About
The Inventing Europe website is a pioneering collaboration between historians and cultural heritage institutions throughout Europe. Together, these national collections shape a transnational collective memory of Europe’s cultural heritage. The goal of the website is to cross borders and explore the history, culture and formation of Europe through the lens of technological objects and images.
About the Tours
Our curators have woven together objects, images and stories in the form of tours. The tours are collected within different exhibitions to explore and illustrate a broader theme. These tours form the basis of the website.
Each tour is a collection of 4 to 6 stories, based on the objects and images in the collections of our partners and other cultural heritage institutions. Each tour outlines and reveals an aspect of the history of technology in Europe.
About the 6 Exhibitions
The exhibitions are collections of tours that have been grouped together around and explore one theme throughout the history of technology in Europe. The exhibition themes are: Daily Lives, Media, Knowledge Societies, Infrastructure, Globalisation and Governance.
The Exhibition themes have been inspired by the forthcoming book series Making Europe: Technology and Transformations 1850-2000. (http://www.makingeurope.eu/ ) The tours collected within these exhibitions allow users to make connections within and between the rich and growing online collections of museums, archives and libraries throughout Europe and beyond.
About the Guest Curated Tours
Inventing Europe is an open-ended call to rethink Europe’s cultural heritage by following the paths of science and technology over borders. Besides the six exhibits based on the six Making Europe books (http://www.makingeurope.eu/), we have invited curators from our partner institutions and other experts to expand the exhibits and contribute their perspectives in the form of new tours.
Taking up our central theme of following the transnational and contextual stories of technology, we have asked them to delve into their rich stores of material and explore what new connections they can find, and see what new links they can make in the complex tangle of Europe and technological developments.
