Virtual Exhibit
The “Inventing Europe” virtual exhibit is a pioneering collaboration between historians, web designers, and cultural heritage institutions throughout Europe to create a new exploratory environment for understanding recent European history. Based on research within the context of the Making Europe: Technology and Transformations 1850–2000 program, the virtual exhibit explores the broad themes of globalization, consumption, communication, infrastructures, knowledge societies, and governance. These themes form the basis for stories that allow users to make connections within and between the rich and growing online collections of museums, archives and libraries in Europe and beyond. The exhibit will show how, together, these national collections help shape a transnational collective memory of European cultural heritage. The first exhibition will go online in the fall of 2011.
Cultural heritage institutions from all across Europe are participating in the project and have agreed to make their growing online collections available. These institutions currently include the Deutsches Museum; the Dokumentationzentrum Alltagskultur der DDR; the Hungarian Museum for Science, Technology and Transport; the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden; the Museum Centre Vapriikki, Tampere; the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision; the Norsk Teknisk Museum; the Science Center NEMO in Amsterdam; the Science Museum in London; and the Tropical Research Institute of Portugal.
The exhibit platform, which has been developed in close collaboration with the Social Computing Group at Imperial College, London, integrates the museum collections. Museum objects will be covered in essays related to the broad themes of the Making Europe book series. Furthermore, the exhibit provides windows to further explorations on the web.
The virtual exhibitions will include:
- A series of six themed storytelling environments in which users can explore the European stories from a range of perspectives
- Thirty-six object-oriented stories based on current historical research
- A number of theme paths that take the visitors on an expert tour across the exhibit
- Multiple views to allow viewers to contextualize stories and objects in time, on maps, and by theme
- Over 200 embedded images and objects
- The relation of each embedded item to a series of objects in the collections of partner institutions
- Possibilities to further explore objects, themes, and stories on Europeana
- Contributions from a broad range of cultural heritage institutions and collections to help users explore related content and themes throughout the web.
A prototype exhibition entitled “Europe, Interrupted” is currently online at www.inventingeurope.eu. This exhibition was developed in 2009, drawing on the work of the European Science Foundation-funded research program “Inventing Europe” and the collections of five science and technology museums. The ongoing project builds on the experiences of the prototype.
For more information about participation in the Inventing Europe Virtual Exhibit, please contact communication manager Suzanne Lommers.
A short overview of the project is available on our website website or at Facebook.