Rickard Bucksch, EC DG Research & Innovation
Xavier Rodier, ECHOES Scientific Coordinator
The ECHOES public launch event on Monday the 9th September was a great success with over 300 people attending both in person at the Castle of Chambord, Loir-et-Cher, France and online (via Zoom).
The event kicked off with an introduction by Rickard Bucksch of the European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, and the context of ECHOES for the European Content Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH). He was followed by Xavier Rodier, the Project Scientific coordinator from CNRS who provided an overview of the ECHOES project.
The focus then moved to each of the four “pillar” Co-ordinators who explained the objectives and roles of their specific focus with ECHOES:
- Community Pillar: Isabelle Pallot-Frossard, President, FSP
- Knowledge Pillar: Dimitris Kotzinos, CY Cergy Paris University, ETIS Lab
- Innovation Pillar: Marco Calieri, CNR-ISTI
- Sustainability Pillar: Vania Virgili, Director of Technological Research, CNR
Sally Chambers, DARIAH, ECHOES Launch Key Note Speaker
The highlight of the session were the two keynote speakers who both described the exciting initiatives they are involved in, the results of which will be made available through ECHOES.
Sally Chambers Director, DARIAH-EU spoke about “Interconnecting knowledge: cultural heritage data from a Digital Humanities perspective” with the focus on libraries and turning collections into data, pointing out that collections covered many different types of media as well as subject matter. One of the projects she mentioned was the digitisation of Belgian newspapers by the Royal Library and a post-graduate project which had extracted all the news items on the general strikes which occurred in Ghent between 1909 and 1913. This new research has generated new data which along with the digitised newspapers can be made accessible to researchers in the ECCCH.
The second keynote speaker was Livio De Luca, Researcher, CNRS and his presentation was the “Project ‘Notre-Dame Numérique’: “Notre-Dame de Paris: a cathedral of digital data and multidisciplinary knowledge for heritage science”. The nDame project is a consortium of French Institutions who are involved in the research and reconstruction of the cathedral. A knowledgebase has been constructed which contains thousands of (digitised) documents, photographs, plans and surveys, 3D models, etc. which all relate to the building and its features both before and after the fire. Every feature or part of the building has a geo-location as well as a temporal aspect. The project will continue for another 3 years and all the information within the knowledge base will also be available in the ECCCH.
The Public Event was followed by the Official Event where each of the following speakers gave short presentations on the ECHOES project:
- Pierre DUBREUIL General Director, Domaine National de Chambord
- Rickard BUCKSCH European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation
- Lionel MAUREL CNRS Sciences Humaines & sociales
- Arnaud GIACOMETTI President of University of Tours
- François BONNEAU President of the Regional Council Centre Val-de Loire
- Pascal LIEVAUX Directorate-General for Heritage and Architecture, French Ministry of Culture. Chair of the JPI Cultural Heritage
- Johanna ETNER Head of Human and Social Sciences Sector, French Ministry of higher education and scientific research
From the feedback, it can be concluded that there will a high level of interest in the first round of grants to be announced in December which focuses on data and has funding of € 60,000 per project for 12 projects in total.
