Cultura y ocio

Until relatively recently, talking about art and data in the same conversation might seem strange. However, recent advances in data science and artificial intelligence seem to open the door to a new discipline in which science, art and technology go hand in hand.

The cover image has been extracted from the blog https://www.r-graph-gallery.com and was originally created by Marcus Volz on his website.

The image above could be an abstract painting created by some modern art author and exhibited at the MoMA in New York. However, it is an image created with some R-code lines that use complex mathematical expressions. Despite the spectacularity of the resulting figure, the beautiful shape of the strokes does not represent a real form. But the ability to create art with data is not limited to generating abstract forms. The possibilities of creating art with code go much further. Here you are two examples:

Real art and representation of plants

With less than 100 lines of R code we can create this plant and infinite variations in terms of branches, symmetry and complexity. Without being an expert in plants and algae, I am sure that I have seen plants and algae similar to this in many occasions. With these representations, we just try to reproduce what nature creates naturally, taking into account physics and mathematics laws. The figures shown below have been created using the R code originally extracted from Antonio Sánchez Chinchón blog.

Variations of plants artificially created by R code and fractal expressions.

As an example, these are the data that make up some of the figures discussed above:

Photography and art with data

But it is not just possible to construct abstract figures or representations that imitate the forms of plants. With the help of data tools and artificial intelligence we can imitate, and even create new works. In the following example, we obtain simplified versions of photographs, using subsets of pixels from the original photograph. Let's see this example in detail.

We take a photograph of a bank of open images, in this case Wikimedia Commons website, such as the following:

By Finetooth - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11692574

Next, we execute a relatively simple algorithm that generates polygonal shapes around the main pixels of the original image. In addition to a simple images treatment to turn this photograph into a flat black and white image, this algorithm applies a mathematical method called Voronoid diagram. When the subset of data (on which we apply the Voronoid diagram) is small, the result of the treatment is poor and we can barely distinguish the underlying form of the figure.

However, as we increase the subset of points to reproduce the initial photograph, we begin to find fascinating results. Finally, with less than 20% of all the points that make up the original image, we obtain a really beautiful and artistic result. This experiment is based on the original post by Antonio Sánchez Chinchón on his blog Fronkostin.

The ability to generate art with the powerful combination of mathematics and programming codes is absolutely powerful. In the following link it is possible to appreciate some of the most impressive works that exist in this art form. The author of this blog is Marcus Volz, researcher at the University of Melbourne. Marcus works with R to generate the figures in two dimensions and with Houdini for 3D and animation.

Content prepared by Alejandro Alija, expert in Digital Transformation and innovation.

Contents and points of view expressed in this publication are the exclusive responsibility of its author.

They use data to make current visualizations (graphs and maps). These graphics are subsequently published on different websites, mainly digital media.

The presentation of the BNEscolar project took place on July 2. The event was attended by the Secretary of State for Education, Alejandro Tiana, the General Director of the National Library of Spain (BNE), Ana Santos, and the General Director of Red.es, David Cierco.

BNEscolar is a portal aimed at the educational community where you can find digital content created using the documentary collection of the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica. The project, developed by the BNE and Red.es, is framed in BNElab, a space that concentrate BNE's new digital strategy. This portal and all its resources aim to promote access and reuse of the library's digital resources, showing the Spanish-speaking educational community formulas and methodologies that allow creating new content for its teaching application.

Specifically, BNEscolar is aimed at teachers and pre-university students, with special focus on the last levels of Primary and Secondary Education. All of them will have at their disposal various contents and functionalities:

• Search engine. After a detailed analysis, the BNE has selected those contents of the Hispanic Digital Library that have a high potential to be used as learning resources, in accordance with the educational programs of the formal education. These contents have been enriched with metadata that facilitate their search. Through a search engine, users can filter the contents according to different parameters, such as the educational level or the subject they are most appropriate for. Other filters that are included are authors, languages or types of resources (texts, illustrations, audios, etc.).
• Didactic sequences. Teachers and students have at their disposal didactic sequences with different activities and challenges to resolve using BNE resources. All the contents are accompanied by methodological guides for its use in the classroom. The objective is to promote project-based learning, and the active and collaborative participation of students. For example, one of the didactic sequences is a role-playing game for a better knowledge of the Semana Trágica: Students will have to put themselves in the shoes of the people involved and recreate the events that took place in real time using Twitter or Instagram.
• Interactive challenges. One aspect that has been taken into account from the origin of the project is the incorporation of playful elements that invite to work with the BNE resources. Two applications have been created based on the reuse of its contents: a digital escape game, located at the San Petesburg Arts Academy, and a geolocalized question-answer game.
• Workshops and videos. Through different workshops, students will be able to deepen in a selection of contents in a practical way, using digital tools. In addition, a series of short videos have been included to review the contents in a fun and entertaining way.
• My BN Escolar. BNEscolar also includes a personal section for teachers where they can organize their resources and create collections. The BNE invites teachers to reuse the materials of the Library to develop their own contents or dynamic sequences

The portal has been valued, in a first pilot phase, by a set of educational centers. This collaboration has allowed to validate the contents so that they respond to the technical and curricular needs of the students and teachers. Now a second phase begins, in which a broad dissemination is planned through social networks in order to reach the entire educational community. The expansion of the BNEscolar contents is also underway. Developing BNEscolar has taken months of work. BNEscolar expands, develops and improves an initial proposal.

BNEscolar joins the list of projects developed by the BNE in favor of opening and reusing our cultural heritage, such as comunidad.bne.es or ChefBNE. On this occasion, the focus is on  education and the informational competence of teachers and students, a key aspect to be critical, creative and autonomous citizens in the digital society.

After months of work, the second edition of the Barcelona Dades Obertes Challenge has come to end. Leading by the City Council of Barcelona and with the collaboration of the Consorci d'Educació de Barcelona and CESIRE, the project seeks to promote the knowledge and use of open data in schools in the city.

The final act took place on May 8 at the Fábrica de Creació de Fabra i Coats. In front of more than 300 attendees, Laia Servera, journalist and director of InfoK - the news program of Super3, the children's channel of Catalonian Television - acted as master of ceremonies. The event was also attended by Màrius Boada i Pla, Director of the Municipal Office of Dades, responsible for opening and closing the session, and national and international experts through video-conference: Martin Alvarez Espinar, director in Spain of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Antje Kirchner, Survey Methodologist and head of the BigSurv18 congress, Esther Huyer, representative of the European Data Portal, and Taisuke Matsuzaki, representative of the Kobe City Council who commented on the experience of the World Data Viz Challenge 2018 Barcelona-Kobe .

During the event, the students of the 8 finalist centres had the opportunity to present and defend their work. After the jury deliberation, the prizes were awarded as follows:

• The first prize went to the Institut Vila de Gràcia in Barcelona, ​​with the project "La gentrificació als barris a Barcelona" (Gentrification in Barcelona neighbourhoods). The objective of the project was to show the process of urban transformation caused by strategic speculative actions that cause the displacement of the original population from one neighbourhood to another. To do this, the students developed a gentrification index, using datasets such as Number of inhabitants that leave their neighbourhoods, Purchase in relation to total housing or Rent variation in € / m2.

• The second prize went to the Institut Lluïsa Cura with "Evolució del comerç als barris de Barcelona" (Commerce evolution in Barcelona neighbourhoods). With this projects, the students wanted to confirm that traditional commerce was losing market share due to international brand stores and new forms of small convenience stores. For this, they used data related to the surface of the cadastral premises in Barcelona city.

• The third prize went to the Institut Joan Brossa and his "On locate the meva botiga to Barcelona?" (Where to locate my store in Barcelona?). The analysis was based on the comparison of the Commercial Endowment Index and the Commercial Attraction Index.

Highlight the great effort that teachers and students have made one more year to create very interesting projects. You can learn more about the winning projects and the rest of the finalist projects here.

Congratulations to the winners and all the participants! Now we only have to wait for the third edition 2020, which will surely be also a success.

A couple of weeks ago, the Spanish National Library (BNE) presented its collaborative work platform, comunidad.bne.es, developed together with Red.es, in an event that brought together dozens of collaborators interested in our cultural heritage.

Since then, almost 200 people have participated in the proposed projects, with 2,000 completed tasks, which shows the success of the initiative. However, they are still looking for collaborators who want to help enrich the Library data, making them more accessible and easy to reuse.

Any citizen can collaborate, either anonymously or by registering on the platform, which allows participating in the rankings and statistics of the portal.

The projects open to citizen participation are structured around 5 areas: identification and transcription, georeferencing, audio transcription, marking and labeling, and data enrichment. As an example and starting point, 7 projects have been proposed to show the available functionalities, using different types of collections:

• Jean Laurent was here - and that is how he saw us -. The collaborators will help to place on the current map the places that appear in the images of Jean Laurent. French by birth, Jean Laurent, lived a great part of his life in our country and immortalized with his camera some of the most convulsive moments of our history: the reign of Isabel II, the democratic Sexenio with the reign of Amadeo de Saboya, the I Spanish Republic and the Bourbon Restoration with the arrival of Alfonso XII.
• Unidentified. The BNE has selected a series of photographs of the Civil War whit unidentified characters. Knowing who these, often anonymous, people were would be practically impossible without citizens help, who can recognize a relative or acquaintance in the images. The BNE gives the opportunity to name these characters and tell their story.
• What does it sound like? The objective of this project is to obtain as much information as possible about musical groups from the BNE catalog. To do this, people who want to collaborate must answer a series of questions about the different bands, such as what the group musical genre is, where they come from or if the group is still active.
• Candilejas. This project seeks to identify actors, actresses and people from the theater (pointers, orchestra and stage directors, musicians...) through a series of nineteenth-century theater posters. The collaborators will help transcribing the names that appear in the images, relating them with certain companies and represented works, which will allow us to get an idea of ​​the Spanish theater panorama of two centuries ago.
• A dictionary, a Swedish diplomat and ninetheenth-century Spain. In the 19th century Gustaf Daniel Lorich, a Swedish diplomat expert in numismatics who lived in Spain, wrote a dictionary called Graphic description of ancient Spain and its correspondence with modern Spain. This manuscript document, whitout known printed version, collects place names and descriptions of the locations that hevisited or studied during his work. The BNE looks for collaborators that help transcribe it to know its correspondence with our current environment.
• Who is who? This project consists of transcribing information about the members of the 1869Constituent Assembly, portrayed in one of the library albums. Collaborators can see various portraits and indicate the character name, position and location.
• To my distinguished friend. Many of the collections guarded by the BNE have handwritten dedications between their pages and images, documents of great value that need to be transcribed to facilitate their conservation and identification.

In addition, the BNE developed a sample project to illustrate the result of this kind of projects: Clifford´s Madrid, where is identified the different places of Madrid that appeared in a series of images taken by Charles Clifford, contemporary of Jean Laurent. The result of the project was the generation of new data (in JSON, CSV and XMLformat), a visualization and a timeline.

These projects are just a sample of the potential of citizen collaboration. During the next weeks and months, the BNE will suggest new proposals for collaborative enrichment and increase the platform's functionalities. In addition, any citizen could suggest new ideas, just sending an email to bnelab@bne.es.

Citizens possess a great knowledge, result of our learning, but also of our daily experiences, a knowledge that sometimes is not easy to acquire otherwise. Therefore, our collaboration is essential to enrich our cultural heritage, while making it more accessible and reusable.

Smartvel builds b2b content marketing solutions for airlines, hotel chains, travel agencies and tourism entities. They collect, monitor, classify, index, geolocate and translate segmented content from different sources. Then, they integrate this content, easily and quickly, into their client websites, driving user experience

In short, they provide a content solution that lets tourist know what to do in a specific place, mixing the destination's living agenda (events, culture, sports, etc.) with the points of interest (monuments, restaurants, etc.) and the own layers that their customers want to show.

Next October 19th will be the second workshop of “The Culture of Open Data”, which this year has the aim of opening the focus to discover how the re-use of public sector information, in general, and cultural data especially, is helping to transform research, professional development, how we communicate and collaborative creation.

This workshop, one of four pre events in the sector that will be included as part of the Aporta Meeting 2017 this year, will take place at the National Library of Spain (BNE).

The BNE Director, Ana Santos Aramburo, and the Director General of Red.es, José Manuel Leceta, will open the meeting at 9.30. Then, an introductory talk will take place, “What to do, why data?” which will be directed by Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez, partner at Tramontana. Afterwards, there will be the talk “The leading role of Administration” (10:30) by Manuel Ruiz del Corral, representative of MECD. At 10:45, the round table “Data for research” will begin, which will include participation from Pura Fernández, of CSIC, who will show how data is being used in the EDI-RED project and Juan de Dios Llorens, from SESIAD, whose participation is entitled “open data and language technology, an opportunity we cannot miss”. Next, at 12:00, the table “Data for corporate and professional (re)creation” where  Elena González-Blanco, from Indra (Minsait), Paula Carrión, from Kantar Insight Spain and Valentín Fernández, from Telefónica Open Future will participate. The final debate of the workshops will focus on Data for social collaborative (re)creation, from 13:00 onwards, where Daniel Villatoro (Databeers), Juan Quemada (Hackforgood), and Cristina Aranda (MujeresTech) will contribute.

The first conclusions of the workshop, promoted by the National Library of Spain (BNE), Red.es and the Spanish Society for Scientific Documentation and Information (SEDIC), will be presented by Agnés Ponsati Obiols, Director of the Digital Library and Information Systems of the BNE, in the afternoon workshop of the Aporta Meeting 2017, which will take place on October 24th in Madrid.

The workshop “The culture of open data” has its own website where you can find more information, see details on the schedule and access the form to register for the event, for free.

You can follow the event live online at http://www.bne.es/es/ComunidadBNE/Retransmisiones/1019-Jornada-Laculturaylosdatosabiertos, and on social media via the hashtags #culturaenabierto and #BNEAporta.

In June 2013, the European Union published the EU directive 2013/37 amending the scope of the re-use of public sector information including those data belonging to public bodies such as libraries, museums and archives. This legislative change and its implementation meant a great challenge for cultural institutions in Europe: turning all the content into reusable formats and making it available under an open license to be reused.

Apart from the difficulties of transforming a cultural resource as a book, a piece of art or a photograph into data, that information with its metadata must be prepared to be accessible and reusable for third parties. Nevertheless, as claimed by Ana Álvarez Lacambra and César Iglesias Rebollo in their post From the digitalization to open data: the challenge for cultural institutions  the openness of such data offers many advantages: from increasing the visibility of cultural institutions, helping spread their content and materials, supporting their digital transformation, improving  internal management to promoting the cooperation between different bodies.

After all, opening up the cultural content is the next step to the computerized cataloging and digitization that cultural institutions have been carrying out for years to share resources not only internally but with the rest of society as a whole .

In this context, on October 5, on the occasion of the International Open Data Conference, the pre-event Open Data and Culture will take place. The Spanish National Library (BNE) will host this meeting designed to promote the openness of information within the national cultural sector, foster public-private cooperation and create a discussion forum to draw a common policy for cultural institutions in Spain.

Organised by Spanish National Library, the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, Red.es (Spanish Ministry of Industry) together with SEDIC (Spanish Society of Information and Scientific Documentation) this event will show strategic aspects and case studies and its conclusions will be discussed on the session Data + Culture at the International Open Data Conference (IODC 2016).

The event is structured in 4 sections:

1. State-of-art and actual situation in Spain.
2. Cultural Information Reuse strategies at European level
3. Success stories in Europe
4. Success stories in Spain

The event, free of charge, will be broadcasted live. All information, speakers and agenda of the meeting is available in http://datosabiertos.sedic.es/.