Monthly Archives: April 2014

Horizon 2020

sdvig press is participating as a “linked third-party” in the Horizon 2020 ICT-31 proposal “Towards Digital Knowledge: Building a Web Platform to Access, Explore and Share Prague’s European Modernity” (Digital-Prague), initiated by Charles University Prague and a consortium of 11 prestigious European Universities and research institutions. The proposal was submitted today, and we will hear back from the Commission and its experts in September. Fingers crossed!

Here’s the abstract and objectives that were submitted:

The project DIGITAL-PRAGUE aims to coordinate and critically monitor the development of an open, digital and social research and publishing web platform dedicated to the cross-disciplinary study of the scientific and cultural context of late 19th and early 20th Century Prague. The proposal will directly harness innovation in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and foster lasting collaborations amongst a very broad range of stakeholders to sustainably and powerfully accelerate, structure and disseminate a ground-breaking, pan-European research programme in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). By reassessing the epochal impact made on almost all fields of the Humanities by the contributions of Prague scholars to major traditions such as analytical philosophy, formalist aesthetics, phenomenology or structuralism, by reappraising the imbrication of these traditions in a unique cultural context that witnessed the rise of literary modernist giants such as Kafka, Rilke or Seiffert, and by re-situating Prague as a transcultural, progressive center at the very heart of Europe’s dense but forgotten pre-war and interwar intellectual networks, this research programme will not only fill a still gaping hole in our knowledge of Europe’s intellectual history occasioned by the catastrophic events of the 20th Century, but will bring new impulses to our conception of the Humanities and their role vis-à-vis the natural sciences, technology and society. In addition, it will reactivate fundamental but underestimated insights into language, knowledge and the human mind that will especially resonate with research carried out today in relation with the digital transition in fields like cognitive psychology or linguistics, neurosciences, communication and media studies or philosophy of technology. Last but not least, the entire proposal will serve as a case-study and reiterable template for the evaluation, implementation and coordination of digital infrastructure and practices in research, teaching and publishing across the whole spectrum of the SSH, contributing to and critically accompanying the scientific and societal transition towards open knowledge.

DIGITAL-PRAGUE will achieve its aims by:

1. uniting a broad community of world-class academic, technical and institutional stakeholders around a shared, participative, repurposable and open source web platform explicitly dedicated to coordinating a major international research effort through ICT;

2. supporting and coordinating interactions between excellent research projects on several crucial aspects of Prague’s European Modernity (Czech Modernism, Early Phenomenology, European Structuralism, Formalist Aesthetics, Polish Theory of Language and Literary Communication, Prague German Literature, Prague Schools and Circles)

3. carrying out a programme of digital curation and open access edition designed to explore innovative processes in digitisation and digital publishing, as well as populate the project’s platform with a critical mass of high-quality content that will in turn provide concrete channels and incentives for collaborations, multi-way feedback and interactions;

4. optimising and diversifying the functionalities of the digital platform to consolidate its role and appeal as an aggregative, structuring public space and resource, as well as to encourage a proactive, confident and creative use of its ICT capacity by researchers, institutions, students and the wider public;

5. using the consultative process of developing the web platform and mobilising stakeholders as a framework to critically analyse and advocate both the potential of ICT for responsible research and innovation in the Humanities and the role of digitally-empowered, open SSH research in harnessing new digital spaces, tools and practices for society.