Storytelling applies to nearly everything we do. Everybody uses stories, from educators to marketers and from politicians to journalists to inform, persuade, entertain, motivate or inspire. In the cultural heritage sector, however, narrative tends to be used narrowly, as a method to communicate to the public the findings and research conducted by the domain experts of a cultural site or collection. The principal objective of the EMOTIVE project is to research, design, develop and evaluate methods and tools that can support the cultural and creative industries in creating Virtual Museums which draw on the power of 'emotive storytelling'. This means storytelling that can engage visitors, trigger their emotions, connect them to other people around the world, and enhance their understanding, imagination and, ultimately, their experience of cultural sites and content. EMOTIVE will do this by providing the means to authors of cultural products to create high-quality, interactive, personalized digital stories. The EMOTIVE project targets two main groups of users: 1. Authors: members of the cultural and creative industries in charge of creating interactive cultural experiences (i.e., interactive stories) and making them available to the visitors. 2. Visitors: people experiencing the cultural site through a “World” created with the EMOTIVE Authoring System. They join in the available experiences when entering the site or when remotely connecting to the site’s Virtual Museum. The project results will be evaluated and validated in major cultural sites in Europe through an extensive network of cultural organizations and creative industries that have expressed their interest to the project.

MEMEX promotes social cohesion through collaborative, heritage-related storytelling tools that provide access to tangible and intangible Cultural Heritage (CH) for communities at risk of exclusion. The project implements new actions for social science to: understand the NEEDS of such communities and co-design interfaces to suit their needs; DEVELOP the audience through participation strategies; while increasing the INCLUSION of communities. The fruition of this will be achieved through ground breaking ICT tools that provide a new paradigm for interaction with CH for all end user. MEMEX will create new assisted Augmented Reality (AR) experiences in the form of stories that intertwine the memories (expressed as videos, images or text) of the participating communities with the physical places / objects that surround them. To reach these objectives, MEMEX develop techniques to (semi-)automatically link images to their LOCATION and connect to a new opensource Knowledge Graph (KG). The KG will facilitate assisted storytelling by means of clustering that links consistently user data and CH assets in the KG. Finally, stories will be visualised onto smartphones by AR on top of the real world allowing to TELL an engaging narrative. MEMEX will be deployed and demonstrated on three pilots with unique communities. First, Barcelona’s Migrant Women, which raises the gender question around their inclusion in CH, giving them a voice to valorise their memories. Secondly, MEMEX will give access to the inhabitants of Paris’s XIX district, one of the largest immigrant settlements of Paris, to digital heritage repositories of over 1 million items to develop co-authored new history and memories connected to the artistic history of the district. Finally, first, second and third generation Portuguese migrants living in Lisbon will provide insights on how technology tools can enrich the lives of the participants.