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Europeana reuse - be inspired

Educators, researchers, culture lovers and creatives enjoy and reuse Europeana’s digital cultural heritage to reach their own goals. Be inspired by the innovative ways they are enriching educational resources, opening up new areas of research, or creating new art, games and entertainments. 

Education

‘While looking through Europeana’s collections, I found amazing images of locomotives and steam engines which inspired me to make a set of videos. The most mind-blowing image for me was a picture of the steam carriage patent from 1828. The idea that this image from almost 200 years ago evolved into the modern-day car really cemented my realisation that engineering and history are intertwined and I wanted to share this idea with other people.’

Teddy Tablante is an American Mechanical and Electrical Engineer with over a decade of experience in the semiconductor industry. He developed his Branch Education YouTube channel to teach engineering, science and technology topics to 14-18 year olds. Teddy’s videos on steam engines won the 2019 Europeana STEM Challenge. Find out more

Europeana, Minecraft & Mozilla Hubs by Emma Abbate / Connecting Formal and Informal Education with Digital Cutlural Heritage, August 2020, CC BY-SA

‘I use Europeana as part of a gamified approach to digital archives that enhances creativity in the classroom. Students collect material on Europeana and use it to solve a problem and complete a challenge in the virtual world on Minecraft or in the augmented virtual reality of Mozilla Hubs.’

Emma AbbateTeacher, Italy
Felt monsters
'Felt monsters', Augmented Age of Inventions and Discoveries, Oulunkylän yhteiskoulu, Finland, 2019, CC BY-SA

Our pupils used Europeana’s collections to inspire the design of some robotic sea monsters, as part of an Erasmus+ project for secondary schools called Augmented Age of Inventions. The results are truly original - far from the mainstream manga style that normally influences their art.

Annamaria Pérez-MoralArt teacher, Catalonia
Anatomical open air museum screenshot
Anatomical Open Air Museum, Luigia Palumbo, Italy, 2021, CC BY-SA

I use Europeana to find science resources. My students research anatomical models, ancient drawings and digitised documents as elements of innovative projects focused on Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. Mixing Europeana resources and AR or VR enhances student motivation, emotional involvement and promotes active learning and problem-solving skills.

Luigia PalumboTeacher, Italy
A screen shot of the app on the mobile
A screen set from Artence (by the students Cátia da Costa Pereira, Marco André Ribeiro Braga, Pedro Duarte Ferreira de Matos Bexiga), 2022, CC BY-SA

My students of the Interactive Media Design course used Europeana as the theme for their Interaction Design projects: to design a mobile application that makes use of Europeana's content. The resulting prototypes are inspiring and range from games to educational apps.

Jorge CardosoEducator, Portugal
Bouquet of tulips
Bouquet of Tulips - Rijksmuseum, Netherlands - Public Domain. Exemplifying educational resources by Aglaia Ruffino Jalles on the importance of tulips to trade in the Netherlands. 

Europeana is a great source of material for my language classes. I use Europeana sources to make my language classes and practice exercises more interesting and rich. I use the texts and images from Europeana to start discussions in class and to work on language knowledge in general with my students.

Aglaia Ruffino JallesTeacher, Canada

Research

Using autobiographical writings from prisoners of war

Early-career scholar Dr Saverio Vita looked to Europeana to help him combine his strong interest in ethical issues about war and his experience in working with digital documents. 

'I used Europeana material to build a platform on which anyone can access real war diaries, with comments and introductions. I think that everyone who works in a research context should know and use the available digital collections - they're a great resource for both the general public and academic audiences.' Saverio Vita, research fellow, Italy

Find out more

Re-use page quotation 4a (Saverio Vita)
Title:
Upgrading History. Diaries from the War Front
Creator:
Saverio Vita
Date:
2019
Country:
Italy

Russian and Soviet posters
Russian and Soviet posters visualisation, Elizaveta Berquin, 2020, In copyright.

I used the data extracted from the Europeana APIs to develop a web application to visualise Soviet posters for my master’s thesis in Digital Humanities. Europeana is a powerful resource that gives access to a rich collection of digitised cultural heritage across Europe and can be used in many creative ways to explore almost any topic.

Elizaveta BerquinResearcher, Belgium
Portrait of Emperor Napoleon
Portrait of Emperor Napoleon I - Rijksmuseum, Netherlands - Public Domain.

I used Europeana images, its Twitter feed and blog in my dissertation research. I wanted to discover who uses digital images and why, as well as how we, as digital cultural heritage creators, can help people discover and reuse digital images by raising their ranking in the Google Images Search.

Michele ReillyProfessor and Digital Projects Coordinator, Arkansas, USA
Screenshot of an online exhibition
Antwerpen 1920 exhibition, Jurryt van de Vooren, 2022, CC BY-SA

As a sports historian, I use a lot of Europeana material for my research, for my website Sportgeschiedenis.nl and on social media. At the end of 2021 I asked my university students in Mechelen to collect photos from Europeana of the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp to make an online exhibition about the Games.

Jurryt van de VoorenSports historian, The Netherlands
Buffalo head
Büffelkopf - Ethnological Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Germany - CC BY-NC-SA.

I use Europeana galleries to support my research. This one is devoted to beaded art from Cameroon. It brings together objects from different cultural spheres and helps me explore iconography, symbolism and meaning, contributing to my research on authenticity and inherent notions of cultural, societal and emotional value.

Eelco BruinsmaResearcher, The Netherlands
International newspapers on a desk with a telephone resting on them
Foreign newspapers on the newsroom desk by Saarinen, UA - Finnish Heritage Agency, Finland - CC BY.

When working in natural language processing (NLP), it can be difficult to find interesting texts showing a variety of ideas, times and languages. Preparing my 'Introduction to NLP' course, I decided to use Europeana to teach students how NLP tasks, like entity recognition, work. I hope that students have gone beyond the course to continue to use Europeana content to learn about language and our world.

Katharine JarmulPrincipal Data Scientist

Creatives

Personal stories transform WW1 video game

Captivated by his own family history during WW1, Yoan Fanise, creative director and co-founder of DigixArt created ‘11-11: Memories Retold’ with animation studio Aardman - a video game with a touching story about the relationship between two men on different sides of the war. 

He says, ‘The game is about the two sides of World War One, shown from the perspective of the Canadian allies and the German army, in which you play both characters. We had a lot of sources from the allied side, but not from the German side. For the character of Harry - the German soldier - we needed more materials and Europeana was a great source for that. Europeana 1914-1918 has so many documents, some of which are very personal, especially those collected from families. Those are the stories that I was looking for in order to humanise Harry.

‘Europeana has a nice licence filter, we know what we can and can’t use and since we wanted to put the documents into the game we needed to make sure the copyright is cleared. This was one of the reasons we used Europeana.'  Find out more

GIF by Nick Cave, Birmingham, UK. Based on 1. A periscope being used above an operation which is projected onto a lantern, gouache painting by W.R. Seton. Wellcome Collection.  2. Praying skeleton, W. Cheselden. 3. Infirmary, Museon via Europeana

I’ve been making short and funny animated gifs using free archive images on Europeana for a while now and I’ve created a skill-sharing course showing other people how to do it too. I love the fact you can save your favourite Europeana images to use later. It means you can experiment with ideas.

Nick J Cave,Creative animator, @6SecondHistory, UK
World of Art Jigsaw Puzzle
World of Art jigsaw puzzle, Marcin Novak

I have used wonderful paintings from Europeana (and elsewhere) in 'World of Art' - a video game for people who love art and jigsaw puzzles. I created it during the pandemic to bring some peace, joy and education to gamers and non-gamers alike.

Marcin NowakGames creator and educator, Poland
Two people wearing headscarves, silhouetted against flowers
Petra Zehner, 2022, CC-BY-SA, based on A Bouquet, 1820, Rijksmuseum, Netherlands, Public Domain.

Collage artists are perpetually looking for copyright-free, high quality images to work with, and Europeana is an excellent source. I use their images for personal work and the weekly creative challenges of Paris Collage Collective. Placing old images into new contexts teaches us more about who we are than any history book.

Petra ZehnerGraphic artist and founder of Paris Collage Collective, France
A family playing Monopoly
Gezelschap van twee mannen en twee vrouwen speelt Monopoly aan keukentafel - Gooi and Vecht Historic, Netherlands - CC BY-SA.

My team's editor found a great photograph on a Europeana blog and used it in 'Ruthless: Monopoly's Secret History', a documentary for the broadcaster PBS. We used the photograph to introduce the popular game of Monopoly as something that now celebrates capitalism but was initially created to critique it. These kinds of documentaries wouldn't exist without the efforts of institutions that collect, archive and share historic material.

Dominic LoundsAssociate Producer, USA

Culture lovers

Gabriel Rosenstock is a bilingual poet and was inspired by artwork he found in Europeana from the Slovak National Gallery to write a series of tanka (Japanese for 'a little song') poems in Irish and English. 'Ekphrastic tanka responds to artwork and is one of my favourite literary pursuits - works of art triggering spontaneous utterances, guided by syllabic rules.'

is this what I am
a knight-errant on the road
some kind of throwback
     i am my own laughing stock
     and the butt of my own jokes

an é sin mise
ridire fáin ar an ród
neach ait ón seanam
    im' cheap magaidh agam féin
    cúis gháire ó Dhia chugainn

               Gabriel Rosenstock, poet, Ireland

Re-use page quotation - Gabriel Rosenstock
Title:
Don Quichotte
Creator:
Majerník, Cyprián
Date:
1943
Institution:
Slovak National Gallery
Country:
Slovakia

A woman's face

Portrait by Pookie_art, in copyright, based on Vilhelmine Biering (1852-1899), The National Library of Denmark CC BY-NC-ND

I am a freelance artist from Thailand and I specialise in making artwork about people in history. I really enjoy searching and looking at pictures on the Europeana website. There are all kinds of artworks there to help me to learn about art creation. The things I find on Europeana are interesting and inspiring.

PookieArtist, Thailand
A chess piece
Chessmen in the form of Saracens and Crusaders. Wellcome Collection, United Kingdom - CC BY.

As co-producers of a podcast shining a light on the oft-forgotten history of our Scottish Borderlands, we find Europeana a valuable source of imagery and archive material. The depiction of The Crusades in terms of a chess game is striking and chimes with our narrative. Using Europeana has triggered many ideas for future podcast instalments.

Mary Craig and Doug SwanPodcasters, UK

New Year card

New Year card, Marie Bellando Mitjans (aka Gabian Spirit), 2021, CC BY-SA

I use Europeana material to create collages for things like New Year cards. I spotted several beautiful pictures from 1920-21 in Europeana. I found maps to create graphic backgrounds as well as landscapes, fashion pictures, graphic elements, stamps, etc. Europeana is really easy to use and it's genuinely interesting and fun to work with these testimonies of the past.

Marie Bellando MitjansIllustrator and author, France
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