#AllezCulture – Fight for Europeana’s CEF Funding

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*The following post was written by the Europeana Steering Group of Europeana Board member volunteers.*

**Fight for Europeana and Europeana Network and Projects future funding**


From 2015 onwards, Europeana’s funding is to come from the European Commission’s Connecting Europe Facility (CEF). However, in early February 2013, a massive budget cut for this scheme was proposed (see e.g. [http://euobserver.com/news/118998](http://euobserver.com/news/118998)), taking the budget for broadband and digital services from 9 billion euros to just 1 billion.

Europeana and the related projects many of you create and run cost currently 30 million euros per year. We will not get this amount but should fight for as much as we can to continue to develop and deliver real European added value to the citizens of Europe. We are in direct competition with other programmes in health, justice and safer internet, which were also relying on CEF. If we lose the funding, much of the hard work we have all put in will be wasted.

Many of you responded to our recent request to send letters about the cut in the CEF budget to your MEPs, to national contacts in Brussels and to your own government ministers. Europeana is now being asked to make its case for funding under the revised guidelines for CEF, which should be issued at the end of May.

Everyone; partners, projects, network members can help via the #AllezCulture campaign to win the hearts and minds of the politicians and policy makers and get across our messages about the importance of digitised, accessible culture for social, economic and unity reasons.

**What can you do now?**

1. Please use the leaflet** [‘Europeana – the case for funding’](http://pro.europeana.eu/documents/858566/0/AllezCulture+leaflet)** in anyway you can to promote our message. Translate, distribute, publish and blog the document or its messages to your network and contacts,

2. Tweet about the messages: **Europeana supports economic growth; Europeana connects Europe; Europeana makes Europe’s culture available to everyone** using our dedicated hashtag[#AllezCulture](https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=%23AllezCulture&src=typd), **and** retweet our messages under** [#AllezCulture](http://bit.ly/17mnbL7)**.

This week we will launch the **#AllezCulture** Facebook Group, which will keep you up to date with the campaign and provide more ideas of further actions you can take to support us. And you can use it to keep us up to date with what you have done or by sending an email to[[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Knowing what you are doing means we can use your efforts to inspire others.

**Background & previous activity**

At the end of March, the European Commission requested a letter from the European Foundation be sent to Neelie Kroes outlining our proposals for funding under CEF. [Read our letter to Neelie Kroes](http://pro.europeana.eu/documents/900548/6e0bef93-491d-4bdd-8bb9-be06261d4d4c). Madam Kroes then requested a meeting with Europeana.

At the end of February, Bruno Racine also sent a letter of support to the Commission. [Read Bruno Racine’s letter](http://pro.europeana.eu/documents/900548/2e0aa1bb-f5ca-4166-86b3-504b7dc86c28).

So far, 31 Europeana Network Members from 17 different European countries have sent 200+ letters to national Members of the European Parliament, national contacts in Brussels and/or national governments.

Know your facts – read this [factsheet](http://pro.europeana.eu/documents/900548/c878ddbd-204e-4f70-b375-d80416f13f5b) detailing how Europeana will work under the CEF – this knowledge forms the basis for your arguments for supporting Europeana’s funding bid.

There is a Europeana Steering Group of Europeana Board member volunteers:

Ms Anne Bergman-Tahon, Federation of European Publishers
Mr Bruno Racine, BnF, Chair Europeana Foundation
Mr Daniel Teruggi, INA
Mr Jan Muller, FIAT/IFTA
Ms Kristiina Hormia, LIBER
Mr Nick Poole, Collections Trust, Chair Europeana Network

This Steering Group is responsible for providing the business case for funding within the next 6 weeks and for guiding the #AllezCulture campaign.

Pundit Workshop at the National Library of the Netherlands

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**On Thursday the 23d of May, the [Open Knowledge Foundation](https://okfn.org) organised together with [Net7](http://www.netseven.it/) and the [National Library of the Netherlands](http://kb.nl) the first [Pundit](http://thepund.it) workshop aimed at digital humanities scholars and librarians. During this day, the idea of Open Humanities research was debated and Pundit was used to annotate the digitised manuscript collection of the National Library.**

foto

After a word of welcome by Joris Pekel of the Open Knowledge Foundation he gave an introduction into open humanities research. With the network technology we have and the digitisation efforts of the cultural heritage institutions we have the potential to realise this vision of a world in which all human knowledge is freely available for everyone, a world in which scholarly discourse is unimpeded across borders and across languages.

By openly sharing not only our final papers, but also our annotations, micro-observations, notes etcetera, we allow everybody to take our data and re-use and improve them, benefiting research as a whole.

After this talk, Ed van der Vlist, curator of [medieval manuscripts](http://manuscripts.kb.nl) gave an overview of the various digitised collections of the National Library and what their plans are for the coming years. At the moment, the ‘[data services](http://www.kb.nl/banners-apis-en-meer/dataservices-apis)’ of the National Library are offering a number of open datasets for anybody to re-use without any restrictions. In the coming period more will be added.

Simone Fonda, lead developer of the Pundit annotation tool at Net7, then gave an extensive introduction about the Pundit tool.

After installing the bookmarklet which allows the user to annotate any page on the web, the scholars annotated a page from the medieval manuscript collection. To see their annotations, install the [Pundit Bookmarklet](http://thepund.it/bm/den_haag), go to [this page](http://www.kb.nl/en/web-exhibitions/highlights-from-medieval-manuscripts/signs-of-the-zodiac) and activate Pundit by clicking the bookmarklet.

Simone had prepared a couple of [exercises](http://thepund.it/exercises.php) which allowed the participants to explore all functionalities of the tool. The feedback they gave is incredibly valuable for further development of the tool and will be implemented into future version of Pundit.

All together this was a useful workshop for both the participants and the DM2E consortium as a whole and helped to further explore the potential of the web of open data and digital tools in humanities research.

With special thanks to the people at the National Library of the Netherlands for all their help to make this a successful day.

Pundit in the final phase of the LODLAM challenge

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**We are very happy to announce that Pundit has made it to the final round of the [LODLAM](http://summit2013.lodlam.net/) (Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives and Museums) challenge.**

This means the Pundit team will be presenting the tool to semantically annotate text to an international crowd of linked open data professionals in Montréal. During the summit in June, the winner will be picked out of four finalists.

[The Pundit tool](http://thepund.it) is being developed by the Italian company [Net7](http://www.netseven.it/) as part of the DM2E project. It enables users to annotate web pages and create structured data. The annotations can be collected in notebooks and shared with others to create collaborative structured knowledge. Annotations span from simple comments to semantic links to the Web of Data (as [Freebase.com](http://freebase.org) and [Dbpedia.org](http://dbpedia.org)), to fine granular cross-references and citations.

The video was produced by [Net7](http://netseven.it/) and [Elena D’Ettole](http://www.elenadettole.com/), with the support of the [Open Knowledge Foundation](https://okfn.org/).

Many thanks for all the support and votes for Pundit.

The DM2E Model v1.0

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A specialisation of the EDM for handwritten manuscripts

This month, we have finished the first operational version of our DM2E model (v1.0), a specialisation of the EDM for handwritten manuscripts. The ontology has been developed within Work Package 2 with a lot of input from others in the project. Especially results of extensive mapping workshops with our data providers were integrated into the model. Metadata of various formats like TEI, EAD and MARC21 was analysed and used to create new classes and properties that specialise the current EDM.

dm2e_model

 Screenshot from the DM2E model representation on Neologism.

How to get the DM2E model?

You can find the specification of the model…

… as a pdf file and in the owl ontology, which can both be downloaded from the documents section

… as well as an html representation on Neologism via the dm2e schema namespace: http://onto.dm2e.eu/schemas/dm2e/1.0/

For more information, please write to julia.iwanowa (at) ibi.hu-berlin.de or evelyn.droege (at) ibi.hu-berlin.de

We are glad to get your feedback or to hear from your own modelling experiences!

Open Humanities Award Winners Announced

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awards-logo

Earlier this year we put out a call to humanities academics and technologists to see if they could come up with innovative ideas for small technology projects that would further humanities research by using **open content**, **open data** and/or **open source**.

We’re very pleased to announce that the winners are **Dr Bernhard Haslhofer (University of Vienna)** and **Dr Robyn Adams (Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, University College London)**. Both winners will receive financial support to help them undertake the work they proposed and will be blogging about the progress of their project. You can follow their progress via the [DM2E blog](https://dm2e.eu/blog).

—

####Award 1: Semantic tagging for old maps… and other things

Screen Shot 2013-05-07 at 11.02.15

The first Award goes to Dr Bernhard Haslhofer of Vienna University. His project will involve building on an open source web application he has been working on called [Maphub](http://maphub.github.io/).

Dr Haslhofer told us a little bit about the inspiration for his project:

>“People love old maps” is a statement that we heard a lot from curators in libraries. This combined with the assumption that many people also have knowledge to share or stories to tell about historical maps, was our motivation to build [Maphub](http://maphub.github.io/).

In essence Maphub is an open source Web application that, first of all, pulls out digitized historical maps from closed environments, adds zooming functionality, and assigns Web URIs so that people can talk about them online. It also supports two main use cases:

(i) georeferencing maps by linking points on the map to [Geonames locations](http://www.geonames.org/);
(ii) commenting on maps or map regions by creating annotations. While users are entering their comments, Maphub analyzes the entered text on the fly and suggests so-called semantic tags, which the user accepts or rejects.

Semantic tags appear like “normal” tags on the user interface, but are in fact links to [DBpedia](http://dbpedia.org) resources. In that way, the user links her annotations and therefore also the underlying historical map with resources from two open data sources. Besides consuming open data during the annotation authoring process, Maphub also contributes collected knowledge back as open data by exposing all annotations following the [W3C Open Annotation specification](http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/). In that way, Maphub supports people in a loop of using and producing open data in the context of historical maps.

Dr Haslhofer looks forward to seeing how collaborations will blossom between these various web annotation systems:

>We believe that people also love other things on the Web and that Web annotation tools should support semantic tagging as well. Therefore, we will make it available as a plugin for [Annotorious](http://annotorious.github.io). Annotorious is a JavaScript image annotation library that can be used in any Website, and is also compatible with the Open Knowledge’s Foundations’s [Annotator](http://okfnlabs.org/annotator).

>Annotorious and Maphub have [common origins](http://www.slideshare.net/bhaslhofer/old-maps-annotations-and-open-data-networks) and the Open Humanities will support us in unifing parallel development streams into a single, reusable annotation tool that works for digitized maps but also for other media. We will also conduct another user study to inform the design of that function for other application contexts.

—

####Award 2: Joined Up Early Modern Diplomacy: Linked Data from the Correspondence of Thomas Bodley

Thomas_Bodley

The second award goes to Dr Robyn Adams of Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, University College London. The project will re-purpose the open resource that Dr Adams has been building with a team of others: *[the Diplomatic Correspondence of Thomas Bodley](http://www.livesandletters.ac.uk/bodley/bodley.html)*.

The project will use ‘additional’ information that was encoded into the digitisation of early modern letters that took place at the [Centre for Editing Lives and Letters](http://www.livesandletters.ac.uk/). In the initial incarnation of the project this data which included biographical and geographical information contained within letters was not used (although it was encoded).

Dr Adams told us a little bit about what she plans on doing with the money from the Awards:

>With the prize funding from the Open Humanities Awards, we propose to mine the data that was
generated but not fully used in the first phase of the project. This data is a rich source of
biographical and geographical information, the visualization of which evokes
the complex and diverse texture of the late sixteenth-century European
diplomatic and military landscape. Bodley’s position in The Hague as the only
English representative on the Dutch Council of State put him at the centre of a
heterogeneous nexus of correspondents a time long before the Republic of
Letters burgeoned in the subsequent century.

The project will interrogate three data fields within the larger data set of Bodley’s diplomatic
correspondence in order to generate visualizations; the network of correspondents
and recipients, and the people and places mentioned within the letters. These
visualizations will be incorporated into the project website, where they will
enhance and extend the knowledge derived from the existing corpus of
correspondence. The visualizations, which will have scope to be playful while
drawn from scrupulous scholarship, will offer an alternative pathway for
scholars and the interested public to understand that in this period
especially, the political, university and kinship networks were fundamental to
advancement and prosperity.

“In mapping the relational activity between data sets,” Dr Adams went on, “I hope to further illuminate and reanimate Bodley’s position within the Elizabethan compass. Furthermore, I hope to demonstrate that fruitful routes of enquiry can result if scholars commit to going the extra mile to encode and record data in their research that may not have immediate relevance to their own studies.”

***

We offer our heartiest congratulations to the both Dr Haslhofer and Dr Adams both of whom will be presenting their work at the forthcoming [Web as Literature conference at the British Library](http://webasliterature.org/).

Pundit Hackday Report, Pisa

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Net7 and the team of developers brainstorming how to implement Pundit user interface improvements

**On the 3rd May 2013 the team that has been leading the development work on DM2E’s flagship Digital Humanities tool, [Pundit](http://thepund.it), got together with other developers and humanities researchers to brainstorm and implement ways of improving Pundit.**

On the day groups were divided up to work on particular challenges and tasks.

###Group 1: Improving the Pundit user interface

The main problem addressed on the day was that users need a quick and intuitive way of performing batch annotations such as linking various bits of text to a given category. The solution explored on the day was to create annotation templates.

Some of the user interface mock-ups based on this idea of annotation templates can be found below:

Screen Shot 2013-05-31 at 18.02.58

Screen Shot 2013-05-31 at 18.03.09

###Group 2: Improving Ask.The.Pundit

Ask The Pundit is a prototype web service for visualising notebooks of annotations created in Pundit.

Work on the day focussed on the trying out ways that notebooks could be annotated. Based on previous consultations with researchers the group decided that notebooks should be able to be viewed as annotation centric, entity centric (grouped around a given digital resource) or through 3rd party web services such as LodLive.

Below are some early mock-ups of the kind of user interfaces they were developing:

myImage

###Scholarly consultation session and user testing

On the second day of the hack the Pundit team worked with a team of humanities researchers, who gave feedback on the current version of Pundit. The key suggestions they had were:

* Allow users to create custom visualisations in [Edgemaps](http://mariandoerk.de/edgemaps/) using their chosen predicates
* Allow users to customise their experience in Pundit more
* Allow users to perform full text searches of annotations
* Allow users to reply to annotation
* Automatic recognition of dates

Pundit Workshop in Den Hague

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**On Thursday the 23d of May, the [DM2E project](https://dm2e.eu) and the [The National library of the Netherlands](http://kb.nl) will organise the first Pundit workshop focussed on the digital humanities. We invite humanities scholars to join us during this one day event to learn what Pundit is and how it can be used in humanities research.**

[The Pundit tool](http://thepund.it) is being developed by the Italian company [Net7](http://www.netseven.it/) as part of the DM2E project. It enables users to annotate web pages and create structured data. The annotations can be collected in notebooks and shared with others to create collaborative structured knowledge. Annotations span from simple comments to semantic links to the Web of Data (as [Freebase.com](http://freebase.org) and [Dbpedia.org](http://dbpedia.org)), to fine granular cross-references and citations. For more information about the tool you can watch this video:



During this day, we will work with the [rich illuminated medieval manuscript collection](http://manuscripts.kb.nl/introduction) that has been made openly available by the National Library of the Netherlands.

We will start the day with a series of presentation about the tool and the possibilities of it for humanities research. After lunch we will work with Pundit and see how it can help us answering research questions in a collaborative way. This session is being led by one of the lead-developers of Pundit and the Open Knowledge Foundation.

**The program:**

* 10:00-10:30 – coffee and registration
* 10:30-12:00 – Presentations.
– Welcome and introduction to manuscript collection
– Introduction into the potential of Linked Open Data in the humanities
– Introduction into Pundit
* 12:00-13:00 – Lunch
* 13:00-16:00 Pundit hands-on workshop
* 16:00- 17:00 Feedback session and goodbye

**Important information**

– Date: Thursday 23d of May
– Time: 10:00 – 17:00
– Where: National Library of the Netherlands, Den Hague ([click here for a map](https://plus.google.com/111353982163615086176/about?hl=en))
– Attending the event is free, but places are limited. Please sign up for the event [using this form](https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/forms/d/1aZN_P_xpMmsLpjy05KuzrA0FhRyX-EcxHYIVw32r9ng/viewform).

If possible, please bring your own laptop. We have a few desktop computers available at the library

***

Pundit Hackday – 3rd and Saturday 4th May in Pisa, Italy

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**[Net7](http://www.netseven.it), [The Open Knowledge Foundation](http://www.okfn.org) and the DM2E project present the first Pundit Hackday: an open hackathon about [Pundit](http://thepund.it), the novel semantic web annotation tool that is being developed as part of the DM2E project. Parallel we will run a users workshop.**

To get an idea what Pundit is about, have a look at this new video:



Any coder, developer (bring your javascript/html skills!) or designer is welcome, along with anyone (skilled or not!) interested in knowing what Pundit is, how to customize it or use it for your digital library project, or adapt it to help your daily workflow.

This free event aims to bring together software developers, scholars and all kind of users to try to steer Pundit’s roadmap following crowdsourced suggestions and ideas, building useful and interesting proof of concepts or pure hacks.

An initial plenary brainstorming session will determine what the hackers will (try to) develop during the two days. A non-technical workshop will run alongside the coding, a sort of Pundit users meeting or focus group. In the end, a final meet-up on the afternoon of the 4th will be open to all, to see what hackers hacked!

####Some ideas to get you started:

– connect more linked data providers (VIAF? dbpedia.de/it/es? .. your own!)
– automatic entity extractor improvements
– general user interface
– image annotation User Interface improvements
– general annotation model: OA compliancy
– visualizations (edgemap/politics/ …. lodlive? d3?)
– ASK User Interface (annotations, notebooks, ..)
– ASK general public search

.. or bring your use case and let’s hack it together!

Want to join us? Fill up [this form](http://goo.gl/bErOa).

For any information, [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])

DM2E Presents The Web as Literature, 10th June 2013, British Library

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We would like to invite you to the [Web as Literature](http://webasliterature.org), a one day event of talks and workshops exploring Linked Open Data and its revolutionary potential for the humanities brought to you by the [DM2E project](https://dm2e.eu) and [Judaica Europeana](http://www.judaica-europeana.eu/).

Taking place on 10th June 2013 and hosted by the British Library the event will bring together leading digital humanists and cultural heritage professionals and will feature a keynote from Ted Nelson the inventor of hypertext.

Attendance is free, but places are limited. [Sign-up here](http://webasliterature.org/) to guarantee yourself a place.

**The programme includes:**

– A keynote by the inventor of hypertext, **[Ted Nelson](http://hyperland.com/)**
– A dedicated Digital Humanities panel on modelling the humanities with Professor Stefan Gradmann (KU Leuven), Dr Tobias Blanke (Kings College London) and Dominic Oldman (Research Space, British Museum)
– The European Digital Library and Linked Open Data with a presentation from Antoine Isaac
– Hands-on workshops with DM2E’s flagship tool, [Pundit](http://thepund.it), for semantically annotating and linking texts and images

More information on the event can be found [here](http://webasliterature.org).

Announcing the Open Humanities Awards

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OpenHumanitiesLogos

We are excited to announce the first ever Open Humanities Awards. The are **€15,000** worth of prizes on offer for 3-5 projects that use **open content**, **open data** or **open source tools** to further humanities teaching and research. Whether you’re interested in patterns of allusion in Aristotle, networks of correspondence in the Jewish Enlightenment or digitising public domain editions of Dante, we’d love to hear about the kinds of open projects that could support your interest!

##Why are we running these Awards?

Humanities research is based on the interpretation and analysis of a wide variety of cultural artefacts including texts, images and audiovisual material. Much of this material is now freely and openly available on the internet enabling people to discover, connect and contextualise cultural artefacts in ways previously very difficult.

**We want to make the most of this new opportunity by encouraging budding developers and humanities researchers to collaborate and start new projects that use this open content and data paving the way for a vibrant cultural and research commons to emerge.**

##Who can apply?

The Awards are open to any citizen of the EU.

##Who is judging the Awards?

The Awards will be judged by a stellar cast of leading Digital Humanists:

##What do we want to see?

ab-digi-screenshots-custom1
The Mapping the Republic of Letters project is a great example of what is possible with humanities data

We are challenging humanities researchers, designers and developers to create innovative projects open content, open data or open source to further teaching or research in the humanities.

For example you might want to:

  • Start a project to collaboratively transcribe, annotate, or translate public domain texts
  • Explore patterns of citation, allusion and influence using bibliographic metadata or textmining
  • Analyse and/or visually represent complex networks or hidden patterns in collections of texts
  • Use computational tools to generate new insights into collections of public domain images, audio or texts

You could start a project from scratch or build on an existing project. For inspiration you can have a look at the open-source tools the Open Knowledge Foundation has developed for use with cultural resources.

As long as your project involves open content, open data or open source tools and makes a contribution to humanities research, the choice is yours!

##Who is behind the awards?

The Awards are being coordinated by the Open Knowledge Foundation and are part of the [DM2E](https://dm2e.eu) project. They are also supported by the [Digital Humanities Quarterly](http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/).

##How to apply

Applications are open from today (13th February 2013). Go to [openhumanitiesawards.org](http://openhumanitiesawards.org/#enter) to apply. The application deadline is **12th March 2013**, so get going and good luck!

##More information…

For more information on the Awards including the rules and ideas for open datasets and tools to use visit [openhumanitiesawards.org](http://openhumanitiesawards.org).