A year ago we looked at eight European research projects that had stopped treating heritage as an inventory and started treating it as a laboratory. Six more, all of them running now, show where that laboratory has gone since. One of them measures the cortisol in a visitor’s saliva. One puts four wind sensors on a Cycladic island where there is no mains power. One is rebuilding, page by page, the archive of a community that left Romania forty years ago. What they share is a refusal to accept the usual excuse — that heritage work cannot be measured, and therefore cannot be argued for.
INT-ACT: what an intangible heritage does to the body that experiences it
INT-ACT — Intangible Cultural Heritage, Bridging the Past, Present, and Future (Horizon Europe, grant 101132719, 2024–2026, €1.99m) — is coordinated from Aalto University by Professor Masood Masoodian, with six partners across four member states and the United Kingdom. Its subject is the heritage that has no object: song, practice, memory, the knowledge of a place held by the people who live beside it.
The usual way to preserve such a thing is to record it — text, audio, video — and the usual complaint is that the recording keeps the information and loses everything else. INT-ACT’s answer is to try to formalise the everything else. The project works on what it calls the 3E dimensions: emotional, experiential and environmental. Human narratives are gathered in one work package and converted, in another, into semantic models and ontologies that carry those three dimensions as structured knowledge, which a third work package then builds into immersive XR environments tied back to the physical site. Four pilots, each attached to a specific social question rather than a technology: megalithic Alentejo in Portugal for cultural tourism, the stone circles of Calanais in Scotland for ageing societies, Koli National Park in Finland for communities that are disappearing, and Kavala in Greece for immigration and multiculturalism.
The part that separates this from a well-funded museum app is the measurement. A study protocol published in PLOS ONE in November 2025 sets out how the effect of the XR experience on well-being will be assessed: through salivary cortisol and cortisone levels, physiological signals and subjective ratings. Heritage projects routinely claim to make people feel better. This one has agreed in advance what would count as evidence.
RESTORY: an archive scattered by the twentieth century, reassembled by protocol
RESTORY — Recovering Past Stories for the Future (Horizon Europe, grant 101132781, 2024–2026, €3m) — is led from Universitatea Babeș-Bolyai in Cluj-Napoca by Adinel C. Dincă, with nineteen partners in twelve countries. Its core case is the written and spoken heritage of the Transylvanian Saxons, worked at Sighișoara, Jelna and Cincu.
The problem is stated plainly in the project’s own methodology document: the records of that community are dispersed across more than 180 different archival collections in Romania, plus the Siebenbürgen-Institut at Gundelsheim in Germany, many of them «with a limited on-line presence, and with outdated and incomplete on-site accessibility». Political rupture and then mass emigration to West Germany did to these archives what fire does to others.
The answer is unglamorous and, for that reason, likely to outlast the grant: a six-stage workflow every partner follows, from identifying the holding institutions through to publication, in which digitisation reproduces the original hierarchical structure of each fond rather than flattening it into a folder of images, described in Dublin Core. Oral history runs alongside, with a shared interview guide, recording sheet and consent paperwork — the last of which is the part most projects discover they needed too late. The method is then tested on ten further cases that have nothing to do with Transylvania and everything to do with whether it generalises: Þingvellir in Iceland, the parish network of Coimbra, the cathedral chapter of medieval Turku, the pollution and waste of Rome between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, a hospital in Donegal founded in 1866 as a district lunatic asylum, Roșa in Chernivtsi, some 170 hectares of the Szachty district in Poznań, and Villacidro in Sardinia.
ARGUS: four wind sensors on Delos, and why they had to be cheap
ARGUS — Non-destructive, scalable, smart monitoring of remote cultural treasures (Horizon Europe, grant 101132308, 2023–2026, €4m) — is coordinated by Athena RC in Athens with thirteen partners in six countries, among them the Ephorate of Antiquities of the Cyclades. Its five pilots are a good definition of «remote»: the archaeological site of Delos, Schenkenberg Castle in Switzerland, the underground wine cellars of Baltanás in Spain, Monti Lucretili in Italy and the Abbey of Sant’Antonio di Ranverso near Turin.
The technical argument is about ownership, not sensitivity. As the project’s own instrumentation paper puts it, commercial monitoring for heritage is «generally based on proprietary architectures that limit interoperability and the integration of application-specific sensors». So ARGUS built its own. On Delos the installed system is a wind monitor: four FS3000-1015 air-velocity sensors arranged in different orientations to estimate wind direction, a Sensirion SHT35 for temperature and humidity, an Arduino MKR WAN 1310 with native LoRaWAN, all in a 3D-printed enclosure, and in its second version a solar panel so that it runs where there is no power to plug into. Elsewhere in the project the same logic produces gas sensing from a drone at Schenkenberg and from a quadruped robot in the cellars of Baltanás. The readings feed a built-heritage digital twin.
An uninhabited island with a UNESCO site on it and no electricity is precisely where conventional monitoring does not go. That is the point of making the node cost what it costs.
REEVALUATE: digitise the object, then govern what happens to it
REEVALUATE (Horizon Europe, grant 101132389, 2024–2026, €3.96m) is coordinated by CERTH in Thessaloniki, under Anastasios Drosou, with sixteen partners in seven countries. It starts where most digitisation programmes stop: the file exists, and now anyone can do anything with it.
The project’s stated aim is «a framework for managing digitised artefacts’ copyrights, monitoring and preventing out of context use or misuse» — distributed-ledger tokenisation of the digitised object together with an automated check on whether a given reuse respects the context the holding institution declared. Current practice in galleries and museums offers the first half of that and almost none of the second. The components are built as reusable enablers and tested in three pilots that deliberately stress the question: a Fashion Time Machine with the European Fashion Heritage Association and MoMu in Antwerp, digitising garments, accessories and sketches and then letting players design virtual outfits from them in a mobile game; From Museums to Screens, which takes material from the Olympic Museum of Thessaloniki and the Ethnological Museum of Berlin and ends in a video clip for a sports brand; and a virtual tour of Aquileia with the Fondazione Aquileia, carrying a smart-contract rights-management layer.
A sports-brand commercial made from museum holdings is exactly the case that makes curators uneasy. Building the pilot around it, rather than around a safe example, is the honest way to find out whether the governance layer works.
GoGreen: conservation that has to account for its own footprint
GoGreen — Green strategies to conserve the past and preserve the future of cultural heritage (Horizon Europe, grant 101060768, 2022–2026, €3.75m) — is coordinated from the University of Amsterdam by Katrien Keune, with thirteen partners in seven countries. It works on three fronts at once: damage functions that establish how much environmental variation a collection can actually tolerate, which is what allows a museum to loosen climate control and cut the energy it burns; green solvents and bio-based treatments, including cysteine solutions for silver, the biopassivation of metals and electrospun nanofibrous gels; and a decision-support application that puts the trade-offs in front of the conservator making the choice.
Its most durable output may be a definition. In July 2026 the project and its cluster partners published Defining Green in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage in Studies in Conservation, setting out green conservation as «a sustainable approach that involves holistic, balanced decision-making to reduce health, climate and environmental hazards while adhering to professional ethics». A word that everyone was using and nobody had bounded now has a peer-reviewed boundary. The project closed with a conference at the Scuola Grande di San Marco in Venice on 3 September 2026.
ekip: the one that is not about objects at all
ekip — the European Cultural and Creative Sectors and Industries Policy Platform (Horizon Europe, grant 101112111, 2023–2026, €5.99m) — is coordinated by Lund University and is the outlier here: no sensors, no digitisation, no site. What it builds is a machine for producing policy. The ekip Engine runs in four phases — identification, prioritisation, investigation, formulation — and feeds a Knowledge Bank, a community platform, Policy Labs and city prototyping exercises, with recommendations as the deliverable. In the project’s own words it is «an elaborated process where we co-create policy recommendations with broad groups of stakeholders».
It belongs in this list because the other five will end. A monitoring node, a digitisation framework and a set of green solvents all need someone to decide, at European level, that they are worth adopting; that decision is a different craft from the one that produced them, and ekip is the attempt to industrialise it.
What these six have in common
Every one of them has agreed, in advance, on what would count as failure. INT-ACT named the biomarker before running the experience. ARGUS published the bill of materials for its nodes. RESTORY wrote the workflow down and then tested it on ten cases chosen for being unlike the first. REEVALUATE built its pilot around the commercial reuse that would embarrass it. GoGreen let a journal referee its definition of the word it is funded to embody. This is not the usual register of cultural heritage advocacy, which tends to assert value and resent being asked for proof — and it is the reason this generation of projects is likely to survive contact with the finance ministries that will be asked to continue them.
Sources
- CORDIS project records for grants 101132719, 101132781, 101132308, 101132389, 101060768 and 101112111, consulted 17 September 2026.
- INT-ACT project newsletter and Aalto University announcement; A. Núñez García et al., «A study protocol for assessing the effects of intangible cultural heritage experiences on human well-being», PLOS ONE, 12 November 2025, doi 10.1371/journal.pone.0336120.
- RESTORY deliverable D2.1, Common Research Methodology, v1.0, 25 June 2024.
- Á. Aparicio et al., Sensors 2026, 26(15), 4941, doi 10.3390/s26154941, on the ARGUS monitoring nodes and pilot sites.
- REEVALUATE use-case documentation, reevaluate.eu.
- G. Fife, A. Turrina, J. Wagner, D. Del Curto, C. Southwick, K. Keune, «Defining Green in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage», Studies in Conservation, 1 July 2026, doi 10.1080/00393630.2026.2653274.
- ekipengine.eu, project description and instruments.