16 articles
Just sharing this MIT Technology Review article on digital archives, a cause that's close to our hearts: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/19/1096284/data-archives-archeologists-tiktok-future-wayback-machine/?src=longreads It is always a good occasion to mention: donate to the Internet Archive, it is such an important resource, and it's constantly under attack. Donating to them was the first thing I did when I got my […]
Read the latest developments on the rules regarding Open Access and cultural heritage in the Italian legislative system: https://www.wikimedia.it/news/il-cammino-verso-lopen-access-in-italia/ Our own position is that eventually openness will win out, simply because the state is trying to charge for something that people are not willing to pay for, and the state has very little enforcement power […]
People expected big changes after the release of the Apple Vision Pro, and some are visibly disappointed. Apple tends to have a big effect on the mainstream, lots of people seem to think that they invented the smartphone, when the iPhone came out I was using my third smartphone. XR technology has been commercially available […]
Last year a mandatory fee regime was introduced for images of publicly-owned cultural heritage artifacts. This is morally wrong, but it is also impractical. A new regulation came out in March modifying the rules and introducing exemptions. Wikimedia Italia wrote about it on their Arkivia blog. Academic works and news are now exempted from the […]
Music generation There are several use-cases for algorithmically generating music, and indeed there is a long history of both hardware and software in this field. Back in the 80s there was even a significant professional backlash against MIDI and drum machines. For example, it would be quite handy to generate anechoic sounds for acoustics listening […]
We're working on the immersive component of the BCC Innovation Festival: a startup event that we won back in 2022. There are still around two weeks to participate, and we're aggregating a little bit of media coverage. Mostly it's because we like seeing our own work (the 3D model of the low-poly Rodin statue) featured […]
I've learned about this amazing exhibit about reversos at the Prado: https://hyperallergic.com/869083/prado-show-reveals-the-hidden-artworks-on-the-backs-of-masterpieces/ It is truly exhibit design at its best, but it gave me the idea of digitizing not only the back of paintings, but the very structure. I'd like to build an exhibit in which we show how the painting is made, how it […]
The Apple Vision Pro launch seems to have brought a lot of of interest, which is to be expected when Apple does, well, anything. They even came up with their own marketing-infused grammar, they want people to say Apple Vision Pro, never the Apple Vision Pro. Some of the discourse has veered into worries about […]
The Apple Vision Pro orders just opened (US only), and they also uploaded a new guided tour, which gives us a chance to reflect on what kind of experiences Apple is putting front and center. In the VR community there has been much ado about Apple's choice to entirely refuse the industry jargon: there is […]
This ended up being a pretty weird post, juxtaposing technical releases and legal developments, we don't know if we really managed to give it a coherent shape, but this is very much the complex space in which the future of digital humanities, and indeed the future of everything we do, is being shaped. There are […]
Back in October we missed this rather interesting conference on digitalization and reuse, hosted by the University of Turin and shared on YouTube by Wikimedia Italia.
As reported by Wikimedia Italia, the Italian Court of Audit (Corte dei Conti) recently released a lengthy (220 pages!) report (source) on the activities of the Italian Ministry for Culture, touching on the PND (Piano Nazionale di Digitalizzazione) and on specific pricing guidelines released in April (D. M. 161, 11 aprile 2023). Ideologically we are […]
Anyone who creates digital experiences should read Cory Doctorow, particularly his blog, Pluralistic. Recently he wrote this essay which touches on immersive digitization efforts for museums, which obviously hits close to home for us. In particular, this linked presentation by Aaron Cope explains the important concepts after which we're titling this post. Check out his […]
Thanks to the official WordPress ActivityPub plugin this blog can now be followed on Mastodon, or any other Fediverse network. These days we're working quite a bit with RSS feeds and the concepts of federation and syndication. We have a couple of super basic RSS-feed generators based on web scraping, one is for the news […]
We just published our first paper as a proper company! Check out the full text here. We created a reconstruction of the current state of a Greek-Roman theater in Sicily using drone-based photogrammetry, we helped with the acoustical measurements using the MIMO technique, and we created a Unity application that allows users to move around […]
We're creating a blog for two reasons: