Europeana Research 2016 grant winners’ final reports published

The Europeana Research Grants Programme was launched in 2016 and proved hugely popular. Digital humanities researchers applied with projects that addressed research questions by using Europeana data. The high volume of proposals proved just how important it is to make heritage data available. And the wide variety of ideas showed the depth of potential in Europeana Collections material.

Grants were awarded to three projects, all of which have now published reports on their work. A Europeana Research mini blog series covers what they’ve achieved and where they’ll go from here.

For music lovers…

Music Scholarship Online (MuSO) is a new virtual research environment dedicated to born-digital and digitized scholarship in music. It contributes to the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC), an organization promoting digital scholarship and incorporating increasingly diverse content.

This project brought together an early modern music and digital humanities scholar, a digital humanities librarian with a degree in vocal studies, a music special collections librarian with a background in jazz, and an alternative academic professional with no prior experience in music, but a wealth of knowledge about aggregation, digital resource discovery, and ARC metadata.
Read the MuSO blog and final report.

For poetry lovers…

Europeana Collections has a rich body of spoken performances of poems by 19th-century French poets, waiting to be discovered, explored, and used for research. For the Visualising Voice project, these recordings were the key to addressing the lack of studies of spoken word performances of poetry in French, and to kick-starting a more general awareness of how performance affects our interpretation of a particular poem, across a wide range of languages and cultural traditions.
Read the Visualising Voice blog and final report

For map lovers...

For almost 250 years, Denmark colonized what is now the US Virgin Islands (St. Croix, St. Thomas and St. John), until the territory was sold to the US in 1917. Mapping a Colony seeks to create an interactive map of Denmark and the US Virgin Islands, which highlights and investigates the Danish colonial heritage with a specific focus on the Danish West Indies, as it manifests itself historically and/or presently in these areas. In doing so, it will create a deeper understanding of how the colonial past is still very much present in our contemporary society and landscapes.
Read the Mapping a Colony blog and final report

Mapping a colony prototype

Keep an eye out for the 2017 Grants Programme announcement in the following days if you want to enter this year's contest!