To respond to the multiple challenges of collaborative research in a transcultural, transdisciplinary, multilinguistic environment, as well as to ensure adequate dissemination of research findings, DETECt devised an innovative methodology to assist the integration of research, learning and public engagement activities. The initial phase of research was focused on establishing the methodological framework and designing and implementing the project’s portal, which has worked as the digital hub for the project’s activities. The semantic modelling of the domain has provided a base for structuring the semantic architecture of both DETECt portal and the project’s five main research areas: Space and place, History and politics, Production and distribution, Promotion and reception, Diversity.
During the first year, the consortium accomplished the difficult task of determining the nature and properties of a possible representative corpus for the study of transcultural identities in European crime narratives. Data collection provided the material to produce a corpus of European trans and cross-media crime series that has been studied with digital methodologies to produce visualizations and graphs that show the different geographical distribution and gender ratio of the most innovative formats that have been travelling across Europe. In the later phases of the project this corpus also provided dozens of case studies that have been further investigated throughout the project’s numerous scholarly publications.
From the second year, the consortium worked to create the digital learning materials that the project was committed to produce. Initially drafted on the DETECt portal and offered in this experimental form to university students in four different countries, these materials were later be revised, reedited, and transformed into the texts and videos finally published in DETECt MOOC ‘Euronoir: Cultural identity in European Popular Crime Narratives’. This period also saw the start of the work to produce DETECt webapp, a touristic application offering guided city tours on the trail of popular crime and noir stories. The first version of this output, DETECt Aarhus, was delivered in July 2020.
The project’s timeline and coordination activities were profoundly disrupted by the advent of the pandemic. Despite many challenges, and thanks to a three-month postponement of the project’s deadline, DETECt successfully managed to pursue its research programme into the final period. The first instance of DETECt MOOC was launched in February 2021. The DETECt Bologna app was launched in October the same year. The project delivered three policy briefs: ‘Creative Europe’s Support for European TV Fiction Programming’; ‘Cultural Diversity on VOD Platforms’; and ‘Cultural Studies and the Transnationalization of the European Higher Education Area
in the Age of Digital Learning’.
