Seeking to collect specialised knowledge regarding the communication of values, VAST project invited museum experts to a focus group in Lisbon on the 13^th of July 2022.

Through a constructive discussion, museum experts provided VAST partners with their valuable expertise regarding the communication of values and the way audiences perceive the role of museums.

The focus group was the preliminary part of the VAST Plenary Meeting which followed the next two days, and the selected material was deployed in the brainstorming sessions and workshops that took place during the meeting.

Having reached the first half of it’s lifetime, VAST project partners met physically for the first time in Lisbon between 14-15 July 2022 at partner NOVA University premises to hold the project’s 16th plenary meeting.

During the first day, the meeting reviewed the project’s progress until month 18 regarding the evaluation of the implemented pilot activities and the project’s objectives. Partners also discussed an updated version of the VAST Digital Platform development, the progress of annotation process and the Ontology’s design. On the same day the partners reviewed issues regarding the present of values, the content collected from all the implemented activities of the three pilots, and how this content could be exploited.

During the plenary several workshops took place, including the digital platform’s user requirements, user flows, necessary tools & content, the design of the VAST Ontology, and the tools used for the design of questionnaires in the VAST platform. Moreover, partners discussed an updated view of the dissemination and communication activities plan and the project’s business plan. The plenary closed with a discussion on the topic “Values and Museums” and the overall coordination and management of the project.

Not all of it was work though! Partners enjoyed NOVA’s hospitality in the beautiful city of Lisbon enjoying a night out at a city restaurant listening to famous Fado music.

VAST partner Stefano Montanelli, Università degli Studi di Milan, presented the paper with the title A Computational History Approach to Interpretation and Analysis of Moral European Values: the VAST Research Project in the 6th International Workshop on Computational History (HistoInformatics2021), which was held in conjuction with ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2021 (JCDL 2021) on 30 September 2021.

More specifically, Università degli Studi di Milan’s team which consists of Silvana Castano, Alfio Ferrara, Giulia Giannini, Stefano Montanelli, Francesco Periti presented the paper in the HistoInformatics workshop series that brought together researchers in the historical disciplines, computer science and associated disciplines as well as the cultural heritage sector.

VAST partner Stefano Montanelli, Università degli Studi di Milan, presented the paper with the title From Digital to Computational Humanities: TheVAST Project Vision, that was created along with Silvana Castano, Alfio Ferrara and Francesco Periti, Università degli Studi di Milan in the SEBD conference.

The 29th Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems (SEBD 2021) was organised by Università della Calabria and took place in Pizzo Calabro, Italy from the 5th of September to the 9th of September 2021.