Five of these projects were funded under the Europeana Generic Services call, and one under the Automated Translation call. Europeana Foundation is a beneficiary in all funded projects, joining partners from 19 EU countries. The projects will start from April 2021 and run until 2022-2023. Explore what they will achieve below!
Multilingual experience
The CEF Automated Translation 2020 call aimed to extend the provision of language resources through the European Language Resource Coordination’s SHARE repository with the use of innovative translation tools. It also looked to integrate automated translation functionalities into other DSIs, public services or SMEs.
The Europeana Translate project was funded under this call to optimise the multilingual experience of the Europeana website. The project will connect the Europeana and the eTranslation DSIs to allow the automatic translation of millions of records from their local language to English, improving the usability of heritage resources on Europeana.
Innovative approaches
The Europeana 2020 CEF call aimed to continue supporting cultural heritage institutions to open their collections with the use of innovative technological approaches. The five projects funded under this call will enhance Europeana’s infrastructure by increasing high quality content and enhancing diversity and local representation in our collections. The projects funded under this call will also experiment with novel technological approaches such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to improve the discoverability, multilinguality, engagement and use of Europeana content.
EnrichEuropeana+ aims to enhance the Transcribathon Platform by developing and integrating new tools based on innovative artificial intelligence and natural language processing. This will help to automate transcriptions as well as support semantic enrichment and translation of metadata. The project will host participatory events to engage Europeana audiences and the general public with manuscripts from the 19th century.
Europeana Subtitled aims to enable audiovisual media heritage from major national broadcasters from Europe to be enjoyed by professional and non-professional audiences. It will increase the use of this media through closed captioning and subtitling, as well as enabling automatic speech recognition and machine translation to produce high-quality captions and English subtitles. The project will work with educators to create learning resources with audiovisual content and focus on language learning using the Content Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) methodology.
CRAFTED aims to support 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. It will develop an innovative, human-in-the-loop methodology to support automatic enrichment at a large scale. It will provide the cultural sector with capacity building resources that support the adoption of AI-driven methods.
Jewish History Tours aims to create engaging online tours on pan-European topics such as multiculturalism, persecution and migration. The tour production will be supported by several innovations including a Europeana-based platform for authoring tours; an AI recommendation system for authors; and a semi-automatic geographical enrichment and machine translation for multilingual tours.
WEAVE aims to develop a framework to link the tangible and intangible heritage of cultural communities, safeguarding the rich and invaluable cultural heritage which they represent. The project will create editorials and capacity building activities to develop a closer connection between cultural heritage institutions, cultural communities and Europeana. The project will create a WEAVE Toolkit using AI and other novel technologies, which will support the use of annotations and semi-automatic recognition of specific gestures and movements, as well as the visualisation of performances and 3D models.
The execution of the European Commission funded projects is overseen by the Innovation And Networks Executive Agency (INEA). Kyriaki Tragouda, Unit C5 – Telecommunications Project Manager at INEA says, 'We are excited to see how these projects will support cultural heritage institutions to make the best use of Europeana in their own public activities, as well as to open up their collections and provide high-quality engaging digital content to Europeana with the use of innovative approaches and tools.'