoctoral researcher with the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory of The Institute of Computer Science of FORTH. The HCI lab is leading SHIFT’s Work Package 3 implementation, catering to the accessibility of cultural heritage assets and improving the user experience of people with visual impairments. This opinion piece was originally part of a presentation for the webinar held to celebrate European Heritage Days 2023. You can watch the entire webinar that was hosted by HERITΛGE here.

SHIFT Project Webinar: accessible & inclusive cultural heritage content

SHIFT PROJECT WEBINAR INVITE

 

Join us for a webinar to celebrate this year’s European Heritage Days organized by SHIFT, an international project funded by the European Commission’s Horizon Europe Program to make cultural heritage more inclusive and accessible through technology.

SHIFT’s (MetamorphoSis of cultural Heritage Into augmented hypermedia assets For enhanced accessibiliTy and inclusion)online event will explore the innovative tools being developed by the SHIFT Consortium to improve the accessibility, inclusivity, and appeal of cultural heritage content. It will be held on September 18th, 11 AM CET.

SHIFT is one of a cluster of six projects funded by the European Commission’s Horizon Europe Program under Cluster 2 Culture, Creativity, and Inclusive Society: Preserving and enhancing cultural heritage with advanced digital technologies. SHIFT supports the adoption of digital transformation strategies and the uptake of tools within the creative and cultural industries (CCI).

The webinar is addressed to cultural heritage professionals, researchers, and the public. To attend, participants can register by filling out this form.

SHIFT PROJECT: The SHIFT Consortium’s 13 partners are leveraging advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to improve cultural heritage access for European citizens experiencing sensory impairment. They aim to enrich the experience of interacting with cultural assets through visual, auditory, and sensory modalities, e.g., using haptics. SHIFT is also developing tools and methodologies to enable contemporary description of cultural assets through language evolution models. HERITΛGE is proud to be a part of the SHIFT Consortium.  To find out more about SHIFT, please watch this introductory video.

European Cultural Heritage Days: Every September, the signatory States to the European Cultural Convention take part in the European Heritage Days – a joint action of the Council of Europe and the European Commission. The action’s aims are, among others, to raise the awareness of European citizens to the richness and cultural diversity of Europe and invite responses to the social, political and economic challenges it faces.

More about SHIFT: https://shift-europe.eu/

 

 

 

SHIFT Project forges ahead to make heritage accessible through technology

SHIFT project, horizon europe, heritage, technology, artifficial intelligence

SHIFT Consortium partners meeting in Serbia

HERTΛGE attends SHIFT Consortium meeting: consulting stakeholders and reviewing use cases to make cultural heritage more accessible and inclusive through technology. 

The SHIFT Consortium held its second in-person meeting earlier this month in Knjaževac, Serbia. HERITΛGE and twelve consortium partners were hosted on 15th – 16th June by the Homeland Museum of Knjaževac, part of the Balkan Museum Network. 

¨We had a great opportunity to take stock of all the progress that has already been made for the creation of tools that will help make cultural heritage more accessible and inclusive,” said Razvan Purcarea, from project coordinating partner SIMAVI.  

SHIFT is funded by the European Commission’s Horizon Europe program. It brings together 13 leading research and industrial organisations and SMEs with a common vision: to strengthen the impact of cultural heritage assets. SHIFT will produce an array of tools taking advantage of the latest developments in fields such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Haptics, and Auditory Synthesizers to increase the appeal of historical artefacts, improving their accessibility and usability for everyone through better content representation, enriched user experiences, inclusive design, training, and more engaging business models. 

During the Knjaževac consortium meeting, partners had the opportunity to review use-case scenarios and functional requirements, engage with external stakeholders, and attend the opening of the Homeland Museum’s latest exhibition.

 

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