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InTaVia is a three year project starting in autumn 2020, funded by the EU under the call DT-TRANSFORMATIONS-12-2018-2020.

Overview (based on the project plan)

Over the last 20 years, digitization endeavors have greatly enhanced the availability of cultural heritage (CH) information across Europe. On the one hand, tangible objects from museums, archives, and libraries have become accessible via numerous object databases (ODBs) and aggregated transnationally by platforms such as Europeana. On the other hand, intangible CH information has been documented in natural language form, such as by newspaper articles or by narrative accounts on the lives of historical individuals which the InTaVia project focuses on. These biographical records have been digitized and shared as partially structured prosopographical databases (PDBs) on a national level. While these developments provide an excellent basis for the enhanced scholarly and public reception, utilization, and promotion of European CH, various technological and organizational restrictions prevent the exploitation of the existing data. As one key challenge, connections between tangible and intangible asset collections have to be strengthened, which requires concerted (infra)structural development efforts. Another challenge derives from a current lack of interconnections between national PDBs, which requires transnational harmonization. To facilitate access to these rich repositories, new technologies are needed to enable their analysis, curation and communication for a variety of target groups without computational and technological expertise. In face of many large, heterogeneous, and unconnected CH collections we aim to develop supporting technologies to better access and manage in/tangible CH data and topics, to better study and analyze them, to curate, enrich and interlink existing collections, and to better communicate and promote their inventories.

• More specifically, in the light of historically separated object and data collections, we need options to draw 'tangible' and 'intangible' CH information together, to create a more comprehensive picture of European culture. To do so, the InTaVia project will tap into the wealth of information stored in PDBs and utilize this rich type of narrative data for the socio-cultural and historical contextualization of data from European ODBs.
• Narrative accounts on the lives of historical actors can be utilized to contextualize cultural objects on the level of individual biographies, or they can be aggregated to form contextual 'composites', such as histories of related groups, organizations, or regions. Thus, InTaVia aims to make a wide variety of European cultural (hi)stories available and to integrate data from different national PDBs for that matter.
• National PDBs commonly emerge from the semantic processing of local biography collections, and they currently operate on different levels of data maturity and completeness. For their integration, it is not only crucial to enable and strengthen transnational data compatibility, but also to develop options for manual and assisted data curation, and for the dynamic creation of new structured data from unstructured (historical or contemporary) natural language sources.
• Structured data from both ODBs and PDBs is often complex, time-oriented, of heterogeneous quality and not optimized for human analysis and reasoning. Against this background, technologies are needed to facilitate the analysis, curation and communication of in/tangible CH data for various user groups. The InTaVia project will develop visual analytics (VA) technologies to support the work on individual CH objects (close reading) and aggregated collections (distant reading). It will offer multiple visualization perspectives to support CH experts' activities of data analysis, curation, and creation. Building on these visualizations, the project will integrate the most accessible ones in a visual storytelling suite for the communication and promotion of European CH to the interested public.
• Due to its transdisciplinary nature, the project will engage in an iterative user-centered design process, assemble and document relevant user requirements from diverse target groups, including CH scholars, historians, curators, practitioners, teachers (i.e. CH experts), and the interested public. The outlined technology developments will build on these requirements and follow a modular but closely coordinated design approach. As such, the consortium will address a variety of basic and applied research challenges, while creating a prototypical European in/tangible CH platform with a strong potential impact on research, pedagogy, journalism, cultural industries, and Europe's cultural self-description in a global context.

Mission

• transcend siloed data and knowledge collections, to contextualize tangible CH assets, to create a more comprehensive picture of European heritage, and to enable synergies for curation and analysis.
• encourage open sharing and connecting of data and technologies from isolated databases, and enable collaboration by basing our integrated PDB data model on the input from 14 PDB projects across the world and making integration for data from these projects straight-forward.
• strengthen European cultural data curation and creation, develop more dynamic, intuitive, distributed, and synergetic technologies, and enable ongoing activities of enrichment and extension.
• provide state-of-the-art NLP methods in a way that scholars can apply, evaluate and help improve them.
• provide advanced visualization support for related activities (i.e., data curation and creation) and significantly advance options of visual data analysis and communication for various user groups.
• encourage CH practitioners and humanities scholars to explore new possibilities of the latest developments in data science, text mining and visual analytics.
• facilitate DH research by using a strong methodological setup to provide clear insight into provenance and data quality and to evaluate the impact of technologies on research processes and quality.
• encourage the utilization and exploitation of European cultural data, strengthen communication and promotion, and create new market opportunities.

Participants of the project

1. Danube University Krems (Coordinator) AT
2. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam NL
3. Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences & Arts SI
4. Aalto University FI
5. University of Southern Denmark DK
6. Austrian Academy of Sciences AT
7. University of Stuttgart DE
8. Fluxguide Ausstellungssysteme GmbH AT
9. University of Helsinki (HELDIG) FI

For more details about the project, see the InTaVia homepage.

Acknowledgements

Thanks for collaborations to our colleagues at the Finnish Literature Society (SKS) whose biographical data will be used in the project.

Contacts in Finland

• Prof. Eero Hyvönen, PI at the University of Helsinki (HELDIG)
• Dr. Jouni Tuominen, PI at Aalto University

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