Intavia

In/Tangible European Heritage

InTaVia is a H2020 research and innovation action funded by the European Commission within the Call DT-TRANSFORMATIONS-12-2018-2020 “Curation of digital assets and advanced digitisation” (project ID: 101004825).

ABSTRACT: Due to a wide range of digitization initiatives, cultural heritage databases have greatly enhanced access to cultural and historical data across Europe. On the one hand, tangible cultural objects from museums, archives, and libraries have become accessible online and aggregated transnationally by platforms such as Europeana. On the other hand, intangible assets—such as language-based accounts on the lives of artists—have been organized and shared as biographical databases on a national level. While these developments provide an excellent basis for the enhanced reception, utilization, and promotion of European cultural heritage, various restrictions prevent the exploitation of the existing data.

The InTaVia project aims to overcome some of these barriers with a deliberate combination of research and development objectives. Firstly, it will draw together tangible and intangible assets of European heritage to enable their mutual contextualization. Secondly, it will develop new means of data creation, curation, and transnational integration. Thirdly, it will develop a visual analytics environment to help cultural heritage experts to better access, analyze, and visually communicate cultural collections and related biographical and contextual knowledge to the interested public. Thereby, InTaVia will develop an information portal for the integration, visual analysis and communication of tangible and intangible cultural assets, supporting synoptic sensemaking and storytelling about European heritage with implications for research, pedagogy, journalism, cultural tourism, creative industries and heritage institutions.

The transdisciplinary project consortium extends existing work and collaborations in European research infrastructures and national digital humanities projects. The InTaVia team is composed of computer scientists specialized in visualization and computational linguists, digital humanists, HCI researchers, historians, and cultural heritage entrepreneurs.