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A Jupyter Notebook implementing a simple parser used to transform the Multilingual Data Stewardship terminology and Metadata, created in the Task 3.1 of the SSHOC project, into SKOS resources. The parser transforms the content in SKOS data following a set of mapping rules, the result is stored in two Turtle files.

The EMM Survey Registry is a database of quantitative surveys that have been undertaken with EMM (sub)samples across Europe and beyond since January 2000. Survey-level metadata is available for each of the surveys included in the EMM Survey Registry. The EMM Survey Registry is one of the main outputs generated by COST Action 16111 Ethmigsurveydata jointly with the Sciences Po team of the SSHOC (Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud) project. It is also a result of the collective efforts by the national delegations of the participating countries in the COST Action who have contributed to an initial comprehensive compilation of all the surveys targeting EMM respondents since January 2000 and until 2020 in their respective country. The EMM Survey Registry work has been coordinated by Laura Morales, Mónica Méndez, Anikó Bernat and Johannes Bergh as the leaders of Work Groups (WG) 1 and 2 of the COST Action, and by Ami Saji at Sciences Po as the researcher in the SSHOC project. Nevertheless, numerous researchers in the COST Action and the SSHOC project have contributed at various stages of the process, providing feedback on various iterations of the methodological guidelines and data collection templates as well as offering advice on the technical aspects of implementation, and participating in the quality control process. Unfortunately, they are too numerous to be listed here, but we wish to publicly acknowledge their contributions. The technical design and implementation of the registry was undertaken by Youngminds. The EMM Survey Registry is currently in version 1.0. This means that it is fully functional and displays all the metadata compiled and contributed by the national delegations of Ethmigsurveydata. Access to the dataset here: https://registry.ethmigsurveydatahub.eu/

UNREFERENCED LECTURE TRANSCRIPT; DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION --- One of Dr Ashok Ranade's major contributions to the field of Indian musicology was his seminal book, On Music and Musicians of Hindoostan. While Dr Ranade was a champion of the intellectual depth and virtuosity of the sina-ba-sina mode of transmission of the guru-shishya-parampara, he also made the fundamentally important point that oral and literate traditions in Indian music have not historically been in opposition to each other, nor have they ever been mutually exclusive. As if to prove his point, shortly after the death of the protagonist of one of Dr Ranade’s chapters, the great Hindustani singer Ustad Faiyaz Hussain Khan-sahib, the late Professor R C Mehta received a Persian manuscript that had been in the Ustad's possession. It turned out to be one of several versions of a music treatise written in the first decade of the nineteenth century, in Persian and Brajbhasha, by a hereditary ustad, Khushhal Khan ‘Anup’, whose father Karim Khan had been the special disciple of Firoz Khan Adarang. What role did this manuscript play in Ustad Faiyaz Khan-sahib’s understanding of his tradition of Hindustani music and musicianship? Did reading it inform his performances? COULD he even read it? Didn’t Bhatkhande tell us the Muslim ustads of Hindustani music were illiterate—ignorant of authoritative theoretical writings on music and therefore susceptible to passively transmitting changes to the tradition they were entrusted with embodying? In her wonderful work on The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting, Molly Aitken has daringly slain some of the mythical beasts of the art-historical jungle: notably that Mewar paintings were mechanical and conventional, conservative and passive products of artists who were unconscious of what they were doing. Scholars’ understanding of the nature of tradition and its relationship with innovation in North Indian classical music has customarily been slightly different; it is recognised, for example, that “tradition” can often simply be a rhetorical device used to mask or to justify individual creativity and virtuosity. But when it comes to Hindustani music’s hereditary Muslim masters, or ustads, a very similar legend to the tale about Rajput traditional painters has long been in operation: that the ustads were illiterate; ignorant of authoritative theoretical writings on music and therefore susceptible to passively transmitting incremental changes to the tradition they were entrusted with embodying. In this paper I will demonstrate that far from being illiterate, several hereditary ustads in the families of Tansen and Sadarang right down to the twentieth century were literate in the written discourses of Indian music and highly conscious of the need to assert their authority over their traditions through writing. Even those family members who were not formally literate were steeped in literacy and deeply familiar with the written as well as embodied knowledges of their families. The literate ustad changes the way we understand the battle for Hindustani music’s modern soul in the early twentieth century. Spoken Lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYxTjOZNYpY

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The MekaZine presents the work of a group of students from the Pwani University in Kilifi, Kenya accomplished during the 2nd DUOS Festival "Women Power" (August-September 2021) dedicated to Mekatilili wa Menza, Kenyan freedom fighter and heroine. The publication was created within the TPAAE project focused on the research in transcultural perspectives on art and art education on the basis of theoretical and practical dialogue, recognizing mutual artistic and cultural influences between Europe and East Africa since times of Great Avant-garde until contemporary globalization; at the same time valuing cultural heritage and opening it for modern transformations for the sake of community and social development.

This paper investigates the recent advances in parsing the Index Thomisticus Treebank, which encompasses Medieval Latin texts by Thomas Aquinas. The research focuses on two types of variables. On the one hand, it examines the impact that a larger dataset has on the results of parsing; on the other hand, performances of new parsers are analysed with respect to less recent tools. Term of comparison to determine the effective parsing advances are the results in parsing the Index Thomisticus Treebank described in a previous work. First, the best performing parser among those concerned in that study is tested on a larger dataset than the one originally used. Then, some parser combinations that were developed in the same study are evaluated as well, assessing that more training data result in more accurate performances. Finally, to examine the impact that newly available tools have on parsing results, we train, test, and evaluate two neural parsers chosen among those best performing in the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task. Our experiments reach the highest accuracy rates achieved so far in automatic syntactic parsing of the Index Thomisticus Treebank and of Latin overall.

The Cultural Heritage plays an important role in defining the identity of Europe as compared to the rest of the World, influencing the feeling of attractiveness for its citizens as a place of work, living and visiting. It increases also the feeling of togetherness among European citizens. Therefore, the need for protecting and preserving European Cultural Heritage is of extreme importance for combined European cultural wealth. The European cultural heritage is enormous, with a vast and rich variety of cultural items, ranging from buildings to museum artefacts. These items consist of materials of diverse types, the condition of which deteriorates with time, mainly due to environmental conditions and human actions. This strengthens the need for the effective documentation of the cultural items, so that information about them is easily accessible to researchers and the public. The preservation of objects against the effects of time to be passed unaltered to next generations, are also matters of uttermost importance and have attracted significant focus. Factors responsible for the deterioration of the state of cultural items, in case of indoor environments, include but are not limited to, humidity, temperature, exposure to light, as well as the effects of human activities, such as the transportation of the items. These factors are eliminated by keeping the cultural items in specifically designed facilities, such as museums and galleries, where environmental conditions are controlled by following specifications established after extensive research. However, there is a lack of research concerning the effect of the environment and the means to eliminate it, in cases of uncontrolled indoor environments. Such cases include objects and artworks hosted in historical buildings and monuments of public access, where people activities are not restricted, as in museums. The increased human activity, in combination with the uncontrolled environmental conditions of such facilities affects the objects of interest in a significantly higher degree, than the controlled environment of a museum. In this respect, several monitoring and simulation technologies can be effectively used in order to assist in the documentation of cultural objects, as well as the evaluation of the effects of the environment on them and the development of procedures to handle those effects, to achieve preventive conservation. This article presents an ongoing work in the research project s ARCH, funded by the European Commission under Horizon 2020 program. It concerns means of better preservation of areas of cultural heritage from hazards and risks resulting from Climate Change. It develops tools that will help modern cities to preserve and protect their cultural heritage and historical areas from multiple negative effects of Climate Change. Tools and methodologies are designed for local authorities and practitioners, urban population, as well as national and international expert communities, aiding authorities in knowledge-aware decision making. We will focus attention in our presentation on a variety of sensors and sensing technologies for offering necessary data and beneficial information for being able to produce knowledge-aware decision support tools. Presented approaches range from satellite observations from Copernicus and respective climate and atmospheric monitoring services, through high/low altitude aerial observations to in-situ and mobile sensing at (near) ground levels using novel sensing technologies, some of which have been developed in collaboration with industry leaders such as Analog Devices (Ireland) or Turta (Turkey). Subsequently, application of acquired sensor data in a variety of tools built by other project partners shall be also presented.

Stained-glass windows play an important role in cultural heritage. Human and environmental factors have subjected these pieces to risks of damage. Mechanical and chemical-based cleaning methods have been used for their restoration and conservation. Additionally, short-pulse lasers have opened new opportunities for safe and controlled cleaning and restoration of these important materials. In this work, ultra-short pulsed lasers were used to clean an artificially applied coating from the surface of a contemporary colorless glass frequently used in the restoration of stained-glass windows. One of the objectives was to explore the applicability of using these types of lasers to safely clean historical stained-glass windows. It was observed that temperature rise and subsequent heat accumulation in the coating layer being removed was sufficient to generate significant thermal stresses on the underlying glass surface leading to damages even when the laser energies are lower than the damage thresholds. Some laser treatments that limit this heat accumulation were designed in this study. For laser systems operating at frequencies in the range of several hundreds of kHz, the option was to work in burst mode, limiting the number of pulses in each burst and selecting an adequate time lapse between two consecutive burst runs. A method to uniformly clean a given surface is proposed in this work. When lower frequencies are available, treatments using frequencies lower than 20 kHz are enough to safely clean the glass. When UV laser radiation is used, optical damage is also an important aspect to be considered. In this case, the cleaning protocol has to deal with both issues, to avoid heat accumulation and chemical damage.

This paper was published on the MSCA research website dhinfra.org on 17.10.2021. In this essay, I outline my ongoing ethnographic research at King’s Digital Lab and study of documents produced by the lab. Based on the analysis of 40 ‘Feasibility documents’, I aimed to understand how they inform the lab management work and how they contribute to structuring the digital research process. To this end, I apply the method of the ‘STS of documents’ and analyse Feasibility documents in a manner similar to STS-based studies of scientific labs’ protocols and kits. The outcome of this analysis has been published in the "Convergence" 29(3), 2022 (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565221111073). In that article, I showed that documents could be studied as ethnographic objects that can help to reveal critical and socio-technical practices entangled with operational methods and local requirements. In this blog post, in turn, I reflect on the lab management and workflow by referring to a research project conducted in collaboration with King’s Digital Lab. The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 891155. The article reflects only the author’s view, and that the Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

gCube CMS Suite is a distributed full stack application for publication management of complex space-temporal documents called Projects in a gCube based infrastructure (see wiki). The gCube CMS Suite is a gCube Application designed to manage the publication lifecycle of complex space-temporal documents called Projects, supporting their materialisation and Indexing in different platforms (Databases, Catalogues, OGC Services) while maximising reusability. It can manage the entire lifecycle of Projects, from their creation to access including : The application’s main features are Documents Publication Management: CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations, publication lifecycle, UCD - based validation; Role-based access to resources and metadata sections; Cooperative and extensible workflows; Automatic Indexing & aggregation based on UCD annotations: GIS indexes (both centroids & multi-polygon), with dynamic aggregation based on zoom level; Text indexes; Extensible Document model: Generic meta-model; Custom extensions of the model; Extensible behaviour Core engine based on a meta-model; Publication management implemented by an extendable set of document Handlers; Workflow configured in UCD by declaring LifeCycle Managers and involved Handlers. Consumption of documents configured in UCD Configurable exploitation of gCube facilities via dedicated Handlers (e.g. SDI Materialisation and Indexing)