Project

The Oceans Past Platform Action aims to measure and understand the significance and value to European societies of living marine resource extraction and production to help shape the future of coasts and oceans. The Integrative Platform will lower the barriers between human, social and natural sciences; multiply the learning capacity of research environments; and enable knowledge transfer and co-production among researchers and other societal factors, specifically by integrating historical findings of scale and intensity of resource use into management and policy frameworks.

The oceans offer rich resources for feeding a hungry world. However, the sea is an alien space in a sense that the land is not. Fishing requires skills that must be learned, it presupposes culinary preferences, technical ability, knowledge of target species, and a backdrop of material and intangible culture. The Action asks when, how and with what socio-economic, political, cultural and ecological implications humans have impacted marine life, primarily in European seas in the last two millennia.

The Action calls on historians, archaeologists and social scientists as well as colleagues from the marine sciences to engage in dialogue and collaboration with ocean and coastal managers. The Action will develop historical descriptors and indicators for marine and coastal management.

PERICLES is an EU-funded research and innovation project running from 2018-2021. PERICLES promotes sustainable, participatory governance of cultural heritage in European coastal and maritime regions through a unique interdisciplinary and geographically wide-ranging approach. The overall aim of the project is to develop and demonstrate a comprehensive framework to understand, preserve and utilize maritime cultural heritage for societal good.

Cultural heritage provides a sense of place, unity, and belonging. Rooted in specific landscapes, seascapes, buildings, stories, traditions, language, and cultural practices, cultural heritage is a fundamental part of every society. It connects people to each other and to the past and helps guide the future.

Protection and advocacy for cultural heritage can strengthen identity and local society, thereby improving the overall quality of life. Culture and heritage are essential in maintaining and building Europe's economic, social, cultural and natural capital. Realizing the potential of cultural heritage in these terms can generate prosperity, bring new jobs, enhance communities and improve environments in ways comparable to Blue Growth initiatives.

Yet, coastal cultural landscapes face risks from climate change, pollution, urbanisation, mass tourism, demographic challenges in remote regions, the fundamental transformation of the European fishing industry, neglect, and inconsistent policies of sea and shore conservation across governance scales and between regions.

The Baltic Sea Region Integrated Maritime Cultural Heritage Management (BalticRIM) is a 3-year project (2017-2020) led by State Archeology Department of Schleswig-Holstein, in Germany. It is part-funded by the Interreg BSR program under the ERDF.

The primary goal of the project is to develop and make available data from Dansk Søfartstidende. The project has a particular focus on ship dispatches published in Dansk Søfartstidende in the years 1893-1962, and involves scanning, automated analysis and interpretation of data regarding Danish ships on arrivals and departures as well as other incidents for which notes are available. In addition to making the resulting data available so that they can be integrated into standard tools for representing digitized data, the plan is to develop a dedicated application that supports searches aimed at special studies based on, for example, time, place and context.

The project's results in the form of a database and dedicated search application primarily provide new opportunities for research, among other things, by virtue of the fact that individual ships or a shipping company's entire fleet can be followed and analyzed in time and space. Furthermore, new uses of maps and data visualizations in the dissemination of Danish maritime history are enabled. Finally, the project will make the complete publications of the Danish Maritime Journal available to the general public in a clear and easily accessible form through the M/S Maritime Museum.