Values across space and time
The discussion on values is now as pertinent as ever. The vision of VAST is to bring (moral) values to the forefront in the field of advanced digitisation. VAST seeks to study European values across space and time and to exploit the digitised tangible and intangible cultural assets associated with values, in order to support and empower cultural heritage institutions and practitioners, promoting this way Europe’s cultural heritage. Emphasis will be placed in those values considered fundamental for European Union and a unifying axis for all member states, forming sustainable communities and enabling citizens to live well together, such as freedom, democracy, equality, tolerance, dialogue, human dignity, and the rule of law. By providing advanced modelling, methods, techniques and digital tools, VAST will study how the meaning of specific values has been expressed through different narratives and user experiences. We aim to track these values in different mediums across space and time. We will study (1) values in ancient Greek tragedies and how they are appropriated by contemporary theatrical plays and audiences, (2) values in works of seventeenth-century natural philosophy and how they are received by experts in science museums and museum visitors and (3) values in folktales across countries and time periods, through a cross cultural perspective and how these values are received by storytelling experts in fairytale museums and museum visitors. VAST will create a collaborative platform to assist scholars, researchers, artists, museums and educators to curate, re-use and re-purpose this material, re-visiting moral values in the context of modern society. We will combine a storytelling platform with crowdsourcing, by providing a storytelling application that will allow the users to create their own stories and remix the content together with pre-selected tags of values, supporting the continuous consolidation of assets.