CRAFTED: Enrich and promote traditional and contemporary crafts

This project 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.

Crafts are the living creative expressions of our traditions and are strongly intertwined in the fabrics and cultural objects of our communities. The richness of European crafts shows in the combination of tangible and intangible heritage: the hand-made objects, such as jewellery, textiles and garments, and the traditions and techniques inherited from our ancestors to create those objects.

This project aims to enable the preservation of both material and immaterial aspects of craftsmanship and thus ensure a comprehensive understanding and appreciation of the communities and cultures from which it belongs to. For this, the project will aggregate more than 186,000 new high-quality records that showcase tangible objects produced or used by artisans and document their immaterial contexts, such as techniques and knowledge. Additionally, it will upgrade over 26,000 records already existing in Europeana to an open license.

It will also develop and deploy an innovative human-in-the-loop methodology (e.g. requiring human interaction) that repurposes and extends state-of-the-art digital tools, including AI tools, for image, audio and semantic analysis. The project will enhance existing crowdsourcing and aggregation tools to support a large scale automatic enrichment of datasets made available through Europeana For this, the project will build upon the results of two previous Generic Services projects - CrowdHeritage and Europeana XX - as well as use the aggregation platform MINT developed by the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA).

The project will enhance the awareness of tangible and intangible aspects of European crafts through editorial. Additionally, it will host three ‘edit-a-thons’ to enrich Wikipedia pages with more comprehensive and diverse information about crafts heritage, including images and videos from Europeana.

Finally, CRAFTED will deliver three workshops and capacity-building resources such as guidelines and documentation to support the adoption of AI-driven methods and tools across the cultural heritage sector.

This project is a Europeana Generic Services project, and it is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility of the European Union.

https://pro.europeana.eu/project/crafted