Aiming to raise awareness and investigate students’ perceptions about values, on 14 December 2022, VAST partner,  the University of Milan, organised an educational workshop addressed to university students during the preliminary session of the project’s plenary meeting, held between 14-16 December 2022 in Milan, IT.

The activity was based on an excerpt from Galileo’s letter to Christina of Lorraine, where the students were motivated to reflect on the values found in the excerpt, to interlink them, and through team working and dialogue to create their personal and group mind maps.

The educational workshop added valuable input to the VAST Project research.

After the first successful Focus Group with museum experts organised by the VAST Project in July 2022 in Lisbon and the valuable deriving feedback, on 14 December 2022, the VAST project arranged one more focus group with museums experts as a preliminary part of its Plenary Meeting held 15-16 December 2022, in Milan.

During the Focus Group, participants shared their experiences and points of view regarding the field of values communication, the role of museums, and the way audiences perceive it as well as relevant policy recommendations. Valuable input was collected and deployed in the brainstorming sessions and the workshops that followed during the Plenary Meeting.

The paper focuses on the performance/case study of Antigone by Sophocles at the Athens Epidaurus Festival in July 2022, which was commissioned for the VAST project, and presented the main research results on the communication and the reception of its values. Data collection followed a mixed-methods approach that combined qualitative and quantitative research methods, addressing theatre artists, as value communicators, through semi-structured interviews, and audiences, as recipients of the communicated messages and final co-authors of meaning, through questionnaires.

The paper also reflects on Antigone as a prominent case study in adaptation, in that it maintained the textual structure of the original, but, at the same time, updated its content by setting it in a modern political context resembling a western parliamentary democracy, and in a television studio displaying large screens and transmitting the action in real time. The paper thus discussed the concomitant associations of meaning concerning democratic values and the contemporary interpolation of political power and media power.

Dr. Marco Berni, manager of European and special projects at partner Museo Galileo, presented the VAST project at the CHARTER Alliance Tuscany Regional Workshop which was held in Florence, Italy on 1-2 December 2022.

More specifically, Dr. Berni participated in the round table discussion on the first day, which focused on cultural heritage, digital and green skills as well as on the needs, methods, and tools for innovation, education, jobs, and growth.

A workshop amongst experts was also realised which concluded with site visits to Museo Galileo, to Cantiere Scuola at Opera del Duomo di Firenze, and to CER – Centro Europeo del Restauro Scuola Edile di Firenze. During the visit to the Galileo Museum Dr. Berni presented a digitalised version of Fra Mauro’s world map with interactive features: https://mostre.museogalileo.it/framauro/en.

A few words about the CHARTER Alliance Tuscany Regional Workshop

The workshop was realised under the theme “Digital Innovation in Cultural Heritage: Skills Needs & Challenges” following the discussions held in Rome. The aim of the workshop was to provide the project with a snapshot of the Tuscan cultural heritage ecosystem and to bring together key stakeholders to start a reflection on the challenges and opportunities provided by the twin transition to the skills in cultural heritage.

On 28 November 2022, the research team of the University of Milan (UMIL) joining the VAST Project,  participated in the 1st Italian Workshop on AI for Cultural Heritage (AI4CH22) which was held in conjunction with the 21st International Conference of the Italian Association for AI (AIxIA 2022) at the University of Udine (Italy).

During the workshop, Dr. Stefano Montanelli, Dr. Alfio Ferrara, and Dr. Martin Ruskov presented the paper “Detecting the Semantic Shift of Values in Cultural Heritage Document Collections” and joined a fruitful, constructive discussion with the workshop participants.

A few words about the Workshop

The workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage (AI4CH22) aims at bringing together researchers, policymakers, professionals, and practitioners to explore the main issues concerning the application of Artificial Intelligence to cultural heritage. In particular, it aims at fostering interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary research on tangible and intangible cultural heritage, promoting the use of Artificial Intelligence models, methodologies, and tools for the study, research, preservation, and dissemination of cultural heritage content. At the same time, the workshop will encourage discussion on the ethical aspects and sustainability issues involved in the management, delivery, and conservation of cultural heritage, with a specific focus on the involvement of all kinds of stakeholders so as to represent the different perspectives and communities involved in cultural heritage practices.

You can find more info about the Workshop in the link:https://ai4ch.di.unito.it

Since October 2022 the VAST project communication team initiated a series of activities in the frame of the project’s outreach plan, exploring potential collaborations and synergies with other EU projects in the Cultural Heritage domain.

A series of online meetings were realised with five EU projects, where opportunities for collaboration  and synergies were discussed whilst sharing knowledge & methodologies, policy related matters and the exploitation of the VAST Digital Platform’s tools and facilities.

rurAllure

The rurAllure project works on promoting 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 enormous 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 add much content and value to their pilgrims’ experience. Thus rurAllure’s goal is to overcome this situation through the allure of the cultural heritage in the rural environment.

TExTOUR

TExTOUR is an EU-funded project that co-designs pioneering and sustainable cultural tourism strategies with the ultimate goal to improve deprived areas in Europe and beyond. To do this, it set up Cultural Tourism Labs at eight pilots located within the EU and outside it.

ARTIS

ARTIS 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

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 broader historical and geographical contexts. The project proposes a very innovative model of sustainable heritage management through which a dynamic network will be born.

SPICE Project

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.

Aiming to offer expanded facilities to the VAST Platform’s users, the project’s technical experts keep working on continuous updates of the Digital Platform.

On 27 October 2022, VAST Project announced a new version of the annotation tool, which now supports audio/video file uploading. From now on, all modalities (text, image, audio, video) are supported, while the audio/video files can be played & annotated from inside the tool.

Direct link to the newly updated annotation Platform: https://annotation.vast-project.eu/auth/login

VAST Project launched a new animated video on 24 October 2022, highlighting the importance of value appropriation through space and time for our life in modern society and how VAST’s study and methodology shed light on this research field.

Watch the video and learn more about the project, its digital tools, and how a researcher in the field of values can take advantage of them.

If you find the work of VAST exciting, contact us!