CRAFTED

Dates: 2021-2023

Call: Europeana / Connecting Europe Facility of the European Union

MCA role:

• Activity leader Content selection, preparation, ingestion
• Contributor to Editorial,curatorial and public engagement activities
• Coordination of the capacity building publication
• Dissemination activities

E-mail: contact@michael-culture.eu

Description:

This project aiming at supporting the transfer of European crafts to future generations by aggregating, enriching and promoting tangible crafts heritage and preserving intangible skills and knowledge from craftsmen and artisans.

Crafts are the living creative expressions of our traditions and are strongly intertwined in the fabrics and cultural objects of our communities. The richness of European crafts shows in the combination of tangible and intangible heritage: the hand-made objects, such as jewellery, textiles and garments, and the traditions and techniques  inherited from our ancestors to create those objects.

For this, the project will aggregate more than 186,000  new high-quality records that showcase tangible objects produced or used by artisans and document their immaterial context, such as techniques  and knowledge. Additionally, it will upgrade over 26,000 records already existing in Europeana to an open license.

It will also develop and deploy an innovative human-in-the-loop methodology (e.g. requiring human interaction) that repurposes and extends state-of-the-art digital tools, including AI tools, for image, audio and semantic analysis. The project will enhance existing crowdsourcing and aggregation tools to support a large scale automatic enrichment of datasets made available through Europeana For this, the project will build upon the results of two previous Generic Services projects – CrowdHeritage and Europeana XX – as well as use the aggregation platform MINT developed by the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA).

The project will enhance the awareness of tangible and intangible aspects of European crafts through editorial. Additionally, it will hostthree ‘edit-a-thons’ to enrich Wikipedia pages with more comprehensive and diverse information about crafts heritage, including images and videos from Europeana.

Finally, CRAFTED will deliver three workshops and capacity-building resources such as guidelines and documentation to support the adoption of AI-driven methods and tools across the cultural heritage sector.