“I didn’t say yes. I can say no to anything I say vile, and I don’t have to count the cost. But because you said yes, all that you can do, for all your crown and your trappings, and your guards—all that you can do is to have me killed.”
-Sophocles, Antigone
Thus speaks Antigone and draws the lines of battle: The Laws of God pitted against the Decrees of Man; Familial Obligation against State Authority; Woman’s Self-Determination against Male Dominance; Duty against Mortality. How many times have women and men not reanimated these ancient battlefields of values, always with some bard standing ready to immortalise them, in verse and song? And at the heart of all this stand the most basic of questions: What values encode our communities? How do these values define one’s self? It is the answers given to these questions through the medium of mythos, in its many diverse forms, that we sought to explore in the VAST project.
Why do values matter? Values define who we are. Values are the trails of our common legacy, our collective memory, the way we think about ourselves and the others. Values are historically dynamic, they travel through material culture (artefacts, books, scientific instruments etc.), they are appropriated in different places and times by different people, and they re-emerge in new cultural forms, whether tangible or intangible.
VAST has brought (moral) values to the forefront of advanced digitisation. The project has traced and inter-linked: a) values of the past through the analysis of collections of narratives, such as theatrical plays, fairy tales, and scientific documents, that come from different places and from significant moments of European history (Greek drama, 17th century Scientific Revolution texts, folktales); b) values of the present through the collection and digitision of how values are conveyed today and of how the audiences experience and perceive the communicated values.
An emphasis has been placed in those core European values considered fundamental for the formation of sustainable communities and enabling citizens to live well together, such as freedom, democracy, equality, tolerance, dialogue, human dignity, the rule of law.
The VAST project: Values Across Space and Time
VAST has managed to a) research existing collections of intangible assets and trace and inter-link the values emerging from them; b) expose audiences to moral values, collect and digitise their appropriations; and c) collect and digitise the experiences of those in charge of communicating values, especially through arts (focusing on theatre), folklore preservation (focusing on folktale storytelling), science (focusing on how science is communicated through museums) and education (focusing on museum educational programs).
VAST Core Objectives
• Study values across space and time: VAST scholars have annotated narratives with values and further consolidated, through its platform, digital assets such as texts, and images, enabling the study of how values have been transformed from antiquity to early modernity.
• A semantic graph over artefacts: An integrating conceptual schema has been designed, modelling contexts, interpretations, associations, historical-scale events and values, semantic relations among artefacts, stories and other types of narratives.
• Continuous digitisation of intangible content: VAST methods and tools have allowed the continuous digitisation of the experiences and stories of artists, professionals involved in the curation and communication of values , as well as of the audiences.
• Support Museums, Arts and Creative Industries, through the material that is annotated/digitised, and the new knowledge created, with values and stories being at the centre of the digitisation procedure. The digitised material and the methods, produced during VAST, allows Museums, the Arts and Creative Industries to enhance the inclusivity of their offerings and broaden their target audiences by systematically studying and understanding the values of stories and people.
