EU FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT TIPS

Topic:The cultural heritage of war in contemporary Europe

Specific challenge: European nations and societies have had ambiguous relation to war since the beginning of the age of modern nation states. Wars were the culmination of patriotic efforts and cemented national identities. The horrors of wars pushed the same societies, nations and their elites to overcome traditional rivalries and to engage in the European construction that finally succeeded after World War II. The Nobel Peace Price received by the European Union in 2012 and the upcoming Europe-wide memorial events related to the first centenary of the outbreak of World War I and to the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II put in relief in an expressive way the many layers of the cultural heritage of war, whether for local communities, for national or for European identities.

Scope: The multidisciplinary, geographically balanced and comparative research will aim at exploring the complex relationship that contemporary European societies have with the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of the major armed conflicts fought on their soil in the 20th century (inter alia World War I and World War II but also Balkan wars, civil wars, revolutions, etc.).

The research will map the use of the cultural heritage of the selected major armed conflicts in memorial practices, media and popular culture, political appropriation, education, heritage preservation and related cultural heritage tourism. It will explore and conceptualise the role that this cultural heritage plays in local and national identities and in the practices and narratives laying the foundation of European identities. It will explore links between national cultural heritage traditions and assess how these can be better articulated, taking the impact of war on cultural memory into account.

Topic: Innovation ecosystems of digital cultural assetsREFLECTIVE-6-2015

Specific Challenge: The digital age has revolutionised our habits, behaviours and expectations. The utilisation of digital technologies for research in the humanities and social sciences demonstrates the need for innovation at the service of scholarship and its advancement. The shift to digital is impacting on identities and cultures and transforming the shape of the knowledge that we will transmit to future generations as well as the means by which we can interact with it. . This specific challenge responds to the growing urge to share the wealth of cultural resources, research and knowledge in our collections and recognises that new cultural assets are continually created. It will show how digital cultural resources can promote creativity and generate innovation in research design and methodology, lead to richer interpretations of the past, bring new perspectives to questions of identity and culture, and generate societal and economic benefits. Europe’s vast cultural heritage can be transformed into digital assets, whose integration and reuse through research-led methods can create value for European cultural institutions and heritage, tourism and the cultural and creative industries. The objective is to enhance the analysis of cultural resources to improve our understanding of how European identity can be traced, constructed or debated, and to use those resources to foster innovation across sectors.

Scope: Support and promote access to and resue of digital cultural heritage resources (available in scientific collections, archives, museums, libraries and cultural heritage sites) as part of research and innovation. Projects should enable new models and demonstrations of the analysis, interpretation and understanding of Europe's cultural and intellectual history and/or capitalising on state of the art technologies (e.g. mobile and wearable devices), bring cultural content to new audiences in novel ways, through the development of new environments, applications, tools, and services for digital cultural resources in scientific collections, archives, museums, libraries and cultural heritage sites. The developed technologies or services should be generated in the context of humanities research perspectives (identity, culture, questions of place, historical and cultural knowledge) and/or facilitate the access, reuse and exploitation of digital cultural resources meeting real user needs. They should illustrate how they allow new research questions to be formulated on the basis of cross-collaboration and/or stimulate cross-border, cross-lingual multi-disciplinary reuse of Europe's cultural heritage, enabling collaboration and partnerships and co-production of knowledge across sectors and communities of researchers and users. Proposals should demonstrate appropriate methods of re-using and repurposing digital assets, paving the way for wider exploitation of Europe's cultural resources and boosting innovation.