VGG

Type of project: National  |  Start date: 02/01/2016  |  End date: 01/01/2018

Voci della Grande Guerra is a scientific and cultural initiative promoted by the University of Pisa (project leader) in collaboration with the Institute for Computational Linguistics “A. Zampolli” of the National Research Council of Italy (ILC-CNR), the University of Siena and the Accademia della Crusca.

Funded by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers in the framework of the public notice for the Commemoration of the Great War Centenary, it aims at preserving and disseminating the memories of the First World War through the construction and on-line publication of a digital corpus of representative texts of the different ways of experiencing and narrating Italy in wartime from its protagonists.

This collective cultural heritage will be enhanced through the use of advanced techniques of Computational Linguistics (in particular, of Natural Language Processing and text mining), Semantic Web and Information Visualization.

The digital archive, which will include historical documents belonging to a wide range of styles and language varieties, will allow users to reconstruct the polyphony of languages of Italy in wartime: the propaganda official voice and the soldiers’ voice, the newspapers voice and the letters voice, the elite intellectual groups’ voice and the people’s voice, the voice of consensus and the voice of dissent.

An on-line interface provided with innovative search functionalities will allow users to consult texts through semantic search keys and, where possible, to visualize the images of the original hardcopy editions.

The initial nucleus of this project is the Web site Memorie di Guerra, which includes the first tests carried out on a specific type of texts: war bulletins.