In 2021, the University of Warsaw, Faculty of History was awarded a Europeana Research Grant. Find out more about what the funded project achieved.
The University of Warsaw is one of the leading universities in Poland. Scholars participate in over 1,300 projects financed by national or international research programmes. The Faculty of History is one of the most prominent humanist research centres in the country, and aims to educate professionals who can explain the present by following the course of social, political, economic and cultural processes in societies throughout history.
The three-and-a-half year research project, People, Places and Events (PPE) develops new approaches to conducting historical geography research using graph-databases. The project will produce a toolkit to support interpretative analytical research and a second toolkit to create interactive visualisations. An active education programme with broad outreach is central to the interdisciplinary research group running the project.
The Europeana research grant supported the organisation of a workshop for cultural heritage institutions and researchers working with spatial humanities data. Workshop participants worked on preparing the ‘Warsaw Statement’, a document which aims to provide key points to consider in the development of cultural heritage spatial humanities data. The preliminary and final versions were made available as workshop proceedings on ‘Atlas Fontium’, the digital platform of the Polish Academy of Science - Institute of History | PAN, which was involved in the organisation of the workshop.
The workshop was held in a hybrid form on 23-25 March 2022 and focussed on general and Polish-specific issues related to the availability and use of cultural heritage spatial data, including:
spatial data in cultural heritage
cultural heritage institutions in leading developments
technical standards for aligning developments
organisational exchange for ensuring excellence
open infrastructure institutional practice and research to sustain capabilities
capacity building for enhancing digital and computational skills, esp. Citizen science
The workshop resulted in the Warsaw Statement on Spatial Data in Cultural Heritage, which was then published as a signed publication. The statement was conceived as practical guidance for humanities researchers and institutions working with geodata, and includes links for additional information aligned with citizen-science concepts.