The First South-Eastern European Digitization Initiative (SEEDI) Conference

The First South-Eastern European Digitization Initiative (SEEDI) Conference
DIGITAL (re-)DISCOVERY of CULTURE (PHYSICALITY OF SOUL)
- Playing. Digital -
11 - 14 September 2005, Ohrid, Macedonia
http://www.ncd.matf.rs/seedi/events/seediConference.html



GENERAL INTRODUCTION

SEEDI (http://www.ncd.matf.rs/seedi/index.html) is an effort to develop awareness about digitization of cultural and scientific heritage in the South- Eastern European countries and to bring together researchers having similar scientific and practical interest in digitization and to support cooperation between them.

Culture arises pre-eminently out of playing, education and research. By "playing" we mean the way human creativity expresses itself throughout history. Activities such as dancing, singing, "edutainment" (education through entertainment) and scientific research, and the products associated with them constitute the backbone of the cultural and scientific heritage. The World-Wide Web (WWW) brings people together digitally and creates a force for cultural re- vitalization among local and global communities. In addition to "playing digital" through the WWW, the actual presence and practical outcome (the "physicality of soul") is also necessary to breathe life into culture and civilization.

Dancing and singing is a total physicality of soul experience. So is edutainment, which uses the principle that all humans learn by playing and
that learning can be fun and serious at the same time. Writing and creating manuscripts is also a work of soul and belongs to the realm of playing. Thanks to the development of digitization techniques and the availability of high-speed networking services, the creativity of humans embodied in digital cultural and scientific objects can be shared world-wide.

The digitization of cultural and scientific heritage and its transmission to next generations in the form of digitized dance, music, edutainment, and
research materials (e.g., manuscripts) has been of interest to many people with different professional backgrounds. Repositories of digitized resources include not only film, video or audio tapes and notation scores of dance/music performances, educational games, and manuscripts but also photographs, posters (of costume and set designs), press clippings, scrapbooks, 3D artifacts, etc. Dancers, musicians, composers, costume and set designers; computer scientists studying motion capture, analysis, and retrieval of dance
patterns, musical pieces and images; developers of different notation systems, software tools, modelling languages, and instructional programs to digitize 3D and 2D dance/music/edutainment materials and manuscripts for archival purposes; content producers, librarians, archivists, museologists; art researchers, manuscripts scholars, dance/music professors, and scientists in general are among the major stakeholders of these repositories who are concerned with preservation of and perpetual access to digital objects contained therein.


CALL FOR PAPERS

The SEEDI Programme Committee invites above-mentioned stakeholders to submit theoretical and practical papers, workshops, posters, and demonstrations for the First Conference on the Digital re-Discovery of Culture made manifest through Physicality of Soul.

CONFERENCE TOPICS

Suggested Conference topics include, but need not be limited to:

Digital re-Discovery of Dance
- computer graphics -- modelling the movements of dancers;
- dance notation languages (e.g., Labanotation), user interfaces for choreographers, editors, etc. ;
- content-based image retrieval (CBIR);
- digitization of 3D and 2D archival dance materials.

Digital re-Discovery of Music
- audio heritage preservation: folklore, music, and oral history collections;
- digitization of printed musical materials;
- digital musical libraries;
- music information retrieval systems.

Manuscripts
- digitization of manuscripts and presentation of their digital copies;
- usage of complex metadata formats for structuring manuscripts as electronic documents incl. their texts;
- building digital libraries for works with manuscripts;
- creation of virtual research environment for work with manuscripts;
- communication between digital library applications for enhancement of access to manuscript-related information;
- digital added-value to study of manuscripts in virtual environment.

Edutainment (playing digital)
- ludology; playing to learn: games in education and putting play to work in multicultural environments;
- virtual walks (e.g., museums, libraries, archives);
- supportive learning experiences; WWW alternative reality gaming; play & games as cultural narratives/environment.
- play ethics; the rhetorics of play as "the imaginary" and as "adaptive variability", and the more general areas covering all aspects of --- Playing. Digital. ---:
- repositories of digital cultural and scientific heritage objects (libraries, archives, museums, etc.) and their management
- preservation of dance/music heritage
- metadata issues (cataloguing, indexing and classification of dance/music/edutainment/manuscripts objects) and metadata standards
- search and retrieval of digital cultural and scientific heritage objects
- copyright issues
- technical issues, e-publication and new technologies etc.


IMPORTANT DATES:

Submission of papers and posters: April 1st, 2005
Acceptance notification by: June 1st, 2005
Camera ready copy due: July 1st, 2005


PRESENTATIONS AND CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS

There will be invited keynote speakers. The author(s) of accepted contributions will be given 30 minutes for their presentation including a 10-minute Q/A period.

Presented papers, selected after a review by the international editorial board, will be published in the Conference Proceedings as a separate volume of the Review of the National Center for Digitization, Serbia and Montenegro
(http://www.ncd.matf.rs/?page=publications&lang=en).

POSTERS

Those who wish to present the results of a research project or analytical study or to report on the progress of their ongoing work in any of the conference topics will be afforded the opportunity to present and discuss their work with attendees through poster sessions.

Posters selected by the Programme Committee will be displayed in a special area at the Conference and discussed immediately after the respective session.

PAPER AND POSTER PREPARATION AND SUBMISSION

All information about modality of the submission, and about length and format of the papers and posters, will be given in the Submission Guidelines Section in the next announcement.


CONFERENCE LOCATION

Ohrid, Macedonia, is a jewel of the South Eastern "European" region. It is centrally situated with respect to the peoples of the Balkan region concerning history, culture and art and also to the neighbouring peoples in all points of the compass with whom it has been engaged over centuries. Ohrid is a regional multicultural centre, an ideal place in which to (re)start a re-discovery process of the Other. It is therefore a fitting place to launch the first International Conference on the DIGITAL (re-)DISCOVERY of CULTURE (PHYSICALITY OF SOUL).


WHO SHOULD ATTEND?

The Conference will be of particular interest to all those engaged in the Digital Preservation of, Access to and Exploitation of Cultural and
Scientific Heritage:
- Scholars in the arts and humanities, social sciences and history doing research on digital cultural heritage objects;
- Computer scientists and information technology researchers developing such digital projects;
- Archivists, librarians and curators responsible for the preservation of and permanent access to digital cultural and scientific heritage;
- Students and young researchers wishing to share their ideas with distinguished experts and their colleagues; and
- The intellectually curious.


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Programme Chair:

Smile Markovski, smile@ii.edu.mk
Institute of Informatics, Faculty of Sciences, Skopje, Macedonia

Programme Committee Members

De Francesco, Giuliana, giulianadefrancesco@yahoo.it
Minerva project, Ministry for cultural heritage, Roma, Italy

Ikonomov, Nikola, nikonomov@ibl.bas.bg
Institute for Bulgarian Language, Sofia, Bulgaria

Knoll, Adolf, Adolf.Knoll@nkp.cz
Deputy Librarian, National Library, Prague, The Czech Republic

Kostovska, Vesna, istorijanamj@yahoo.com
Institute of History of Macedonian Language, Skopje, Macedonia

Mac An Airchinnigh, Micheal, mmaa@cs.tcd.ie
Department of Computer Science, University of Dublin, Trinity College, Ireland

Mijajlovic, Zarko, zarkom@eunet.rs
Faculty of Mathematics, Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro

Ognjanovic, Zoran, zorano@mi.sanu.ac.rs
Mathematical Institute of Serbian Academy of Science and Arts

Sotirova, Kalina, kalina@cc.bas.bg
Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Sofia, Bulgaria

Tonta, Yasar, tonta@hacettepe.edu.tr
Department of Information Management, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey



For additional information, please contact Programme Chair,

Smile Markovski, smile@ii.edu.mk