The team

AFOr (Archivio delle Fonti Orali, lit. Archive of Oral Sources) is funded by Regione Emilia-Romagna, and is carried out by OvestLab in collaboration with the Istituto Storico di Modena and Prof. Antonio Canovi (professor in Oral History). It started in June and will end in December.

Aims of the project

The aim of the project is the creation of a digital archive of “oral sources” concerning the Villaggio Artigiano neighbourhood (Modena), to be used for the analysis of the relation between space and memory. Starting from the identification of how the Villaggio Artigiano has been perceived by its inhabitants through the linguistic analysis of the collected interviews, the project will result in the creation of an interactive map, serving as both a thematic itinerary to browse the materials, and as an analytical tool to visualise the relations that the interviews create. The collected interviews are transcribed for the linguistic analysis, and a set of metadata fields are added to allow for multiple analysis, including the visualisation of relations among the materials.

The digital archive

The whole archive will be published as libre and open materials on Internet Archive. This brings about a series of benefits:

1. No cost for archiving the materials, as it offers free and unlimited space for open data.
2. Good visibility: the Internet Archive is one of the top 100 websites in the world, and the most important (and biggest) digital open library.
3. Well-suited for cataloguing: it is structured as a real library, so it supports the standards for library metadata.

The remaining files (mostly the source code of the tools for the creation/management of the archive) will be published in an ad-hoc gitlab repository; the map will be available on both the gitlab website and on OvestLab’s site where a series of articles will be written to offer a description of the materials.

AFOr is structured to allow for the addition of other materials (written documents, images, etc…) in the future.