Research Agenda

According to the Marie-Curie research agenda, several tools were proposed, in order to define a coherent research agenda, common for the project's partners: Supervised involvement, Crash course(s), Highly specialized courses, Short secondments and a basic language course. Other skills (such as presentation, academic text preparation, etc.) will not, in general, be the object of planned formal teaching. They will be taught according to necessity / opportunity (e. g. when a paper by the hosted researcher has to be prepared for a conference) and improved by continuous use. Whenever possible and relevant to the research plans, already taught courses will be used for CHIRON fellows' training, to make the best of existing experience and training opportunities. These include, for instance, the “ Summer Archaeological School ” at Ename; the “Multimedia for Cultural Heritage” courses at PIN; several Master courses at York and University of the Aegean, part of their Master degree; courses at Brighton on topics as cultural tourism, the economy of Cultural Heritage, computer graphics applications.

Other institutions to be involved for short secondments (less than three months each, see above) include museums, sites and monuments or research teams. They will provide opportunities for field tests of technologies.

• Methodological issues: Credibility and validation. User evaluation of use and effect of IT applications (quantitative and qualitative analysis).

• Social and economic issues: Sustainabilty. Socio-economic models for CH. Business models. Impact of cross-cultural issues on Cultural Informatics.

As far as on-site activity is concerned, the research projects will aim at objects, monuments, museums and sites. The geographical distribution of application sites and case-studies will cover Europe , the Mediterranean area and possibly other areas in the world. Historic periods go from Prehistory to modern times (industrial archaeology and World War II, for instance).