Europeana Digital Spring Programme Ignite talks

Carola Carlino - Murals inside

Vania Ramírez Islas - Mexican codices. From traditional to digital knowledge

About

This session explores how cultural transformation can support digital transformation, the potential of centralising existing online collections and how digital storytelling can enhance learning of our cultural history and societal development. 

Speakers

• Lana Pajdas presents 'Slow travel for a better understanding of heritage'. The most important thing about culture and heritage travel is to understand the places you visit and to be able to discuss them. Many heritage sites have difficult stories and travel is often too fast to allow a full discovery. The talk will explore how some concepts of slow travel that could be budget-savy and at the same time meaningful.
• Carola Carlino presents 'Murals inside'. The talk will reflect on the importance of visual storytelling as street art production. Often considered negatively as an act of vandalism, street art is, instead, the creative expression of a form of art that decorates public urban spaces, sometimes very large ones, making itself usable by anyone at any time. Connoted by an essential freedom of creation, street art can be realised through various techniques. The talk will particularly investigate the mural technique, which since the origin of humanity, in the form of cave painting and then of fresco in wall painting, is still adopted today by wall writers to express political dissent, to support social or political issues, or to communicate with a non-verbal language their position about common interest events. It will explore a proposal to create a large virtual archive to collect murals widespread all over the world, through a digital platform meant as a creative commons resource, where users can independently upload photos of murals already known to them, or seen during their travels. The project also looks at collecting some of the biggest murals and projecting them inside museum rooms – possibly respecting their original dimensions -  or destined for exhibitions in disused spaces that will be re-functionalized, as old railway stations, warehouses, factories. The final goal is to offer the visitor a complete and immersive experience, because through the use of 3D viewers, he will be given the opportunity to enter the murals, precisely. Furthermore, the 3D viewers will allow the users to observe the murals according to the real light condition coming from the external environment: this will be possible thanks to the use of special filters or through the time-lapse technology.
• Georgia Manolopoulou presents 'Shaping the Global Citizen'. The talk will focus on the dynamic dimension of an essential cultural and social intelligence which defines our daily behavior as citizens of the world. Culture, our cultural heritage, tangible and intangible, together with contemporary art, has a distinct role, providing us with human values, solidarity, social justice and world peace. It is the so called 'healthy cell' for strong 'immune' societies. It provides not only the models of sustainable development, management and social integration, but also offers a new interpretation of the world involving elements of social and emotional intelligence, centered on life skills.
• Vania Ramírez Islas presents 'Mexican codices. From traditional to digital knowledge'. The talk will focus on how the traditional knowledge from the Mexican indigenous communities has been empowered by technology. Through the case study of the Codices of México project, Otomi indigenous people have recovered the endangered processes about amate papermaking, which is one of the oldest traditional knowledge (more than 1000 years) widely rooted in pre-Columbian Mexican cultures. The amate paper has been the canvas of the oldest documents of America. Since 2015, in collaboration with the National Library of Anthropology and History, close and particular cooperation began to renew Mesoamerican codices' publishing on amate paper and through digital versions to promote the documentation of traditional knowledge.

Resources 

• Find out more about our Digital Spring Programme.
• Join the Europeana Network Association to receive news about the digital transformation of the cultural heritage sector, network with peers and hear about relevant events, resources and opportunities.