Former Socialist Countries Open their Past to Europe (SCOPE)

Abstract

The project “Former Socialist Countries Open their Past to Europe” (SCOPE) focuses on gathering cultural heritage (CH) in the form of documents and personal testimonies from the former socialist countries (FSC) in the Danube Region. The main goals are to create an extensive database (DB) of the publicly available and newly collected documents, and to develop a user-friendly application for data search and analysis. The collection of available documents will be examined by group of historians to select significant CH movements on a specific geographical area. Innovative tools, SCOPE website and application, will provide effective research and analysis of documents in a new, standardized database. SCOPE tools allow quick searching of all available documents using keywords or phrases; classification of results according to geographical position/ dates/types/historical impact; and graphical illustration of activities against the socialist/communist regimes through the defined period of time. The novelty of the project is the use of the ‘citizen science’ approach to acquire personal testimonies of cultural opposition movements during the communist period through SCOPE tools. An interactive part of SCOPE application will collect users’ feedback in order to analyze if the documents serve the purpose of awareness raising on the anti-communist past among EU citizens.