INNOVATIONS
The ROLE MODEL CITIES Booklet developed by the ROCK project presents specific actions of each city, highlighting both soft and technological tools that have been used or tested to support the transformation of historic city centres. They are grouped under two main sections: - achievements at local level - obstacles and barriers centres and sites. A dedicated section focuses on how the ROCK role model cities faced coronavirus, capturing a short overview of the immediate impacts of the pandemic on the ROCK implementation process and the management of the crisis.
In recent decades, with the growing emphasis on the creative economy, culture has tended to be increasingly seen in political circles under the exclusive lens of the economy and its contribution to it. To counteract this tendency, it is necessary to define the social values associated with culture on a different basis from the traditional one. The work focuses on the valuation practices of the actors involved in cultural life. In this respect, three areas and three types of fundamental actors in the value dynamics of culture are distinguished: the field of cultural participation, in which citizenship is the protagonist; the field of cultural production and heritage, where the professionals of creation and preservation are the ones who take the initiative; and the field of cultural administration, in which it is the experts and politicians who decide. The project takes these three areas and this basic typology of actors as a starting point to structure the study of the different aspects involved in this evaluative dynamic: the emergence of values, the configuration of a value order and the political impulse of values.
CoHERE “Εurocraft” serious game was created in the framework of WP5 CoHERE project (Horizon 2020), with the aim to promote the communication of cultural heritage(s) between people within Europe, as well as to encourage the dialogue and the understanding of the “European Other”. Moreover, it will be a research tool to investigate the perceptual regions of pupils from different parts of Europe through: [i] their “footprints” (material they upload), [ii] the games they upload [iii] the games they play, and [iv] multilayer maps of heritage distributions they create (vid-maps) by overlapping thematic layers of heritage information.
The online magazine has established as a lively community of users, who participate in the initiative accessing the website and providing information about the sector, internationally. The magazine is officially registered and receives an average of 25,000 visits per month. It features projects and initiatives from all over the world, linking to original source to provide complete information. It is open to contributions from the whole community of digital cultural heritage and arts.
RURITAGE establishes a new heritage-led rural regeneration paradigm able to transform rural areas in sustainable development demonstration ‘laboratories’, through the enhancement of their unique Cultural and Natural Heritage potential. Through the identification of 6 Systemic Innovation Areas (SIAs) (Pilgrimage, Sustainable Local Food Production, Migration, Art and festivals, Resilience, Integrated Landscape management) and the analysis of 11 Cross-cutting Themes in 13 Role Models (RMs), RURITAGE will showcase heritage potential as a powerful economic, social and environmental motivator for regeneration, sustainable development, economic growth and improvement of people’s well-being and living environment in 6 Replicators (Rs). Moreover, through the creation of 19 Rural Heritage Hubs (RHHs) and 1 Digital Rural Heritage Hub (Digital RHH), RURITAGE will foster collective management, responsibility and ownership of Cultural and Natural Heritage.
Replacing existing buildings is prohibitively expensive or not allowed for historical heritage buildings and would have a significant societal and environmental impact. The innovation aims to develop a solution integrating advanced materials for the simultaneous seismic and energy retrofitting of the European building stock. To the present date, energy and seismic retrofitting are treated separately. To achieve cost effectiveness, iRESIST+ develops a novel approach and goes several steps beyond the state-of-the-art by proposing for a hybrid seismic-plus-energy retrofit which combines inorganic textile-based composites with thermal insulation systems. The effectiveness of the proposed retrofitting system will be validated experimentally in a full-scale building using the ELSA reaction wall facility. Moreover, a common approach for building performance classification is proposed, allowing to assess whether energy efficiency and disaster-resilient practices could be integrated.
STORM provides technological and procedural tools and methods to support decision makers faced with climate change and natural hazards during the Disaster Risk Reduction lifecycle, including prevention, preparedness, response and recovery activities. Specifically, STORM proposes a set of novel predictive models and improved non-invasive and non-destructive methods of survey and diagnosis, for effective prediction of environmental changes and for revealing threats and conditions that could damage cultural heritage. To this end, STORM determines how different vulnerable material and structures are affected by extreme weather events and risks associated to climatic condition, offering improved, effective adaptation and mitigation strategies, systems and technologies. An integrated system featuring new low-cost compact eco-friendly sensors, resilient solutions and survey and diagnosis technologies (including LiDAR and UAVs), as well as crowdsensing and crowdsourcing techniques will be provided over a collaborative, cloud based platform for collecting and enhancing knowledge, processes and methodologies on sustainable and effective safeguarding and management of European CH.
The HeAT project has developed a systematic approach to analyse threats and processes leading to destruction of cultural heritage to help policy makers develop effective strategies.
The project, designs and develops methodologies and tools that can support the cultural and creative industries in creating narratives and experiences which draw on the power of ’emotive storytelling’, both on site and remotely. EMOTIVE combines in the same time technological solutions & methods for designing emotive storytelling. The EMOTIVE platform provides a set of authoring tools targeting different author profiles from beginners to more experienced users supporting them to create emotional experiences. The solution integrates an Authoring Tool, for the storyboarding and production of interactive storytelling experiences for mobile devices as well as a Floor Plan Editor, to bring experiences online and a Mixed Reality Plugin to create immersive virtual experiences and bring objects to life. The EMOTIVE framework provides guidelines on the design of innovative experiences combining a strong emotional and social dimension, which, applied on the experiences created with the EMOTIVE tools, aspire to change the way visitors perceive Heritage
In HERACLES two kinds of mortars have been developed: 1- a natural lime-based mortar for historical masonry walls: natural cement free lime-based mortar, for the restoration of historic buildings, with excellent mechanical and chemical compatibility with materials used in the past, with optimised porosity guaranteeing permeability to aqueous vapour, and low reaction to the disintegrating actions of the salts contained in the walls. Using natural binders, improved with nanometric particles, the pozzolanic activity has been improved. 2- a technical mortar expressly developed for the restoration/consolidation of old reinforced concrete structures, showing an advanced degradation state. It is reo-plastic, fiber-reinforced, and polymer-modified, formulated with high sulphate-resistant binders and selected sands, in a controlled granulometric curve. It presents high compressive strenght, adequate elastic modulus, very low presence of soluble chlorides, together with compensated hydraulic shrinkage. It has a reduced permeability to CO2, with resulting increased anti-carbonatation requisites.
A new scalable and flexible innovative ICT platform is realized in order to collect and integrate heterogeneous data for a situational awareness and decision support, allowing: to identify and suggest new environmentally sustainable solutions and materials for the long-term maintenance and restoration of CH under the CC impact, taking into account also the economical sustainability and the cultural and social integrity; to define procedures and coordinate people and analysis; to make operators able to share information and analysis. Furthermore, an iterative process is generated where new designed and adopted solutions for the interventions represent information to be ingested in the system, to identify proper maintenance, remediation and restoration actions. Due to the request from the challenge, a new Ontology has been designed as well. It combines CH Assets, Stakeholders and Roles, Climate and Weather Effects, Risk Management, Conservation Actions, Materials, Sensors, Models, Observations and procedures. It gives different tools for the expert users of the different domains to connect and exchange their information to provide info to decision makers suitable to protect CH from
The GRAVITATE project has developed a digital research platform, addressing the digital re-unification of items belonging to the same collection, the re -association of objects under defined criteria, and the re -assembly of fragmented artefacts. The methodology integrates archaeological research with computer graphics, computer vision, natural language processing and semantic technologies. The platform permits to investigate objects looking at their 3D geometry, surface properties, colouring texture and related semantic information within a single digital environment, where they can conduct 3D shape analysis, feature comparison, semantic and 3D annotations, similarities search etc. by exploring collections. 450 artefacts have already been studied, including a collection of 250 ancient votive terracotta statue from Salamis (Cyprus).
The ROCK Video Neuroanalytics Database collects the following data: - emotional states - affective attitudes - physiological states - weather conditions - pollution - Vilnius built environment and municipal districts data
The Urban Heritage Development Fund (UHDF) is a specific fund designed to support investments at urban level, particularly cultural heritage investments. The UHDF is designed to support investments at urban level through the creation of a portfolio of urban cultural heritage projects to make manifest the strategic vision of the city. It aims to achieve financial returns as well as environmental and social impacts. Different from an individual project investment, the UHDF vehicle invests its resources in a portfolio of projects. In this way it becomes possible to coordinate multiple investments over long time horizons, capture synergies across different types of projects, and improve or tailor the financial structure of individual projects (e.g. debt, equity, guarantees). The portfolio is grounded on the idea that several urban projects can reinforce each other, and in so doing achieve greater stability in their financial returns, resilience to shocks, and ultimately, reduce the financial risks. We obtain this result not only by considering the financial returns of the projects, but also in accounting for their environmental and social impacts.
CHIA represents an innovative proposal for impact assessment in cultural heritage sector for adaptive reuse projects in the perspective of the circular economy that can be adopted by creative and cultural organizations, social entrepreneurs and other industry practitioners. CHIA provides focused business services and a practical tool to assess the impacts and performances of cultural heritage adaptive reuse projects under the framework of the circular economy. CHIA is based on a heritage impact assessment methodology that considers historic-cultural attributes and values, as well as economic-financial self-sustainability, economic spillovers, social and environmental impacts. The toolkit is based on assessment criteria and a set of quantitative and qualitative indicators that define three levels of circularity: L-I Cultural values conservation; L-II Circularity of building construction; L-III Multidimensional impacts generated in the area/district/city/region. Heritage reuse projects are scanned through criteria/indicators, making evident actual impacts and areas of potential improvement.
CoHERE Interactive e-book and the "Europe in the museum" game were designed as a way of teaching about heritage while also raising questions about national/European heritage, as well as tangible/intangible heritage. This fit in very well with the philosophy of the eBook because we wanted to engage students in the process from the get-go. The end result is a detailed game on European and EU member states’ national heritage assets. We tried to include as many well-known and not widely-known heritages to show that the diversity in the EU is also present within the national frames. In turn, the objective of the game was to tie back to the written content of the e-book.
meSch A platform for creating smart objects and interactive spaces for novel experiences of heritage
meSch has developed a hardware and software platform for creating tangible and immersive installations for personalised visitors' experiences. With meSch, cultural heritage organisations and professionals can easily create smart objects and spaces for novel interactive experiences. The platform is composed by: a browser-based editor to upload content and define the visitors’ interaction, and a set of smart blocks (sensors, actuators, and small computing units) to compose the smart setting the visitor interacts with. The use of Cloud Computing (for the online editor) and the Internet of Things (for the physical smart components) allows to edit the content and instantaneously deploy it on the physical configuration of the smart blocks supporting fast prototyping and the exploration of different solutions. The visitors’ experience on-site continues on-line via personalised and recommended content created using the data from the visit. meSch enables cultural heritage institutions to independently create personally meaningful, sensorily rich, and socially expanded visitor’s experiences.
Maps are the visual representation of where events happen. As such, maps and stories complement each other, but until recently, they have existed more as side-by-side products and not as one integrated presentation. The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission developed the cultural heritage interactive map (http://arcg.is/0TjSai) as a map journal combining panels with rich content—text, photos, illustrations, video— and maps that can be queried by the user. One scrolls down the journal discovering new sections around themes relevant to the preservation of cultural heritage in Europe. Besides the needed reflection on the way one want to communicate and the purpose or goal of the story to develop, an innovative work was conducted to create a set of consistent and harmonised European layers depicting cultural heritage.
The NANORESTORE and NANOFORART projects have developed radically new nanomaterials for the conservation of modern and contemporary art, trade name NANORESTORE.
INNOVATIVE METHODOLOGY: * CCPs are based on long-term researches about contentious cultural heritages and their public interfaces. * Cross-disciplinary approach, combining artistic practices and academic research. * CCPs’ artists move from the tradition of Institutional Critique and intend contemporary art as a strategy to enable the usage of sensitive and self-critical approaches within institutions that own or host contentious collections, and foster a public debate. * Experimental participative actions and integrated multi-disciplinary projects set in specific contexts, involving different stakeholders. OBJECTIVE: * To identify/produce innovative research methodologies for protection, re-appropriation and valorisation of European heritages, combining qualitative research with action research, academics with end-users, theorisation with intervention, classical methodologies with ICT. * To involve the local population in strategies of cultural co-production, in order to develop a potent exchange between top-down academic approaches and bottom-up practices, and to enable direct users to actively participate in the process.
The NANOMATCH project has developed consolidants for stone and stone-like materials with features able to improve resistance and durability of historic materials. NANOMATCH products are based on alkaline earth alkoxides with a great potential for the development of nanostructured materials, thanks to their high versatility of metal functionalization. They are suitable molecular precursors of consolidants for carbonate stone and stone-like materials achieving a better consolidation and resistance towards environmental/climatic attack. Calcium alkoxides have demonstrated to overcome the problems faced by the use of organic polymers and the limitations of inorganic treatments. In fact, NANOMATCH products are produced as nanosuspensions with particle size smaller than 100nm, higher calcium nanoparticles content in suspension with respect to nanolimes, and have proven to be efficient consolidants, with no risk to release hazardous nanoparticles.
The HERCULES project has developed the Knowledge Hub for Landscape Practices, an interactive open platform to support the sustainable stewardship of cultural landscapes. The Knowledge Hub for Landscape Practices enables to visualize the interface of nature and society and provides a tool to share, obtain and create landscape knowledge. The interactive open platform has been developed by Sinergise for the HERCULES project, aiming to provide a powerful communication tool for bringing together citizens and landscape stakeholders supporting the sustainable stewardship of cultural landscapes. Moreover, the Hub goes beyond being a cartographic viewer of existing scientific information, but enables constant exchange of knowledge and ideas between different stakeholder groups, by allowing the creation of content by any person interested.
The sensor development was inspired by mediaeval stained glasses which are highly sensitive to environmental pollution. The glass sensor has a similar chemical composition but corrodes in an accelerated time of days and weeks. It is a thin glass platelet (0.7 mm thick) made of a potassium lime silicate glass with a fire-polished surface. Under the environmental influence of temperature, humidity and/or air pollutants, the surface of the glass corrodes and a water-containing gel layer is formed by leaching of potassium and calcium ions. This gel layer serves as indicator for the corrosiveness of the environmental conditions, warning when the local environment is in non-optimal conditions and calls for improvements. Such a system is suitable for detecting even small amounts of pollutants (i.e. SO2, NOx, volatile organic compounds, formaldehyde, organic acids etc.), as well as temperature and humidity, allowing small scale mapping and comparison of different sites and locations. The sensor is easy to handle, simple and requires no electricity thus saving energy and reducing the carbon footprint.
PLUGGY will support citizens in shaping cultural heritage and being shaped by it. PLUGGY frames its objectives around the Faro Convention, in line with new social paradigms which declare heritage as an asset and a responsibility for all, aiming to encompass greater democratic participative actions with concern for the local and the everyday. PLUGGY will develop two interlinked sets of software applications: a) The PLUGGY software platform, which will facilitate a continuing process for creating, modifying and safeguarding heritage where citizens will be ‘prosumers’ and maintainers of cultural activities. It will be web-based, easily accessed and will allow the development of shared identity and differentiation. Social Platform’s users will curate stories using the Curatorial Tool. Content will be either uploaded by end-users or derived from digital collections (e.g., museums, archives, cultural institutions), allowing users to create links between seemingly unrelated facts, events, people and digitized collections, leading to new approaches of presenting cultural resources, and new ways of experiencing them. PLUGGY will provide the necessary architecture and the technologies for
HeritaMus is a technical resource for organizing, structuring, and retrieving historical and ethnographic data on heritage (tangible and intangible), contributing to overcome the asymmetrical representation of knowledge by bringing practitioners into the core of the research process. Intuitive and user-friendly, with a quick learning curve, the tool is centered on the idea that any item (that we call “nodes”) is defined by its relations with other “nodes”. The community and its knowledge can thus be traced by a network of dynamically connected “nodes”. The registered user simply has to identify the items that he/she recognizes as their heritage (tangible and intangible) and wishes to input in the graph. HeritaMus is the only on-line, easy to use, free tool for community curation of data and participatory graph database that allows the input of user data and big datasets.
The RIBuild Software tooI allows a “probability‐based” life‐cycle assessment of environmental and economic impacts of building retrofit measures. LCA and LCC data inputs – e.g. building component prices, embedded energy, etc ‐ can be combined considering their “uncertainty ranges”. The software provides results in alternative scenarios. Furthermore, it offers an idea of the significance of input parameters’ uncertainties and their impacts on the results, through a detailed sensitivity analysis. In this way, the user is made aware of the inherent uncertainties related to environmental impacts and costs of building renovation, and during the design stage can work on the most proper and effective solutions. The software can be effectively applied as a decision support tool during the building renovation phase.
LBASense is a technology delivered by DFRC AG for the estimation of people present in an area, the duration of their stay and their country of origin. The technology has been adopted in various contexts. Within ROCK project it has a novel large-scale application to measure the impact and effectiveness of heritage-led regeneration actions. The technology counts anonymous mobile phone signals thanks to special sensors installed in the areas under observation, without interfering with the phones’ communication. The system is completely passive: it doesn’t require individual mobile apps and is able to detect any mobile phone, regardless of the operating system. Soon after the acquisition, data is transferred to a local server and aggregated on the basis of time and region of collection, whereas the raw data is immediately deleted. Aggregated figures are elaborated with statistical approach to determine the so-called Crowd Analytics.
The app aims at providing citizens, cultural third sector representatives, tourism offices and local administrators with the possibility to share and highlight less known cultural spaces, going beyond the main touristic spots. The pivotal function of the app consists of the provision of a mobile-enabled collaborative map, encouraging residents to share their favourite cultural and creative spots in a map-based interface. Cultural gems will allow city residents and visitors to discover the “cultural pulse” of the city in an interactive way. Cultural gems aims at going beyond the current proprietary solutions by providing a Europe-wide open source sharing platform on culture and creativity. Cultural gems collects information about points of interests ranging from museums to live music venues and arts centres, in the attempt to overcome specialisation of culture and creativity maps.
Virtual and Augmented Reality applications have been developed and tested by the iMARECULTURE project to provide advanced, immersive and personalized experiences to be used at home, in-situ or at a museum. Based on existing 3D data, three sites have been carefully selected for the VR/AR applications interactive virtual underwater visits, such are Mazotos shipwreck, Baiae archaeological site and Xlendi shipwreck. The visualisations realised provide visitors an interactive and enhanced experience of diving into an unreachable underwater site, while offering additional information through storytelling about the artefacts displayed. Moreover, more advanced immersive technologies will be tested in Thalassa museum (CY), a partner of the iMARECULTURE project.
The InnovaConcrete project is developing advanced materials and techniques specifically designed for concrete heritage preservation. Products and techniques encompass the development of multifunctional impregnation treatments (with improved super-hydrophobic performance, and able to produce calcium silicate hydrates), cementitious coatings containing inorganic nanotubes, portable atmospheric plasma devices and self-healing impregnation treatments. Such technologies are based on multiscale modelling and are validated in relevant environment.
Scan4Reco innovation is a cost-effective, modular and extendable portable device, easy to use - thanks to a motorized mechanical arm - for advanced 3D modelling, predictive simulation and documentation of CH objects, targeting to improve their conservation. In particular, the system is based on a modular platform for non-destructive diagnosis of CH objects, based on hierarchical scanning of the surface and the underlying substrates. Smart algorithms for material identification and unfolding of the stratigraphy aiming at the production of digital 3D reconstructions, that can efficiently simulate the past and future states of the object itself, through dedicated material models. The Scan4Reco solution goes beyond state of the art regarding the following technologies: -The integrated solution is build around a dedicated robotic arm that enhances the accuracy and the repeatability of multispectral scanning. - It combines non-destructive & automatically annotated 3D reconstruction - It provides a bidirectional ageing simulation for forward (i.e. future) and backward (i.e. past) simulation It improves the public accessibility to rare & valuable CH items through VR Museums & 3D printing
Technically our main innovation lies in the usage of Graph technology to the challenge of integrating and enriching information about heterogeneous, dispersed and fragmented archival sources documenting the Holocaust. While graph databases have a long pedigree in social media applications, EHRI was one of the first adopters in a cultural heritage setting. We are using a Neo4J graph DB as a store that can be accessed by researchers via the EHRI Portal and two APIs. Our work shows that the graph paradigm excellently fits the complex archival data domain, and allows us to flexibly model information. In particular, the EHRI collection graph integrates both concrete and “virtual” representations of archival hierarchies and is therefore able to capture physical and provenential characteristics of dispersed archival collection. Utilising graph technology has allowed EHRI to integrate information about more than 230,000 archival units, physically held at more than 588 cultural heritage institutions located in 33 countries into its Online Portal. This unprecedented aggregation of Holocaust-related archival data allows for the first time access to sources at a pan-European level.
Protective coating is effective for different inorganic substrates of historical and modern buildings, especially in urban areas. The self-cleaning properties of the coating enable historic objects and modern facades to keep their aesthetic appearance longer, and decrease regular maintenance costs. The product is eco-friendly with zero negative footprints on the environment. It uses the power of UV light to decompose pollutants and rains to wash decomposed pollutants of the surface (self-cleaning effect). The innovation decreases level of aero pollution in urban areas and improves appearance of urban landscapes. Therefore, it improves quality of life in urban areas and aesthetic appearance of urban landscapes, adding self-cleaning properties to historic and modern facades. Main advantage of new consolidant for carbonate-based materials is greater consolidation efficiency of historic materials and consolidation of deeper layers of degraded materials. It results in greater durability of consolidated historic material and could preserve historic material for longer periods of time. Due to water used as a solvent, the consolidant is eco-toxicologically friendly.
In the context of the research project ‘A Million Pictures. Magic Lantern Slide Heritage as Artefacts in the Common European History of Learning’, López and Frutos (University of Salamanca) proposed the use of descriptive content analysis as a method for the taxonomic organization of magical lantern slides in Europe. López and Frutos developed a controlled vocabulary that would facilitate the classification of magical lantern slides according to their discursive gender. A vocabulary that should serve as a relational architecture for the design and development of web application Linternauta. The web application aimed at the interpretation of cultural heritage associated with the collection of magic lantern slides by promoting technological and educational innovation. It aims to boost the knowledge, the accessibility and the cultural value present in the magic lantern slides thanks to the new digital technologies and directly stimulate the contemporary cultural experience with this audiovisual heritage.
The SMooHS project has developed wireless monitoring systems using new miniature sensor technologies for minimally invasive installation as well as smart data processing. The technology is easy to use and completely non-destructive, with only minor visual impact on the application surface. A large variety of sensors (relative humidity, temperature, TVOC, light, UV light, air velocity, material moisture, salt content, stress, strain, vibration, fine dust, etc.) are able to detect very diverse environmental influences and their effects in terms of deterioration and damage risk. Due to the implemented data pre-processing and the usage of real-data driven deterioration and material models identification of risks, suitable measures for preventive conservation can be taken more easily than before.
The goal of ArchAIDE is to optimise and economise the process of pottery identification, making knowledge accessible wherever archaeologists are working. ArchAIDE supports the classification and interpretation work of archaeologists (during fieldwork and post-excavation analysis) with an innovative app for tablets and smartphones, designed as an essential tool for archaeologists. Pottery fragments are photographed, their characteristics sent to a comparative collection (showing typical pottery types and characteristics, against which pottery to be identified by the user is compared), which activates the image recognition system, resulting in a response with all relevant information linked, and ultimately stored, within a database that allows sharing online. This goal has been supported through a range of practical elements, including: a digital comparative collection for multiple pottery types incorporating digitised paper catalogues and multiple photography campaigns; an automatic-as-possible workflow to digitise paper catalogues and improve search and retrieval; a multilingual thesaurus of descriptive pottery terms, including French, German, Spanish, Catalan, English and Italian.
The CHIME App is a mobile application developed through the EU and JPI-funded CHIME project, exploring innovative ways of planning and managing jazz festivals in online environments. In particular the App has the potential to significantly improve communication with – and measurement of – festival audiences.
