Skip to main content
European Commission logo
Research and Innovation

Fostering social inclusion through shared stories and technology

Migrants and fragile communities often feel ostracised from the societies in which they live. The EU-funded MEMEX project helped communities at risk of sociocultural exclusion tell their stories through augmented reality. Similar projects could help social integration across Europe.

©gustavofrazao #91590115 source: stock.adobe.com 2023

PDF Basket

No article selected

One way migrant communities can overcome social and cultural exclusion is through shared storytelling. Immigrant communities may have very different historical links to certain places, and many of these stories are easily forgotten or ignored.

The EU-funded MEMEX project worked with several fragile communities across Europe to bring these hidden stories into the world. MEMEX created an app prototype that uses artificial intelligence and augmented reality to offer the possibility of sharing these stories.

“The idea, and really the end challenge, was to design the methodologies and technologies we created in the MEMEX project, with the widest groups of migrants and communities at risk of exclusion as possible,” says Alessio Del Bue, tenured senior researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology and MEMEX project coordinator.

Working alongside communities at risk

MEMEX worked closely with three groups who could potentially feel excluded, including citizens in the 19th district of Paris, migrant women in Barcelona and three generations of migrants living in Lisbon.

“The strategy was to have partners in the project in direct contact with the communities, through associations,” Del Bue explains. “In order to create stories about their own experience, and even some things that are very intimate, you need to create a safe space,” he says.

Shared digital storytelling

One of the main methodologies developed through the project was to take pictures of places known locally to these groups, and have them tell a story about its significance to the community. A set of local audiovisual digital storytelling was carried out by the participants with the support of the partners.

In Portugal, for example, there was a lot of heritage connected to the local history of famous navigators of the past. Other stories were related to religion: in Barcelona, female migrants were closely connected to La Moreneta, a statue depicting the Virgin Mary as a black woman.

“The most interesting ones were those retelling histories that weren’t things you could read in books, because they were based on self-interpretation,” Del Bue says.

The stories were fed into an app with location tags, and are accessible in the real world using augmented reality technology. This tool empowered communities, making the stories more accessible to everyone.

“At the end, MEMEX was really a map of memories,” Del Bue explains. The app also used artificial intelligence to analyse text from the disparate stories, and reveal links between them.

“People were happy to see that the story in Lisbon might be connected with some migrants in Barcelona,” Del Bue says. “It’s just giving an impression that you might create a nice connecting effect through this,” he adds.

Future projects

Toward the end of the project, the MEMEX team started to consider how to prolong its legacy. The MEMEX platform will be used in the New European Bauhaus project, using digital storytelling to connect coastal societies to their shared history with the sea.

The MEMEX tools will be made open-source, to try and encourage other research projects to use similar methods. The app has already been used in museums, including the Caserta Royal Palace in Naples, allowing elderly patrons of the museum to tell stories of their visits there.

“There are many ways to reuse MEMEX, even just as a tool for recording intangible heritage,” says Del Bue. “Every story is, per se, a part of heritage and this was the way in the past that we were propagating culture,” he notes.

Del Bue explains that much of the success of the project came from the close work done through the local associations, to build trust with communities and help them tell their stories. Designing technology with social objectives was an exciting new challenge, he says.

By the end, the project delivered a set of methodologies and tools, policy and professional recommendations disseminated among the diversity of related target groups of researchers and practitioners, from technology to humanities.

“This interdisciplinary research was really important for creating technology in order to satisfy what the people need,” he concludes.

PDF Basket

No article selected

Project details

Project acronym
MEMEX
Project number
870743
Project coordinator: Italy
Project participants:
Belgium
France
Ireland
Italy
Portugal
Spain
Sweden
Total cost
€ 3 995 036
EU Contribution
€ 3 995 036
Project duration
-

See also

More information about project MEMEX

All success stories