On March 23rd, Dorottya Szabó – Senior Archivist and head of department of Digital Services National Archives of Hungary and Anabela Borges Teles Ribeiro, Head of Departments of Digital Contents Conservation and Restoration, at Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, supported by Maria dos Remédios Amaral, gave the ICARUS Online Lecture #5 on the topic: Digitized archival materials from different corners of Europe: birth of transmedia exhibitions of the European Digital Treasures project.
The exhibitions aim at telling the stories and experiences hold inside European archives across multiple platforms and formats using various digital technologies, working together with cross-platform media and involving new publics.
Anabela Borges Teles Ribeiro
Anabela Ribeiro and Dorottya Szabó described the process of “making the exhibition”: the choice of documents and scientific work of historians, the digitization, the designer’s work, the creation of merchandising products, videos and entertainment apps in the different environments of Hungarian and Portuguese archives.
Dorottya Szabó
They also addressed the topic of managing these activities during a pandemic, which greatly affected the event’s schedule and opening of the exhibitions. Thanks to the efforts of the archival staff’s this process was successful and the exhibitions are currently open. Exhibition catalogues and materials are available at this page & check the Exhibition timeline.
The Order of St. John was set up in ca. 1048 to assist pilgrims in the Holy Land. They opened both hostels and hospitals for this purpose and also started protecting these pilgrims hospital gaining a military character.
After settling in Malta, they started building the city of Valletta in 1566; 12 years later they finished the building of the Sacra Infermeria (Sacred Infirmary), a new hospital which was one of the best in Europe at the time.
The Supreme Head of this hospital was the Grand Master himself, one of whose titles was that of ‘Servant of the Sick’. Another high officer was the Grand Hospitaller, the senior among the French Knights who exercised over-all control in hospital matters.
Initially, the Sacred Infirmary was a male institution; female patients were not admitted. This was remedied by Catherina Scappi, a noble lady, who some time before 1625 donated a house in Valletta for the care of sick and destitute women. The Order realized that a hospital for women was an essential service, and the Scappi hospital was developed as a department of the Infirmary.
The nursing of the sick by the Knights of St John at the Sacra Infermeria in Valletta (Malta). An engraving by Philippe Thomassin (1562-1622) in the Statute of the Order of St John, NLM, Statuta Hospitalis Hierusalem, [Rome], 1586).
The Order of Malta was essentially a hospitaller Order. Indeed, the Grand Chapter of the Order, convened by Grand Master Fra’ Hugues Loubenx de Verdalle in 1584 in the new city of Valletta, confirmed the early Statute and made hospitality mandatory to all Knights.
The new statutes include engravings by Philippe Thomassin (1562-1622), illustrating life in the Order; one of them is the nursing of the sick at the Sacra Infermeria by the Knights. (Ref NLM, Statuta Hospitalis Hierusalem, [Rome], 1586).
Written by Leonard Callus, National Archives of Malta
The third of the three transmedia exhibitions included in the European Digital Treasures project, European Discoveries: From the New World to New Technologies, was successfully opened at the General Archive of the Indies (Spain) on the 29th of April.
The exhibition, open to the public until the 29th of July, analyses the scientific and technological discoveries that have been vital engines for the material progress and wealth of Europe, through the documentary treasures kept by the European archives.
This exhibition tries to show that discoveries and inventions lie at the heart of Europe’s cultural heritage. Archives in Europe abound with documents and materials that witness the constant desire to explore and to discover, and these documents tell thousands of different stories. The three pillars of this exhibition –Medicine, Energy/Industry, Transport/Navigation– are an attempt to provide a glimpse of the multifarious variety of stories, events and personalities involved in discoveries of many different types, during the long history of Europe. It is thus an exhibition not only about the discoveries themselves, but also about their archival memory, recording one of Europe’s most distinctive cultural traits.
In addition to the documents, the exhibition is completed with transmedia tools to bring its content closer through experimentation and play.
The opening was chaired by Severiano Hernández Vicente, Head of the Spanish State Archives, by María Oliván, Head of the Transparency, Document Management & Access to Documents Unit of the European Commission, and by Esther Cruces, Director of the General Archives of the Indies.
Enrique Vidal is emeritus professor at the same university and former co-leader of PRHLT research center. For many years Dr. Vidal has focussed his research on handwritten document analysis and recognition leading the development of the probabilistic indexing technology. Joan Andreu and Enrique are founders of tranSkriptorium, an AI spin-off company.
Enrique Vidal.
The contents of a massive volume of digitised handwritten records in archives and libraries all over the world are practically inaccessible, buried beneath thousands of terabytes of high-resolution images. The image textual content could be straightforwardly indexed for plain-text textual access using conventional information retrieval systems if perfect or sufficiently accurate text image transcripts were available.
However, fully automatic transcription results generally lack the level of accuracy that is required for reliable text indexing and search purposes. On the other hand, the massive volume of image collections typically considered for indexing render manual or even computer-assisted transcription as entirely prohibitive. Dr. Sanchez and Dr. Vidal explain how very accurate indexing and search can be directly implemented on the images themselves, without explicitly resorting to image transcripts; they present the results obtained using the proposed techniques on several relevant historical data sets. The results have led to a high interest in these technologies.
You can watch the session on YouTube here and the paper presented at the workshop here: Part I & Part II.
Written by Leonard Callus and the European Digital Treasures Team.
After two years of online conventions and zoom conferences, we are happy to announce that the upcoming ICARUS Convention #28 will be held in person in Paris from 23rd to 25th of May, 2022 as a hybrid event!
Within the programme of the convention, the European Digital Treasures project will hold their workshop “New Business & Conceptual models” led by Yvan Corbat!
One of the key objectives of the Digital Treasures project is to generate a greater added value, profitability, visibility and economic return of European archives, through the identification and implementation of new business models and activities.
The workshop will include practical examples of new activities being implemented by some partners of this project:
The second speech was held by Artem Reshetnikov who is a deep learning researcher at Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Working in several companies and research centers, he received big experience in Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing and applying it to the tasks of different domains. For a long time, he was thinking about how to combine his two main passions: machine learning and art. The solution is the project where he works now: Saint George on a Bike is a project about the enrichment of metadata of paintings using Deep Learning and NLP approaches.
Abstract.“Saint George on a Bike” project proposes several novel approaches to enrichment of metadata (captions, tags, relationships between objects, iconographic description) for the Cultural Heritage domain, which relies on combining Deep Learning and semantic metadata about paintings. Working with cultural heritage presents challenges not existent for every-day images. Models for objects detection or caption generation are usually trained with datasets that contain correct descriptions of current images or labels for objects, which were generated manually. Apart from this conceptual problem, the paintings are limited in number and represent the same concept in potentially very different styles. Finally, the metadata associated with the images is often poor or inexistent, which makes it hard to properly generate quality metadata. Our approach can assist in generation of metadata for different tasks. By taking into account an exiting metadata of Cultural heritage objects and additional techniques, we can generate tags, relationships between objects or descriptive text which is likely to be directly related to the scene depicted in an image.
You can watch the whole session on YouTube here and read the manuscript paper here!
Written by Artem Reshetnikov & the European Digital Treasures Team.
Following the example of its Spanish, Portuguese and Norwegian partners, the National Archives of Hungary opened its first transmedia exhibition at the Várkert Bazár in Budapest. The first of the three exhibitions planned as part of the European Digital Treasures international project, European Discoveries: from the New World to New Technologies, opened in the Hungarian capital. Following a special private opening on 21st of January 2022, the exhibition was opened to the public the following day, 22nd of January 2022.
This day has a special significance in the cultural life of Hungary, as it is the day when Hungarians celebrate the Day of Hungarian Culture, in memory of the day Ferenc Kölcsey revised his manuscript of the Hungarian National Anthem in 1823. However, on this day of remembrance, the National Archives of Hungary wanted to commemorate not only Hungarian cultural values, but also the common European values, historical and ideological experiences that link Hungary with other European countries.
European Discoveries: from the New World to New Technologies is a digital exhibition dedicated to the latter, which presents European discoveries in three pillars, covering medical science, industrial achievements and transport and traffic, preserved in the archives of Malta, Montenegro, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Serbia and Hungary, through documents of historical value.
In addition to the printed panels, the 43 manuscripts and records presented in the exhibition can also be seen in a digital catalogue, according to the unified project concept. The National Archives of Hungary presents some original archival material on the exhibition site as well. Visitors of the exhibition space can also see some designer products inspired by the documents – with a separate description of the source of inspiration – and play an RPG game and quiz based on the documents presented in the project, in the dedicated game space.
The European Discoveries exhibition at the Castle Garden is attracting a lot of interest. In addition to the digital descriptions, visitors can browse through the exhibition with a handy English and Hungarian catalogue to learn more about the documents on display.
The multilingual nature of the exhibition helps our visitors from abroad to learn more about the European archival material. Our exhibition venue is one of the best exhibition spaces of the Castle Garden. The highly equipped hall and its digital facilities provide a suitable place for all visitors to access and explore digital content.
The first exhibitions actuality – European Discoveries – is attracting many group visits; we are getting high engagement in the requests from schools, universities and other institutions.
Our professional Public Education team offers guided tours at the exhibition site as well, for registration please contact: kozmuvelodes@mnl.gov.hu
The exhibition is open until the end of April 2022, at the beautiful site at the foot of Buda Castle.
Love songs by King D. Dinis (fragments). Torre do Tombo Archive.
The document, also known as “The Sharrer Parchment”, discovered in 1990 at the Torre do Tombo Archive, includes musical notation, found for the first time in love songs, and is the oldest known register of Portuguese secular music.
The love songs take us back to a cultural tradition of the European medieval courts, where courtly love was favored, that is an amorous compliment aside from patrimonial, family, and political pressures that were inevitably present in marriage alliances.
King D. Dinis was a prolific and well-known author of troubadouresque poetry of Iberian tradition: 137 poems were identified, 75 love songs, 11 satirical songs and 51 amigo songs. This king developed his musical and poetic genius in the context of the confluence of European cultivated courts to which he was linked by family and cultural bonds: his father, King Afonso III, spent his youth in the court of the king of France (Louis VIII), and married the Countess Mathilde de Boulogne, knowing the cultural atmosphere of the French court.
One of the educators he chose for his son Dinis was Americ d’Ébrard, of Aquitaine, who introduced him to the culture from beyond the Pyrenees and to the troubadouresque schools. On his mother’s side, he was the grandson of Alfonso X, the Wise, King of Castilla and Leon, the author of a vast poetic work, including the well-known “Cantigas de Santa Maria”. Later, D. Dinis married Isabel of Aragon, from a court that cultivated poetry. There was great proximity between Aragon and the South of France and their troubadouresque courts.
The troubadour poetry of courtly love emerged in the Iberian Peninsula, influenced also by the pilgrimage routes of the Way of St. James, under a strong Provencal influence, considering minstrels and troubadours constituted an international and migratory brotherhood, traveling from one court to another in the Peninsula.
If the amigo songs, where the troubadour embodies a female voice, are part of an Iberian tradition of popular origin, the love and satirical songs belong to a troubadouresque tradition of European courts and feudal lords, of Provencal origin, between the 12th and 14th centuries.
In love songs, the troubadour, a noble man and author of the melody and the lyrics, expresses his passion for “his lady”, a woman of unique beauty and virtue that, according to the canons of this ritualized love, isn’t identified. Only the submission of the troubadour is exposed, who expects a reward, that could be a present, a look or something significantly more physical, being the service and the suffering of the lover the biggest proof of his love. This “service” of loyalty and love for the lady mirrors, in the romantic relationship, the dependence relations that united vassal and lord in the feudal system.
What is the human reality hidden behind these rituals and conventions? What is the point of all these secrets and precautions? In most love songs the “servant” expects to receive a favor of the lady, but keeps the favor a secret. For the Portuguese Culture historian António José Saraiva, we have to consider that these protagonists are frequently feudal lords, kings and sons of kings, the songs’ theme is clandestine love, outside of marriage, so the secrecy is a precaution, not literary fiction. Clandestine love and adultery are a recurrent theme of medieval love literature and of the great romantic couples that the Middle Ages have left us: Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere, …
Click here to listen to one of the 7 love songs: A tal estado me adusse, senhor. In this song, the troubadour tells his lady about the state her beauty and qualities have left him in: nothing gives or will give him pleasure, until he sees her again.
Written by Maria Trindade Serralheiro (text) and Ana Isabel Fernandes (trad.) Senior Technicians, General Directorate of Books, Archives and Libraries, Portugal.
The European Digital Treasures team wants to present the various presentations held within the workshop “New Digital Exponential Technologies Towards The Generation Of Business Models” on 2nd and 3rd of September, 2021 at the Provincial Historical Archive of Alicante (Spain). For this reason, we will post about each of the presentations within the upcoming weeks – stay tuned!
Kerstin Arnold.
The first speech was held by Kerstin Arnold who has been working in the archives domain for more than 15 years! Having been part of various projects creating and establishing Archives Portal Europe, Kerstin is now the initiative’s acting COO in the role of the APEF Manager. She holds a Master degree each in Communication Science and in Library and Information Management and also is a member of the Technical Subcommittee on Encoded Archival Standards (TS-EAS) at the Society of American Archivists.
Abstract. Archives Portal Europe is a comprehensive and open resource on archives from and about Europe, that currently holds archival descriptions from more than 30 countries and in more than 20 languages. Following traditional approaches of archival description, the portal allows users to access the documents via the contextual entities of the records creators and the holding repositories, next to a general keyword search. To evaluate options for subject- or topic-based access points, Archives Portal Europe is working on an automated cross-lingual topic detection tool that aims at enabling users to identify relevant documents related to a topic well beyond the narrowness of direct keyword matching. Synergising different approaches for concept-based and entity-based topics, the tool then also is meant to allow for active topic tagging in order to improve coverage of topic-based relations between the heterogeneous and multilingual documents present in Archives Portal Europe. Building on the current status quo in the portal, this paper presents the tool’s set-up, initial results from the proof-of-concept phase, and next steps envisaged during alpha and beta development of the tool, which will be made available as Open Source to also be of benefit for other, similar initiatives in the cultural heritage sector.
You can watch the whole session on YouTube here and read the manuscript paper here!
Written by Kerstin Arnold & the European Digital Treasures Team.
