Integrating Museums Activities on intangible Cultural Heritage with Data-Driven Research on Early Modern Scientific Texts

The Vast project aims to disseminate intangible cultural heritage by relying on open-data sets available to a public of non-scholar. The Museo Galileo and UniMi’s pilot is focusing on the transmission of moral values through 17th century philosophical texts and images and considering the museums as a vehicle for the values’ diffusion. The connection between past and present is traced during the educational activities, which are divided into three phases and create a dialogue between texts and scientific instruments, online documents/activities and in-person visit.

In the pre-visit part, students, teachers and the general public can access the annotated documents and fill in pre-visit questionnaires. The visit phase consists in the reading of excerpts to highlight the link between scientific instruments and the annotated values, as well as in compiling a mind-map drawn around a central value and answering the question of a second questionnaire, whose results are digitalized. In the post-visit phase, visitors can play value-centred games, revise, comment, provide feedbacks, or extend the reading to other annotated texts and images on the Vast platform.