The Digital Archive DisComPoSE will be presented at the ICARUS Convention 33 – European Travel Routes through GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums). The Challenge of Becoming Digital, a result of the scientific collaboration between the Museum of Agricultural Sciences and the Department of Humanities at the University of Naples Federico II.
The theme of travel, linked to the study and online representation of historical documents, is the common thread of the conference program, which features Domenico Cecere and Antonello Mori as speakers in the session Future of Cultural Heritage: Projects and Digital Innovations. The event, chaired by Georg Vogeler from the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of Graz, will take place on October 18 at 9:00 a.m. in the Chinese Hall of the Royal Palace of Portici.
Texts and Images in Motion. The Global Circulation of News and the Making of Knowledge on Disasters in the Spanish Monarchy is the title chosen to illustrate the two main digital tools developed during the DisComPoSE research. A digital archive and platform were created to process and utilize the thousands of documents selected by the research team, which are among the most significant for revealing new information about the memory of natural catastrophic events, emergency measures, and reconstruction policies in the territories of the Spanish Monarchy between the 16th and 18th centuries.
These materials have been collected in the Digital Archive, which has proven to be a crucial tool for research and data sharing, providing scholars in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Disaster Studies with a vast corpus of sources, many of which are unknown or little-known, covering a time span of almost three centuries. The metadata have enabled the research team to process and analyze massive amounts of data, combining distant reading and close reading. This approach captures transformations and specificities in texts that are usually standardized and inspired by ancient models, highlighting how exceptional events were experienced, communicated, and addressed.
The data stored in the Digital Archive are also exploited by the digital platform DisComPoSE Routes, a web application based on an interactive map that enables the visualization of the geographical incidence of disasters and the dissemination of documents that narrate and explain these events.
Routes is primarily designed for a broader audience of non-specialists interested in history, literature, and the visual arts and is publicly accessible via the project’s website.
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