European and National Programs

EUROPEANA

The Time Machine FET Flagship is committed to valorize the Europeana integrated catalog and collections, as the basis for higher level data models. At the technical level, Time Machine will help the national aggregators and partners to leapfrog to new technological standard for cultural heritage storing, display and analysis, facilitating the access and enrichment of Europeana’s 53 million cultural documents.

Archives Portal Europe

The Time Machine FET Flagship has the support of the Archives Portal Europe Foundation, a consortium of 17 European national archival institutions, which maintains and further develops the Archives Portal Europe, the largest online access point to descriptions of archival material. At the moment – February 2017 – the Archives Portal Europe gives access to more than 250 million descriptions brought together by more than 800 archival institutions from 33 European countries. To these descriptions are already more than 200 million digital objects (scans) directly linked via the Archives Portal Europe and much more are made accessible, namely via their presentations on the websites of the Archives Portal Europe’s data providers. The Archives Portal Europe team has recently started an ambitious endeavour: providing a uniform way of publishing more detailed information from rich archival sources such as Notary records. For these so-called additional finding aids the newest version of the international standard for archival descriptions EAD will be used: EAD3, which can tag detailed information on for instance events, persons and places in a more meaningful and semantic way. This is exactly the kind of information the Time Machine FET Flagship project needs and the Archives Portal Europe will offer the project access to its network of data providers and co-operation in implementing ways to make use of their information via its infrastructure.

DARIAH

The Time Machine FET Flagship receives the support of DARIAH, the pan-european research infrastructure for the Arts and the Humanities, regrouping several hundreds of scholars and dozens of research facilities. DARIAH’s working groups covering topics ranging from Text and Data analytics to Guidelines and Standards are already playing a crucial role for organising the technological and scientific discussion addressed in the Flagship and will be key to structure their on-going development at the European level.

EuroSDR

The Time Machine FET Flagship is strongly supported by the EuroSDR – the European Spatial Data Research network linking national mapping and cadastral agencies with research institutes and universities for the purpose of applied research in spatial data provision, management and delivery. EuroSDR advanced expertise about 3D modelling, spatial data archiving, historic data infrastructures, advanced photogrammetry, Linked Data, Big Geodata and ‘Geo’-business modelling contributes to making the Time Machine reality.

ICARUS

The Time Machine FET Flagship is supported by the ICARUS network, regrouping 160 archives and scientific institutions from 30 European countries. This continuously expanding network of coordinated institutions brings to the project the access to extremely large collection of documents and the access to relevant expertise to interpret them. Time Machine shares equally with all these institutions the technological innovations and infrastructure developed in the Flagship.

CERL

The Consortium of European Research Libraries is partner of the Time Machine Project. It includes 300 European libraries (and a growing number of US libraries with substantial European book heritage) and run the Heritage of the Printed Book database, with over 6 million records of books printed between 1450 and 1830.

IIIF Consortium

Time Machine promotes the use of the IIIF APIs, guidelines and best practices. It encourages partners to share their cultural heritage data using these open standards and to develop new services in this framework. Time Machine also organises the development of higher level services based on the IIIF standards including handwritten word recognition, image matching, document analysis, complex annotations and more and explores the extension of the IIIF approach to other kind of services, beyond image delivery. This could include services for music, video, 3d, maps, biography, genealogy, and so forth.

READ

The Time Machine FET Flagship is supported by the READ H2020 project, a multidisciplinary consortium of 13 partners working in Computer Science, Pattern Recognition, Machine Learning, Image Processing and Humanities. The project boosts the development and usage of cutting edge technology for the automated recognition, transcription, indexing and enrichment of handwritten archival documents and develops a collaborative platform for this purpose.

EAUH

Time Machine collaborates with the European Association for Urban History (EAUH). EAUH was established in 1989 with support from the European Union. Its goal is to provide a multidisciplinary forum for historians, geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, art and architectural historians, planners and other scholars working on various aspects of urban history from the middle ages until the present. The EAUH supports the FET Time Machine Flagship because it will be an excellent opportunity to make big data available and accessible for the reconstruction of the historical development of European cities in relation to economic growth, cultural diversity and migration networks. These topics are highly relevant to the scientific network and the conferences of the EAUH.

E-RIHS

Time Machine collaborates with the European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science (E-RIHS). This pan-European project aims to support research on heritage interpretation, preservation, documentation and management. The project will provide state-of-the-art tools and services to interdisciplinary research communities that advance understanding and preservation of global heritage.

MAPIRE

Time Machine collaborates with the MAPIRE project, a cooperation between the Austrian State Archives, the Geophysics and Space Science Department of the University of Budapest and a number of other institutions. The project originally enabled the user to navigate historical maps of the Habsburg empire using state-of-the art technologies including Google Maps, Google Earth and OpenStreetMap. It recently extended its area of coverage to now include 20 European and more than 100.000 map sheets.

15cBOOKTRADE

Time Machine collaborates with 15cBOOKTRADE to help retracing the history of 450 000 copies of incunabula, currently located in about 4000 different public libraries. The circulation of these books will be informed by the other historical reconstructions and circulation maps developped by the Time Machine’s partners.

FRAGMENTARIUM

Time Machine collaborates with Fragmentarium, the International Digital Research Lab for Medieval Manuscript Fragments. Collaborating with 15 partner institutions throughout Europe and the USA, the project aims, over the next years, to lay the foundations for research on medieval manuscript fragments by providing open standards and guidelines.

CLARIAH

Time Machine works with CLARIAH, the Common Lab Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, to define sustainable strategies for accessing, processing, preserving and exploiting digital data for humanities scholars.

GOLDEN AGENTS

Time Machine collaborates closely with the Golden Agent project, which goal is to disclose existing and new datasets on the production of the creative industries of the Dutch Golden Age by combining linked open data and multi-agent technology. The project will make 2 millions scans available of notarial acts/probate inventories in the City Archives of Amsterdam providing this way insight in the consumption of cultural goods of the 17th Century of Amsterdam.

CREATE

Time Machine collaborates also with the CREATE Program of the University of Amsterdam. This program volunteered to develop an Amsterdam Time Machine, based on the Venetian experience, exploiting the wealth of data and knowledge present within the Amsterdam context.

POSTDATA

Time Machine collaborates with POSTDATA (Poetry Standardization and Linked Open Data), an ERC Starting Grant EU Funded project, whose aim is to transform poetry collections into standardized, machine-readable Linked Open Data. It will allow researchers from different languages and cultures to retrieve information from sources of varied origins, making data interoperable thanks to the combination of ontologies, Natural Language Processing technologies and machine learning applied to poetry analysis.

FRIDA

Time Machine collaborated with project FRIDA, a pioneer digital Atlas of festivals in Renaissance Italy, with the long-term goal to focus on festivals in Renaissance Europe, developed at the University of Minnesota, in collaboration with the researchers at Politecnico di Milano and Columbia University. FRIDA aims to develop new methodological and experimental approaches to overcome recovery biases of historical records and systematically recompose the montage of ephemeral events in a way that allows for the reconstruction of a full multi-media experience. The technological development proposed by Time Machine will substantially advance the tool set available to interrogate the FRIDA Atlas.

 

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