The VAST Ecosystem

EU Sibling projects

Odeuropa: Negotiating Olfactory and Sensory Experiences in Cultural Heritage Practice and Research (1/1/2021-31/12/2023) Odeuropa will apply state-of-the-art AI techniques to text and image datasets that span four centuries of European history. It will identify the vocabularies, spaces, events, practices, and emotions associated with smells and smelling. The project will curate this multi-modal information, following semantic web standards, and store the enriched data in a "European Olfactory Knowledge Graph" (EOKG). Odeuropa’s main goal is to show that smells and smelling are important and viable means for consolidating and promoting Europe’s tangible and intangible cultural heritage.
Mingei: Representation and Preservation of Heritage Crafts (1/1/2018-31/5/2022) Mingei will explore the possibilities of representing and making accessible both tangible and intangible aspects of craft as cultural heritage. Heritage Crafts (HCs) involve craft artefacts, materials, and tools and encompass craftsmanship as a form of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Mingei will provide means to establish HC representations based on digital assets, semantics, existing literature and repositories, as well as, mature digitisation and representation technologies. These representations will capture and preserve tangible and intangible dimensions of HCs.
Polifonia: a digital harmoniser for musical heritage knowledge (1/1/2021-30/4/2024) Polifonia implements a digital ecosystem for European Musical Heritage: music objects along with relevant related knowledge about their cultural and historical context, expressed in different languages and styles, and across centuries. The ecosystem will include methods, tools, guidelines, experiences, and creative designs, openly shared according to F.A.I.R. principles. The aim is to provoke a paradigm shift in musical heritage preservation, management, studying, interaction, and exploitation.
Visual History of the Holocaust: Rethinking Curation in the Digital Age (1/1/2019-31/12/2022) VHH is an innovation action that focuses on the digital curation and preservation of film records relating to the discovery of Nazi concentration camps and other atrocity sites. VHH combines state-of-the-art concepts and practices from information science, museum pedagogy and digital storytelling to design a new approach for the engagement with a significant aspect of European audio-visual heritage. Building on the advanced digitisation of a relevant selection of films, VHH will develop new methods in digital curation and apply sophisticated technologies to the analysis and time-based annotation of these historical materials.
InTavia: In/Tangible European Heritage - Visual Analysis, Curation and Communication (1/12/2020-31/10/2023) The InTaVia project will draw together multiple national databases of intangible assets, such as biographical data about historical persons, and databases of tangible cultural objects. Its overall aim is to develop an information portal for the integration, visual analysis, and visual communication of these assets. It will also develop new means of visually supported data creation, curation, and storytelling. Thereby, the riches of European culture will become more accessible - for experts and the public alike.

EU related projects

Uncharted: Understanding, Capturing and Fostering the Societal Value of Culture (1/2/2020-31/1/2024) UNCHARTED project, focusing on the valuation practices developed by different actors involved in the cultural sector, will identify Europe’s plurality of cultural values attached to specific cultural products, productions, services, activities and sites. Three areas in the value dynamics of culture are distinguished: the field of cultural participation, the field of cultural production and heritage and the field of cultural administration. The project aims to structure the study of the different aspects involved in this evaluative dynamic: the emergence of values, the configuration of a value order and the political impulse of values.
pop AI project A European Positive Sum Approach towards AI tools in support of Law Enforcement and safeguarding privacy and fundamental rights (1/10/2021-30/9/2023) pop AI aims at fostering trust in the application of AI and AI-enable mechanisms in the security domain, by increasing awareness, social engagement and gathering knowledge and expertise from multiple sectors (e.g. academic and non-academic actors). This approach will offer a unified European view across LEAs (Law Enforcement Agencies), while encouraging the creation of an ecosystem that could provide the structural architecture of a sustainable and inclusive European AI hub for Law Enforcement.
rurAllure Project: Promotion of rural museums and heritage sites in the vicinity of European pilgrimage routes (1/01/2021-31/12/2023) The rurAllure Project works on the promotion of cultural venues and heritage sites from the rural environments of Europe, in the vicinity of pilgrimage routes. The starting point was the weakness behind the big success of pilgrimage routes: the fact that many provinces and regions of a predominantly rural nature become passive witnesses of the flows of pilgrims, while they could actually add much of content and value to their pilgrims’ experience. Thus rurAllure’s goal is to overcome this situation through the allure of the cultural heritage found in the rural environment.
ARTIS Project: Art and Research on Transformations of Individuals and Societies (1/02/2020-31/01/2025 ARTIS (Art and Research on Transformations of Individuals and Societies) is a EU Horizon 2020-funded project under the call “Societal Transformations and the Arts.” It is a consortium of research institutions in the social sciences, Art History, Philosophy, Art education, and Art and Cultural Policy. The project aims to integrate state-of-the-art empirical approaches from psychology, neuroscience, and phenomenology to conduct a series of investigations that identify specific types of experiences with art.
ReInHerit Project: Redefining the future of cultural heritage, through a disruptive model of sustainability (1/03/2021-29/02/2024) ReInHerit is an Horizon2020 project that aspires to disrupt the current status quo of communication, collaboration and innovation exchange between museums and cultural heritage sites, in a sense that it will connect cultural heritage collections and sites, and present Europe’s tangible and intangible heritage to citizens and tourists in their wider historical and geographical contexts. The project proposes, a very innovative model of sustainable heritage management, through which a dynamic network will be born.
TExTOUR Project: Social Innovation and TEchnologies for sustainable growth through participative cultural TOURism 1/01/2021-30/09/2024 TExTOUR is an EU-funded project which co-designs pioneering and sustainable cultural tourism strategies to improve deprived areas in Europe and beyond. The ultimate goal is to improve deprived areas in Europe and beyond. To do this, it sets up Cultural Tourism Labs at eight pilots located within the EU and outside it.
Inclusion4Schools School-community Partnership for Reversing Inequality and Exclusion: Transformative Practices of Segregated Schools (1/11/2020-31/10/2024) The aim of the Horizon2020 Inclusion4Schools project is to strive against the logic of exclusion in education and against the systemic (re)production of inequalities – insisting on a bottom-up strategy – in the context of segregated schools and communities. The project aims to foster and promote pedagogical relations of inclusion, a culture of dialogue, and the transformation of unjust structures through education. The central objectives of the proposed action are: - to support and coordinate community schools and their respective communities of practice, and - to create a place and culture of sharing between such communities by initiating and coordinating the convergence and synergies of local, regional and transnational communities.The expected impact of the proposed project is to contribute to the European initiatives and interventions that aim at reversing inequalities.
Social cohesion, Participation, and Inclusion through Cultural Engagement (01/05/2020 -30/04/ 2023) SPICE project aims to foster diverse participation in the cultural heritage domain via citizen curation, where citizen groups will share and compare their interpretations of cultural objects with other groups. Various tools will assist citizens in this process, helping them build a representation of themselves and appreciate variety and similarity across groups to enhance social cohesion
Training Young People on Augmented Reality Authoring Showcasing Intangible Cultural Assets as Use Cases AR4Youth centralises at training young people in conceiving, designing and implementing an Augmented Reality (AR) project for digitising and augmenting books, guides or manuals. Acknowledging, in addition, the necessity of preserving our cultural heritage the project will use as case studies Greek, Lithuanian and Estonian fairy tales, myths and legends which will be transformed into digitally AR texts and preserved in the project’s Cultural Digital Library.