Globalisation, changing demographics and the dominant position of private social media platforms threaten Europe's cultural and democratic values and sense of belonging. These unprecedented transformations compel Europe to intensify its engagement with its past, to facilitate an evidence-based dialogue between diverse histories and memories, their values and interdependencies, and build a common path across generations.
Time Machine is a large-scale research initiative that responds to the above challenges by creating the big data of the past: a distributed digital information system mapping the European 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, alignment of named entities and simulation of hypothetical spatiotemporal 4D reconstructions.
Such computational models with an extended temporal horizon are key resources for developing new critical reflections on the future of our institutions, providing insights for historians, social scientists, creative arts professionals, policy-makers and the general public, with a significant common denominator: contributing to informed decision-making from everyday life to academic, professional and political matters. The vision is, therefore, to enable Europe to turn its long history, as well as its multilingualism and multiculturalism, into a living social and economic resource.
Time Machine comes at a time when a new technology platform is being created, giving birth to a digital information “overlay” over the physical world, a “mirror-world”, as an up-to-date model of the world as it is, as it was and as it will be. Time will be a “palpable” fourth dimension, since it will be very easy to go back to the past, at any location, reverting to a previous version kept in the log, but also to create future versions of an increased sense of reality. The mirror-world will disrupt most forms of human activity, as we know them today, giving birth to an unimaginable number of new ideas (and many problems) and creating new forms of prosperity from new forms of economic and social activity that will shape new behaviours and ecosystems. In this scenario that is currently unfolding, Time Machine will enable Europe to be one of the leading players, shaping the mirror-world according to its democratic values and fundamental ethics.
