Report on Luisa Cigognetti's speech "The history in the network: a study. Rites, myths and models in the blogs and social networks of some European Union countries".
The research project
"Media and Community Culture" is a project born in 2006 that studies the relationship between the representation of history in the European media and involves 14 universities from as many EU countries. After a first phase of research dedicated to television - the results are published in "Tanti passato per un Futuro comune: la Storia in television negli Paesi dell'Unione Europea", Venice, Marsilio, 2011 - we have now moved on to the study of the web as a place of information and "agent" of history. The analysis focuses on public and private historical sites, social networks, forums and blogs.
Initial questions and method choices
From the very first glance, the web appears as a labyrinth in which it is easy to get lost not only because there are no maps available for orientation, but also because - as Antonio Brusa mentioned in one of his previous speeches - it is not clear who can be those who those maps should provide. The voices circulating on the web give a vague idea of how people see the world and judge their own time: the messages, unclear and ephemeral, take their cue from previous speeches along a chain of bang and bang of which the original sense is lost after some exchange of jokes.
But despite the elusive context, the aims of the research are clear: we are interested in finding out what are the historical arguments that emerge in the daily talks on the web, on what occasions they are used, to what extent they are deepened and, finally, if there are references to the history of other European countries or Europe.
The preliminary operation is to map the national territory, that is, to identify the places where it is most likely to be historical themes, even considering that in the web new sites appear and disappear at a frantic pace. In a second step, we analyze the type of site, the nature of the discussions within it, its weight in terms of daily contacts and / or comments.
It must be said that the study of public and private historical sites and especially forums, blogs and social networks as potential sources of historical and social research is in its infancy, an area that poses methodological questions still to be resolved. Moreover, there is a lack of literature on the subject and field research is rare. In Europe, among the most interesting ideas we can mention the studies of the Slovenian Martin Pogacar of the University of Nova Gorica who worked on the historical memory of the former Yugoslavia as it appears today in social networks. His analysis has offered us numerous suggestions for the setting up of methodological lines useful for the investigation.
The situation in Italy. Some data
According to the Web Index Report, Italy occupies the twenty-third position in the world for the impact of the Internet on people's daily lives, which - translated into concrete terms - means that less than one Italian in two surf the Internet every day. Having said that, we asked ourselves whether it is possible in Italy to carry out historical research using exclusively digital sources, what history Italians tell and are told on the Internet, what are the main themes of interest and how they are discussed.
As far as digital sources for historical research are concerned, only 0.293% of Italian institutions use the web for their services. More web-oriented than the national average are the institutions connected to historical research (Archives, Study and Documentation Centres) that have important operations underway to digitize their heritage.
The Web Index Report also reports that in Italy a low percentage of the data produced (60%) is available on the web. A trend confirmed by the analysis of online historiographic journals: web magazines and e-journals are often simple showcases to promote paper products, only partially exhaustive with respect to the number and themes of publications of interest on the subject and very "lukewarm" with regard to the debate among scholars.
to be continued in the next part https://zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5d878dc58d5b5f00ad32ca96/history-in-the-network-a-study-rituals-myths-and-models-in-blogs-and-social-networks-part-2-5d8f8051f557d000af739a28