Documenting Eastern-European Public Monuments through Digital Cartography: The Story of a Grassroots Initiative
Documenting Eastern-European Public Monuments through Digital Cartography: The Story of a Grassroots Initiative

Summary/Abstract: Out of a long-standing interest in the perception of public art, a lockdown project involving students, and an ongoing quest for data-visualisation tools, a project was born. After collecting information about more than 250 monuments from across Romania and creating a digital interactive pilot map of the ones in Cluj-Napoca, reaching some interesting (yet not altogether surprising) conclusions there was a desire to compare and contrast how Romania’s monuments fare in comparison to those of other countries in the region. This is a particularly useful exercise considering the rather superficial yet well-known similarities of the former Communist Bloc paralleled with the many cultural, ethnic, and religious differences and nationalistic discourses of the countries involved. The crowdsourcing call for monuments profited from Erasmus+ mobilities and conferences in the region as well as from Contested Histories – an initiative of the EuroClio network, albeit with variable degrees of success. As a 2-in-1 approach, surveys were also designed to find out more about people’s preferences when it comes to public monuments and their current use in contemporary everyday life. By dipping into pedagogy, Digital Humanities, and sociological methods this project seeks to unveil both the desirable and the less fortunate narratives of art in public spaces.

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