Inventing Europe

Inventing Europe is a pioneering collaborative project in which historians and cultural heritage institutions throughout Europe together tell a new kind of history of Europe. Following the paths of technology from the transport and communication revolutions of the Nineteenth Century through to the present day, in the course of half a year the project will realize an online exhibition that shows to a wide range of users the ways technology has shaped Europe – and the ways Europe has shaped technology.

Based on research from the six-part book series Making Europe: Technolgy and Transformations 1850-2000 the virtual exhibit explores the broad themes of globalization, consumption, communication, infrastructures, knowledge societies, and governance. It seeks to make its results available to a wider audience by drawing on the rich and growing online collections of museums, archives and libraries throughout Europe and beyond.

The exhibit, developed at Imperial College, London, will allow participating museums to share relevant content from their online collections quickly and easily. These appear as related content next to the objects within the exhibit, and serve as a portal for further exploration on the web.

The prototype exhibit, "Europe, Interrupted" was built in connection to the European Science Foundation EUROCORES theme Inventing Europe: Technology and the Making of Europe, 1850 to the Present by the Foundation for the History of Technology, in collaboration with five science and technology museums

The new exhibit is expected to launch in the summer of 2011. Features of the final exhibition include:

• A series of six themed storytelling environments where users can explore the European stories from a range of perspectives

• 42 object-oriented stories based on current historical research

• Multiple views to allow viewers to contextualize stories and objects in time, on maps, and by theme

• Up to 200 embedded images and objects

• Contributions from a broad range of cultural heritage institutions and collections to help users to explore related content and themes throughout the web

We welcome participation from all relevant cultural heritage collections. For more information, please contact communications manager Suzanne Lommers: s.b.lommers(at)tue.nl