VAST envisions bringing values to the forefront in the field of advanced digitisation. During a course of three years, VAST partners will address how values have been transformed across space and time, and how values are communicated and perceived by audiences. At the core of the VAST project lies the continuous digitisation of tangible and intangible content, including the experiences and stories of artists and professionals involved in the curation and communication of values to modern audiences, as well as the experiences of the audiences.

VAST project kicked off in December 2020 and has already completed its first year! We now look back on the project’s main achievements.

Studying Values Across Space and Time

VAST looks at the past and the present of values to study how they have been transformed through time. Following VAST methodology, during the first year of the project, the consortium focused on the study of the past of values. Specifically,

• 44 digital artefacts have been annotated. Applying the scientific methodology designed for narrative analysis, VAST scholars have annotated:  20 ancient Greek drama plays, 15 17th century Scientific Revolution document excerpts, and 9 fairy tales written by the Grimm Brothers.
• Through the annotation process, the Registry of Values has been created based on the core European values, such as: freedom, democracy, equality, tolerance, dialogue, human dignity and the rule of law. The Registry of Values currently includes 94 values.

The VAST Annotation tool

The annotation of the selected artefacts has been conducted through the VAST Semantic Annotation Platform (SAP). Based on the CLARIN-EL Web-based Annotation Tool, the VAST SAP meets the usability requirements of the scholars as defined during the first project year. It provides many collaborative features, including asset sharing and real-time collaborative analysis of annotation assets. The VAST SAP is one of the first exploitable assets of VAST and is already used in other research projects, such as the DebateLab.

Continuous digitisation of intangible content

As a first step towards the understanding how people perceive in the present the past of values, two audience research campaigns have been implemented in the context of the pilot that focuses on ancient drama literature. The campaigns have been implemented in greek as online questionnaire surveys and study the people’s perception of values before and after watching a recorded performance of the ancient Greek drama “Seven Against Thebes” by Aeschylus. More than 100 research participants were involved in the studies.

In addition to the previous activities, other achievements of the first year include:

• An initial list of user requirements for all the VAST digital tools was defined along with appropriate procedures for the evaluation of the tools.
• The semantic foundation of VAST has been specified, based on existing standards, such as CIDOC CRM3. VAST ontology integrates under an integrating conceptual schema the requirements related to “past of values” knowledge representation, including the annotation of artefacts with values, and the requirements related to the “present of values”, including the representation of contexts, multiple interpretations, and semantic relations among artefacts. The first prototype of VAST’s ontology has already been implemented and has been populated with the results of the annotation.
• An initial prototype of an exploration tool has been developed, providing functionalities related to browsing ontological concepts and relations, their annotation with additional metadata, and the addition of contextualised relations.
• The planning and preparation of the pilot activities of the second year.

Communicating the project

Finally, VAST continuously interacts with the public and the cultural heritage community through several communication channels such as the VAST website and its social media. Some of the communication activities that have been implemented in the first year include:

• The organisation and participation in several conferences and workshops, including the organisation of an international theatre conference in 2021 by NKUA titled Values of Ancient Greek Theatre Across Space & Time: Cultural Heritage and Memory.
• Eight scientific publications
• The liaison with sibling EU-funded research projects and European research projects with similar research agendas towards building up the VAST ecosystem.
• The establishment of the VAST Expert Advisory Board.

What’s next?

VAST will further consolidate digital assets such as texts, videos, images, enabling the study of how values have been transformed from antiquity to early modernity, from the past to the present. During the second year, VAST will study how values are communicated through the digitisation and analysis of the stories and experiences of those in charge to communicate values. Moreover, it will study how values are perceived by addressing audiences that have been exposed to theater performances and museum activities.

Towards this, several activities will be implemented in the four pilot sites: the House of Greek Ideas, the Athens and Epidaurus Festival, the Museo Galileo and the Fairy Tale Museum. All the activities will be supported by the VAST digital tools that will be developed and integrated in the VAST digital platform.

Stay tuned!

VAST partner, Saso Zagoranski, SEMANTIKA organised eight webinars in which more than 180 curators participated from many museums in Slovenia and Croatia. The webinars were held from November to January and they were specifically targeted to museum curators as users of SEMANTIKA’s software.

SEMANTIKA develops its own Collections Management System (Galis CMS) used by over 70 organisations in three different countries. The webinars were addressed to the curators to showcase new capabilities and features, get feedback and interact with them.

SEMANTIKA, as VAST partner and in the context of the project’s commercialisation and exploitation strategy, examines ways to integrate some of the advanced project outcomes, like the annotation tool into its software. At this stage, SEMANTIKA presents the work conducted within the project to future users and determines whether these tools and actions could provide possible added value to the VAST project.

The International Theatre Conference Values of Ancient Greek Theatre Across Space & Time: Cultural Heritage and Memory was held virtually on 6-7 November 2021. The highly successful event was organised by the VAST partner, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA) and attracted more than 350 registrants.

Emeritus Prof Theodoros Grammatas, NKUA along with Dr Georgios Petasis, VAST Coordinator

and Prof Constantine Skordoulis, NKUA welcomed participants to the Conference.

The two-day event brought together academics, young researchers and postgraduate students, who had the opportunity to attend, among other presentations in the field of Values in Ancient Greek Theatre, two important keynote talks, held by the invited speakers Prof Heinz-Uwe Haus and Emeritus Prof Michael Walton.

Presentations from the VAST Conference

Invited keynote speakers

VAST partner Martin Ruskov, postdoctoral researcher in the University of Milan, participated in the Cultural Heritage Game Jam, which was held online between 5 and 21 November 2021. The aim was to create and submit a game on cultural heritage themes such as the importance of protecting and preserving cultural heritage, the diverse cultural art, artifacts, traditions, and places, the cultural heritage looting, theft, trafficking, destruction and the effects of climate change on cultural heritage.

The team has worked on ideas relevant to the VAST pilots that study Values in Scientific Revolution Texts and in European Folktales, i.e. a city building game where players build their vision of the island of Bensalem and a digital Lapse-like card game based on a Brothers Grimm fairytale, creating a prototype that you can try out here.

All games created for the Cultural Heritage Game Jam will be promoted on the GGJ’s itch.io page. This game jam is organised by the Global Game Jam in partnership with the Cultural Antiquities Task Force (CATF), part of the U.S. Department of State’s Cultural Heritage Coordinating Committee.

VAST has been featured in the Greek science magazine Prisma, of Greek newspaper Avgi.gr.

Prisma Magazine highlights the VAST project through its featured article under the title VAST: Exploring the European values across space and time. The article was published on 17 July 2021 and elaborates on the vision of the project and the study of the past and the present of the values.

VAST partner Nina Zagoranski, SEMANTIKA presented our project in Slovenia on two separate occasions in April.

On April, 13 VAST was presented during the event Microsoft Croatia: Microsoft CEE Industry Week during the Cultural Industry Innovation Panel.

The second one was on April 14, at the Technology Park Ljubljana, Slovenia: The Future of Digitalization of Cultural Heritage.