Digitizing Intangible Culture, Identity and Memory: Eurotales, a Museum of the Voices of Europe

Abstract The open-ended project-in-development called Eurotales: A Museum of the Voices of Europe is an experimental online museum that is based on the underlying question of “how can one present and communicate, in museological form, the intangible culture of languages as they are and have been used across Europe?” Its response is to turn to digital technology to explore and create displays that foreground language uses as culture, as identity, and as memory. The aim is to show and explore the actual multiplexity of languages in real life, and through time and space, and to contrast this implicitly with canonical and standardizing accounts presented in histories of named languages, which are also digitally displayed. This article opens with a discussion of museums and digital collections of intangible culture and goes on to describe the thinking and design underlying the four digital collections of Eurotales. The methods of data collection for each of these are separately mentioned in their subsequent descriptions. The collections present the material traces of language as intangible culture, the lived experiences and memories of languages of individuals in the present and in the past (separately), and societies’ authorized, or canonical, memories of named languages as presented in their published histories. Eurotales is thence presented as a project that uses the superordinating and intangible nature of digital space to address and explore the equally superordinating and intangible natures of language, culture, memory, and identity.