After Babel: On Confusion, Convergence, and the Architecture of Understanding

I've been working with standards in the cultural sector for quite some time now. Let's all agree on an agreed set of artsforms, so cultural leaders across the EU can share insights and benchmarks. Why don't we define a single audience survey form, so we can learn about differing audiences cultural habits in Porto, Paris and Prague?

Simpler said than done.

A long time ago, humans formulated a story. In it, a unified people share "one language and one speech," and set out to build a tower whose top might reach the heavens. But what Babel ultimately punishes is not aspiration; it is the fragility of comprehension when it is built on a single instrument.

The result is scattering—not merely across geography, but across interpretation. "They may not understand one another's speech," the story says. Babel is, at heart, an account of how collective endeavour fails when meaning cannot travel.

We have inherited that condition.

And because cultural data often remains bound to local definitions, the "same" engagement is measured differently, funded differently, and—crucially—noticed differently. This is not a defect of any one city or institution; it is the ordinary residue of post-Babel scattering.

Babel's scattering, however, is not only a European problem of dialect and data schema; it is, in miniature, the condition of international cultural relations itself. When a cultural institution in Copenhagen, Madrid or Brussels cannot make its evidence of engagement, value, or impact legible to funders and partners on its own terms, the resulting "misunderstanding" is not neutral—it reproduces exactly the asymmetries of visibility, agenda-setting, and investment-attraction that international cultural relations is meant to overcome.

It's not about creating a language that flattens difference into uniform standards. Instead, we propose something more faithful to how culture actually works: a trusted system of translation—an ontological and technological convergence that helps cultural actors speak to one another without asking them to forget their own dialects of meaning.

A new paradigm for cultural engagement data

A Data Space for Arts & Culture (DSAC) is that translation layer: a co-governed conversion of locally divergent definitions into shared interpretive pathways, enabling data to be understood across contexts while safeguarding cultural and linguistic diversity.

What makes this moment distinct is the emergence of two foundational shifts in technology. The Data Spaces paradigm offers a federated architecture in which interoperability can coexist with sovereignty—so a partner can keep control of its data and still participate in shared understanding. And AI-driven natural language models (LLMs) promise a new kind of semantic bridge: capable of handling nuance in the very concepts that cultural engagement is made of, not just their surface labels. In other words, LUMINA aims at comprehension as infrastructure—an approach to reducing confusion not by force of sameness, but by design of shared pathways for meaning.

Join us on this exciting new journey.