• A Collaborative Workspace for Archival Research: MIA and the EURONEWS Project

    Author(s):
    Lorenzo Allori (see profile) , Carlotta Paltrinieri
    Date:
    2020
    Group(s):
    DH2020
    Item Type:
    Conference paper
    Conf. Title:
    DH2020
    Conf. Org.:
    Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO)
    Conf. Loc.:
    Ottawa (CA)
    Conf. Date:
    20-24 July 2020
    Tag(s):
    community-sourcing, self-archiving, self-digitization, Collaboration, Preservation
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/nxve-ex80
    Abstract:
    MIA (Medici Interactive Archive - http://mia.medici.org) is a community-sourcing research portal, developed by the Medici Archive Project (http://www.medici.org), that uses self-digitization and self-archiving practices, along with textual data-entry, to reconstruct and preserve the Medici Archive held in the Florence State Archive. This archive comprising over 15 million documents dating from the 1370s to 1743 - later dispersed into ten collections - is one of the most extensive and most disrupted archives in Western Europe. Currently the portal contains more than 500.000 digitized documents (half of which on double folios), more than 25.000 transcriptions, and 30.000 biographical entries. A fruitful result of a collaboration within MIA is the work done by the Irish Research Council EURONEWS project (University College Cork - http://euronewsproject.org), which focuses on analyzing pre modern newsletters in order to map their circulation and diffusion in early modern Europe. For this research project MIA provides a solid data-entry infrastructure. In addition to storing and classifying the newsletters, MIA has enabled Euronews Project to experiment with the data collected from all the documents written in the year 1600: this has led to further digital analyses that have brought to light issues and elements - such as unknown connections between specific cities and forgotten events that were the talk of European towns - that would have not been uncovered through a traditional approach or by an individual research project. MIA successfully solves some of the most complex issues of archival research and traditional academic practices: digitally reconstructing the archive through community-sourced uploads; allowing for annotations, transcriptions, and organization of documents; ensuring the integrity of data; enabling collaborative work and discussion; and publishing archival discoveries in the form of Short Notices following a peer-review protocol.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    3 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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