Horizon 2020

Call for Proposals on Cultural heritage and European identities

The Call for Proposals “Reflective societies: cultural heritage and European identities” has been published by the European Commission in the framework of the Horizon 2020 Programme.


Specific Challenge: The digital age has revolutionised our habits, behaviours and expectations. The utilisation of digital technologies for research in the humanities and social sciences demonstrates the need for innovation at the service of scholarship and its advancement. The shift to digital is impacting on identities and cultures and transforming the shape of the knowledge that we will transmit to future generations as our legacy. This specific challenge responds to the growing urge to share the wealth of cultural resources, research and knowledge in our collections. It will show how digital cultural resources can promote creativity and generate innovation in research, lead to richer interpretations of the past, bring new perspectives to questions of identity and culture, and generate societal and economic benefits. Europe’s vast cultural heritage can be transformed into digital assets, whose integration and reuse through research-led methods can create value for European cultural institutions and heritage, tourism and the cultural and creative industries. The objective is to enhance the analysis of cultural resources to improve our understanding of how European identity can be traced, constructed or debated, and to use those resources to foster innovation across sectors.

Scope:  Support and promote access to and resue of cultural heritage resources as part of research and innovation. Projects should enable new models and demonstrations of the analysis, interpretation and understanding of Europe's cultural and intellectual history and/or bring cultural content to new audiences in novel ways, through the development of new environments, applications, tools, and services for digital cultural resources in scientific collections, archives, museums, libraries and cultural heritage sites. The developed technologies or services should be generated in the context of humanities research perspectives (identity, culture, questions of place, historical and cultural knowledge) alongside meeting real user needs. They should stimulate cross-border, cross-lingual multi-disciplinary research of Europe's cultural heritage, enabling collaboration, partnerships and co-production of knowledge across sectors and communities of researchers and users. Proposals should demonstrate appropriate methods of re-using and repurposing digital assets, paving the way for wider exploitation of Europe's cultural resources and boosting innovation.

As far as the budget is concerned, the Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU between EUR 2 million and 4 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Expected impact: Activities under this topic will stimulate new research perspectives for the humanities and social science communities, provide innovative and creative methods for approaching cultural assets, generate tools and resources to access and exploit the rich and diverse European digital cultural heritage in a sustainable way, and promote further its use allowing its reinterpretation towards the development of a new shared culture in Europe.

It is expected that these activities will create a viable and sustainable cross-border, cross-lingual and/or cross-sector exploitation of European digital cultural heritage assets by putting into place new networks of researchers, scholars, ICT professionals and specialists of digital heritage.

The deadline for submitting proposals in the framework of the current Horizon 2020 call for proposals is 30 April 2015. 

Further information on the current call for proposals is available on the European Commission’s web site