About us

Time Machine: Invigorating European History with the Big Data of the Past

Time Machine is aiming to join Europe’s rich past with up-to-date digital technologies and infrastructures, creating a collective digital information system mapping the European economic, social, cultural and geographical evolution across times.

In the proposed approach, digitisation is only the first step of a long series of extraction processes, including document segmentation and understanding enhanced by Augmented/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) applications, leading to simulations of hypothetical spatiotemporal 4D reconstructions.

Such computational models are key resources for developing new critical reflections on our past and future, enabling new insights for historians, social scientists, creative arts professionals, policy makers, and for the general public, with a significant common denominator: contributing to informed decision-making from everyday life to academic, professional and political matters.

ADDING A NEW DIMENSION TO THE PAST

Time Machine aims to develop the Big Data of the Past, creating a huge distributed digital information system mapping the European social, cultural and geographical evolution across times. This large-scale digitisation and computing infrastructure will enable Europe to turn its long history, as well as its multilingualism and interculturalism, into a living social and economic resource.

Pushing frontiers

By pushing the frontiers of scientific research in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), Time Machine will strongly impact key sectors of European economy: ICT software, especially Augmented/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) applications; the creative industries; and tourism. Moreover, it will offer new perspectives in urban planning, land management and developing smart cities.

Time Machine will have strong positive long-term effects on European cohesion, economy and society, with concrete contributions to promoting critical thinking at all levels of decision making, to strengthening the feeling of European identity, as well as to boosting scientific and technological competitiveness, entrepreneurship and employment in knowledge-intensive and creative sectors across the European Union.