The “Inventing Europe” Virtual Exhibit is a pioneering collaboration between historians, web designers, and cultural heritage institutions throughout Europe to create a new exploratory environment for understanding recent European history. Based on research from the six-part book series Making Europe: Technology and Transformations 1850-2000, the virtual exhibit explores the broad themes of globalization, consumption, communication, infrastructures, knowledge societies, and governance. These form the basis for stories that allow users to make connections within and between the rich and growing online collections of museums, archives and libraries throughout Europe and beyond. The exhibit will show how these national collections together shape a transnational collective memory of European cultural heritage.

The Exhibit platform, developed in close collaboration with the Social Computing Group at Imperial College, London, integrates these collections in the form of static as well as dynamic content. Several of their objects will serve as the basis for a large number of relevant essays that are related to the broad themes of the book series. Furthermore, the exhibit will allow participating heritage institutions 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.

“Europe, Interrupted”, a prototype exhibition, is currently online at www.inventingeurope.eu. This was built drawing on the work of the European Science Foundation-funded research program “Inventing Europe” and  the collections of five science and technology museums. 

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
• 36 object-oriented stories based on current historical research
• A number of theme paths that take the visitors on an expert tour across the Exhibit
• Multiple views to allow viewers to contextualize stories and objects in time, on maps, and by theme
• Over 200 embedded images and objects
• Each embedded item is related to a series of objects in collections of partner institutions
• Possibilities to explore objects, themes and stories further on Europeana
• Contributions from a broad range of cultural heritage institutions and collections to help users to explore related content and themes throughout the web

The project collaborates with a large number of cultural heritage institutions from all across Europe who have agreed to make their growing online collections available for the project. At the moment these concern the Deutsches Museum, the Dokumentationzentrum Alltagskultur der DDR, the Hungarian Museum for Science, Technology and Transport, the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden, the Museum Centre Vapriikki, Tampere, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, the Norsk Teknisk Museum, the Science Center NEMO in Amsterdam, the Science Museum in London, and the Tropical Research Institute of Portugal.

We welcome participation from all relevant cultural heritage collections.  For more information about participation in the Inventing Europe Virtual Exhibit please see our Notes for Contributors, and contact communications manager Suzanne Lommers: s.b.lommers@tue.nl

You can find a short overview of the project here or by visiting our website www.inventingeurope.eu or at Facebook.