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Exploring Carta Marina is a cultural heritage forum about Nordic heritage built around narratives represented in the Carta Marina map of 1539. The Forum was initially created with the Harkko Museum in Raisio, Finland. The Harkko Museum owes its existence to the ongoing relationship with archaeologists in the region: On the suggestion of the city, the University of Turku performed a series of excavations during the years 1994-1997. The impressive results reinforced the city’s interest "to the extent that an archaeological museum called Harkko was established there, employing one archaeologist on a permanent basis."
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The first trial of Exploring Carta Marina Forum involved a community of educators from primary schools in the city of Raisio and the Harkko Museum. There was also an expert community that initially included one anthropologist, one archaeologist/historian, and one computer scientist. Their interests comprised Finnish language and culture, identity and multiculturalism. The school children participating in the trial were aged 9 to 10 years.
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The official opening of Exploring Carta Marina CH Forum took place during the Symposium on Carta Marina held in Raisio on June 3, 2003. The event was held in Martinsalli, the auditorium in the Raisio main library. The audience for the symposium included 24 adults from Raisio, the nearby city of Turku, and from Helsinki. The audience was composed of academics, researchers, and teachers who share an interest in cultural heritage of the region as well as on the subject of the Carta Marina.
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The Carta Marina CH forum was developed during the first trial. This is the first complete interactive version of Carta Marina available online. It was accessible to the teachers and the community at large. It provides: navigation facilities for exploring the map; English and Finnish versions of The History of the Northern People (1539); and commentaries about the nature of these sources created by the scholars who participated in the Carta Marina Symposium.
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The Soft Ontology Layer (SOL) tool uses ontologies that allow the user to create a descriptive, interpretive layer of an artefact. The name ‘Soft Ontology Layer’ relates to the fact that the resulting ontology is the product of terms entered using natural language and without the need of rigid, hierarchical groupings.
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The Automatic Description Engine (ADE) is a system that enables large textual corpora to be processed into the numerical representation used to produce a similarity cluster map. The system is available to users via the World Wide Web. It integrates a diverse set of methods and tasks that allow users to create similarity clusters of text data.
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- A symposium was held on June 3, 2003.
- An exhibition event based on the materials created by the students using the CH Forum cultural resources will be held in Harkko in April 2004.
- Exploring Carta Marina currently contains the cultural resources as well as the tools to provide the experience.
- A significant amount of content generated from the Symposium is being transcribed and posted online for use by educators and expert community
- Students have drawn their own monsters based on the representations of Carta Marina.
- Students have written stories about the monsters that the representations in Carta Marina inspired them to draw.
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