The research has the purspose to explore the theme of memory in the digital age in the research project coordinated by the Fondazione Bruno Kessler entitled "LiveMemories. Active digital memories of collective life". The project aims at scaling up content extraction techniques towards very large scale extraction from multimedia sources. These techniques use this information to support new ways of linking, summarizing and classifying data in a new generation of digital memories which are “alive” and to turn the creation of such memories into a communal web activity.

In particular, the research activities carried out within Rucola has two specific objectives: first, to reflect on the themes of the sociology of memory and its evolution in relation to the developments of digital technologies and particularly to the evolution of Web 2.0; second, the realization of two case studies for testing the use of the technological platform developed by the LiveMemories project and the creation, transmission and spread of collective memory related to the studied cases.

The research, in fact, has as its focus the analysis of the concept of collective memory, understood as the set of representations about the past that each group produces, institutionalises, preserves and passes through the interaction of its members among themselves. This definition allows us to make an initial distinction between a "traditional" concept of memory that goes back to images such as archive, library, museum or in general "stores" able to accumulate information about the past, and an alternative conception of memory that considers a variety of interrelated functions. In this second sense what we call "memory" is a complex network of activities. Their study shows how the past is not always equal to itself, but it constantly changes through selection of events, application of filters and its reconstruction in a complex temporal dynamics that brings together past and present.

The research project also aims to analyze the use of the technological platform of LiveMemories by two groups chosen as case studies to examine the (re)appropriation of collective memories from specific communities using this second perspective to the study of memory. In particular, the two case studies will be realized through qualitative techniques of data collection and analysis. The first concern the collective memories of the feminist and women movements in Trentino from the seventies to the present. The second case study deals with collective memories related to the natural catastrophe of the Val di Stava in 1985, one of the greatest disasters that occurred in Trentino due to the collapse of landfill services in the mines of Tesero.

Researchers: Silvia Gherardi (coordinator), Manuela Perrotta (referent)
Period: 2009-2011
Funding: Autonomous Province of Trento