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Mapping the Reception and Legacy of the Vikings in Europe

Project description

Mapping the Viking legacy

The Viking legacy has been reshaped over a thousand years to reflect changing European identities, politics, and cultural memories. Even today, the Viking past continues to influence contemporary society in complex ways. With this in mind, the ERC-funded NorseMap project tackles the challenge of mapping public perceptions of the Vikings, focusing on the evolving use of Viking history. By crowdsourcing data and using app-based GIS mapping, NorseMap adapts citizen science techniques to humanities research. This approach redefines reception studies, drawing connections across literature, politics, tourism, and branding to create a Deep Map that reveals the many forces shaping our understanding of the Viking past and its ongoing cultural impact.

Objective

The modern understanding of the Vikings has developed over a thousand years to reflect the politics, identities and cultural memories of very different communities across Europe. This shared history impacts on many aspects of contemporary society and is appropriated in increasingly diverse ways. NorseMap posits that the oversignification of the Viking past can be approached as an ecology of interactions within which ideas of European culture and identity are made and remade. While this working hypothesis is based on observation of the current reception landscape, it is difficult to test because of a lack of data on public perceptions of the Vikings and the limitations of reception studies as currently conceived to map such a complex legacy. The guiding question that NorseMap asks – how is the Viking past used today, and how has public understanding of the Vikings evolved over time? – thus poses profound challenges for the discipline at both an applied and conceptual level.

The applied challenge is how we capture widely dispersed data on uses of the Viking past in the present day. The conceptual challenge involves rethinking reception studies so it can address historical legacy at a macro level and account for the complexities of the reception ecosystem. NorseMap will make a step change in cultural heritage crowdsourcing, taking the model of app-based GIS mapping used for large-scale citizen science documentation projects and adapting it to the humanities. Reorienting the discipline to map the Viking legacy will entail drawing together various strands of reception history – Literature & Art; Branding & Tourism; Politics & Identity – and demonstrating how they have interacted to create a uniquely pliable cultural memory, using a conceptual lens inspired by Actor-Network Theory. The resulting Deep Map of reception will reveal the multiple influences that intersect in any individual reimagining of the Vikings and open up new ways of thinking about the remediated past.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

Keywords

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Funding Scheme

HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

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Call for proposal

(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG

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Host institution

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK - NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, CORK
Net EU contribution
€ 1 999 519,00
Address
WESTERN ROAD
T12 YN60 Cork
Ireland
Region
Ireland Southern South-West
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
€ 1 999 519,00

Beneficiaries (1)