The proposed project offers a new understanding of transnational memory as a process of translation by focusing on post-Soviet Eastern European attempts to make their local histories of the Second World War and the Socialist regime known globally. It examines these efforts through aesthetic media of memory – literature, film and art – that circulate globally and bring local experiences to global audiences and through the heated public debates that these works of art have provoked in different national and transnational contexts. It argues that the recently reinforced comparative and competitive political discourses about twentieth-century totalitarianisms in Eastern Europe can only be understood by exploring the arts that have developed more productive comparative and translational approaches and can therefore help to untangle the most recalcitrant nodes of confrontational political discourses and addressing the ethical and political complexity of remembering war and state terror. The project innovates methodologically by bringing together transcultural memory studies, translation theory and world literature studies to offer translation as a new model for conceptualising the transnational travel of memories that operates through transcultural memorial forms. What memorial forms have been used to make Eastern European memories intelligible in the global arena? What is gained and what is lost in this translation? What can the different ways that aesthetic acts of memory are received nationally and transnationally tell us about the frictions between these scales of memory and within the national itself? How has the globalisation of memory practices reinforced national memory in Eastern Europe? In providing the answers to these questions the project offers a transnational view of Eastern European attempts to negotiate their entangled histories of twentieth-century totalitarianisms within the global framework.

MetDect examines long-term developments in the settlement patterns, local production of ornaments and visual culture by using metal-detector finds from Estonia. Despite the inherent limitation of the data (uneven level of contextual and empirical information), MetDect will demonstrate that the vast amount of metal-detector finds will significantly advance our current knowledge about the past. Unlike many other studies, this project focuses on the full variability of detected-artefacts in a long temporal scale (1800BCE–1800CE). MetDect will use a combination of methods drawn from humanities and natural sciences for investigating each topic. Settlement patterns and workshop areas will be examined by using GIS mapping and spatial analysis (e.g., point-pattern analysis), but production series of ornaments will be distinguished stylistically. Local production of ornaments is further examined by determining chemical composition (bulk alloy and trace elements) of selected production series. Lastly, new types and form variations of artefacts that are discovered by private detectorists will be compared with other visual sources (architectural and artefactual) in order to discuss circulation of ideas related to cross symbolism. MetDect will launch the first open-access database on metal-detector finds in the Eastern Baltic. Further, the results of this project will provide an important contribution to a wider debate regarding the usage of metal detectors by private persons. As such, MetDect offers a novel and ambitious research programme for studying metal-detector finds in the Baltic Sea area and beyond.

The proposed project offers a new, pan-European intellectual history of the political imagination in the interwar period that places the demise of historicism and progressivism – and the emerging anti-teleological visions of time – at the center of some of its most innovative ethical, political and methodological pursuits. It argues that only a distinctively cross-disciplinary and European narrative can capture the full ramifications and legacies of a fundamental rupture in thought conventionally, yet inadequately confined to the German cultural space and termed “anti-historicism”. It innovates narratively by exploring politically and theoretically interlaced reinventions of temporality across and between different disciplines (theology, jurisprudence, classical studies, literary theory, linguistics, sociology, philosophy), as well as other creative fields. It experiments methodologically by reconstructing the dynamics of political thought prosopographically, through intellectual groupings at the forefront of the scholarly and political debates of the period. It challenges the sufficiency of the standard focus in interwar intellectual history on one or two, at most three (usually “Western” European) national contexts by following out the interactions of these groupings in France, Britain, Germany, Russia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania – groupings whose members frequently moved across national contexts. What were the political languages encoded in the reinventions of time, and vice versa – how were political aims translated into and advanced through theoretical innovation? How did these differ in different national contexts, and why? What are the fragmented legacies of this rupture, disbursed in and through the philosophical, methodological and political dicta and dogmas that rooted themselves in post-1945 thought? This project provides the first comprehensive answer to these fundamental questions about the intellectual identity of Europe and its historicities.

The Lifelong Learning Strategy for Estonia envisions digital turn in formal and informal education, order to change the learning paradigm towards more self-directed, creative and collaborative learning. One-to-one computing, digital learning resources, semantic web tools, linked data applications and interoperable cloud computing services will be used to build and evaluate tailored educational opportunities for every learner. This will maximize each student’s self-actualization aspirations and role in the tomorrow’s society and adaptation of educational institutions in Estonia along the expectations of rapidly changing job market and European education space. It is also well aligned with the EU Education & Training 2020 strategic framework, which aims at transforming education to deliver better socio-economic outcomes in the long term. Hence change in the approach to learning is needed in Estonia as well as across Europe, as teaching the skills needed in the 21st century demand creativity, entrepreneurial approaches and evidence-based policies at all levels and types of education. This in turn requires teaching methods and learning environment that considers each learner’s individual and social development and is tailored to his/her needs and capabilities. Latest developments in cognitive and developmental psychology enhanced by the innovations in the ICT sector show a strong potential for scalable applications to flexible and personalized approach to teaching. Current project together with the new ERA Chair holder specifically addresses the move towards implementing formative assessment method in schools, which in practice aims at supporting individual learning and development curve of the learner by evaluating personal progress.

The broad framework of the recent EU Digital Single Market strategy has prepared the ground for many of the guidelines and future directions in cultural heritage digitisation and in the area of open data policies. In line with this new strategy, the core document for Estonian cultural policy, The General Principles of Cultural Policy up to 2020, sets out that most Estonian cultural heritage will be digitised by 2020 and the interoperability of culture-related information systems will be ensured by harmonised descriptions and web services. In connection with that, the 2020 Digital Agenda for Estonia emphasises that the public sector’s capacity to apply data analytics solutions needs to be increased significantly over the coming years and that Estonian cultural heritage should be digitally accessible and spreading through re-use. In accordance with these strategies, the CUDAN project aims to harness the existing strengths of Tallinn University in order to build a new analytical approach, called “Cultural Data Analytics”, that integrates cultural semiotics, data analytics, digital culture studies and creative industries’ studies to work with digitised cultural heritage as well as with born-digital data scraped from contemporary platforms. This aim will be accomplished by establishing the ERA Chair position and the transdisciplinary and innovative cooperation platform (Open Lab) at Tallinn University. Open Lab will cooperate with multiple external partners, both public and private, in order to collect, analyse and use digital cultural data and to develop relevant new analytic methods – all in order to better understand contemporary cultural dynamics and incorporate this understanding into public cultural service designs, and cultural and creative industries’ policymaking processes. The benefits will be that these designs and processes will become more evidence-based, agile and responsive to contemporary challenges.