In this paper, we present the preliminary research activities on building a semantic digital archive for publishing heterogeneous data about a literary corpus provided by Italian actresses, known as Divagrafie. This corpus represents a unique collection of cultural data for scholars in Film and Literature Studies through which they can analyze the phenomenology, characteristics, and historical evolution of the writings produced by Italian actresses. In this paper, we present the vision behind the development of the semantic digital archive and explore the potential applications and its expected impacts in the research community and society.
The availability of cultural heritage data has rapidly boosted the emerging new research area
in Digital Humanities (DH) [
Semantic Web (SW) [
This paper introduces our ongoing research work on developing an ontology-based archive named WOmen Writing around the camera (WOW) which will collect semantic data about relevant writings produced by Italian actresses (“Divagrafie”) focusing on the dynamics of exchange between writing, acting performance and the construction of the star image. This research idea builds-on and extends the “Drawing a Map of Italian Actresses in Writing” (DaMA) funded by PRIN 2017 4 which aims at investigating the extension, phenomenology, characteristics, and historical evolution of the writings produced by Italian actresses. The main goal is to build a semantic portal containing diferent resource materials related to Italian actresses’ visual and self-representation history able to bring to light and interrogating together diferent kinds of documents (mainly photographs and texts) with a defined set of investigation methods with the help of DH tools, particularly those based on SW technologies and distant reading methods. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes our current research progress and outlines the planned phases related to the development of the WOW semantic archive, while Section 3 concludes the paper by discussing the potential applications and expected impacts resulting from this line of research both for the academic point of view but also society in general.
The idea to develop the WOW Semantic Archive stems from the in-progress research project DaMA which aims at investigating the extension, phenomenology, characteristics, and historical evolution of the writings produced by Italian actresses, focusing in particular on the dynamics of exchange between writing, acting performance and construction of the star image. Defined as Divagrafie [ 17], such writings represent a multifaceted and interesting corpus of texts traditionally overlooked by the academic community. The important contribution to the understanding of stardom provided by this kind of self-narratives or fiction writings has been only partially acknowledged within the field of star studies; similarly, the field is also lacking 1https://www.europeana.eu/en 2https://www.dbpedia.org/ 3https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page 4https://www.damadivagrafie.org/ an in-depth analysis dedicated to the relationship between the writings of a specific actress and the construction of her own star image. This ongoing project is revealing a still unknown territory and has so far classified a wide number of texts, including 80 autobiographies written by 47 actresses. This literary corpus – which we are intended to focus on – represents a unique testing ground for a convergent methodology that applies DH methods, SW technologies and the most recent advances in the fields of Film and Media Studies, Literature and Gender Studies. These volumes have been analyzed so far by the DaMA team with a close reading approach focusing on paradigmatic examples and eliciting a variety of recurring topics [18, 19, 20], with a particular focus on the interconnections with the perspective of performing and actors’ studies, stardom and celebrities studies and by using also the videographic analysis tools.
By following and expanding the multidisciplinary approach already explored by the DaMA research, our current and future research work focuses on increasing the actual corpus and applying on it SW standards and DH tools. Below the main phases of our methodological approach: 1. Recognition of DaMA project’s outcomes and integration of new materials. All the materials collected and analyzed by the DAMA research project team will be subjected to a further and extended analysis in order to provide a first taxonomy describing the corpus. During this phase, new documents and resources will be integrated into the original corpus, in particular we we will focus on the retrieval of materials preserved in the Elisabetta Catalano archive (Rome), the Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea MuFoCo archive (Cinisello Balsamo, MI), the Museo del Cinema archive (Turin), the Cinemazero archive, the Luisa Di Gaetano archive (Rome), Archivia - Casa Internazionale delle Donne (Rome). In addition, we intend to study cinema and cultural periodicals in order to verify the circulation and the incidence of the work of female photographers in the national press. 2. Conceptualization and formalization. The main goal of this activity is to formalize the acquired knowledge in terms of concepts and relations with respect to specific ontological schema and models detected in this phase. In this domain, the use of ontologies provides a range of benefits for the users, e.g., in searching and browsing by concept rather than string-based only. For example, the photographs that Elisabetta Catalano has taken of a variety of actors and actresses, writers and directors can be put in relationships with all the excerpts in the Italian actresses’ autobiographies in which the relations with the cultural field strongly emerge as a symptom of overcoming the stereotype of actresses as a pure "not thinking" beautiful and fashioned body. As we can see in Figure 1, Elisabetta Catalano’s photograph of Monica Vitti talking to Andy Warhol can be intertwined with passages in her autobiographies related to art as a means of self-expression and with other several entities and concepts in the corpus. 3. Semantic annotations and analysis of the corpus. In this phase, ontological schema and models will be used to guide the semantic annotations of all the corpus materials (texts and images). During this phase, the corpus will be enriched with metadata describing, for example, references that link the content to specific concepts. Moreover, a variety of literary analysis based on distant reading approaches will be applied to the corpus materials. In particular, we will explore typical computational linguistics methods based on Natural Language Processing techniques in order to identify recursive narrative patterns as well as similar characteristics of the texts which will allow the recognition of an attantial typology specifically linked to Divagrafie. 4. Development of the semantic archive. The main goal of this last phase will be the development of the WOW semantic archive. It will provide the researchers with a set of powerful and eficient tools that can be used to query, analyze and study the data in order to make possible intertwine and connect diferent data. The interdisciplinary approach will be made visible and easily traceable by a digital user interface able to link diferent objects and produce new sets of knowledge. This will be particularly useful for scholars and researchers of diferent fields, such as History of Cinema, History of Photography, Visual Studies, Literature, Contemporary History and so on. The semantic archive will be the hub through which not only find materials to be linked to other studies and researches, but also to find new ways to analyze and study them with innovative approaches. In this phase, we intend to investigate some automatic techniques for ontology population, such as those presented in [21, 22]. All the features of the semantic archive will be integrated into an easy-to-use graphical interface which will provide the visualization of the data in various formats, such as graphs, interactive maps, timelines, facets, etc.
The development of the WOW Semantic Archive could have significant potential applications within the national and international research communities involved in the process. In fact, the archive will make accessible a wide corpus of materials related to Italian Actresses which crosses a wide range of studies also in the international academic communities: Film Studies, Photography Studies, Women’s Studies and Literature Studies, and so on. To our knowledge, this is the first time that such a corpus is being created following the unambiguous, rigorous, consistent and well-documented practices provided by the DH approach. Moreover, this is the first time that computational methods and SW technologies will be applied to this kind of document resources. The data integration feature provided by SW technologies will allow the connection between data contained in the WOW Semantic Archive to data included to other international archives, such as the European Film Gateway 5, by increasing the international impact.
The semantic archive will be useful also for upper-secondary teachers and students, curators of film-related events, film/photography/literature enthusiasts, and in general for whoever needs to retrieve the data and the researches included in it. In addition to the ambition to fill a gap in research and reflection on the area of study, namely the analysis of the relationship between women, photography and cinema from a feminist perspective, which in many Western countries has already been addressed, this work has another ambition, more complex and therefore even more important and stimulating: this research work aims at contributing to the debate and to the cultural framework of Italy, in which gender issues, women’s emancipation, feminist heritage, women’s art are still not suficiently considered as a fundamental part of the cultural heritage of the nation, and therefore as a topic in school and university curriculum. As for its social impact, it will contribute to the growing interest in those cultural dynamics which are afected and/or shaped by gender issues as well as promoting a deeper social awareness of the cultural role of women in Italian society.
As for its methodology, the actual collaboration among diferent scientific areas, such as DH, Computer Science, Cinema Studies, Photography, Visual Studies, Gender Studies, Literary Theory, will constitute an example of an integrated and multi-layered methodology, ofering itself as a possible benchmark for potential future projects. As for its objectives and expected potential impacts, this work is in line with the research goals and targets defined by the National Research Program (PNR) 2021-2027 and by the "Cultural Heritage" specific intervention area of Horizon Europe. In particular, it will mainly impact the cluster “Humanistic culture, creativity, social transformation, society of inclusion” of the PNR, specifically the sub-category “Digital preservation and conservation of cultural heritage”. In fact, according to this sub-category research line, the priority should be given to the implementation of efective semantic modeling technologies, also through the construction of ontologies wherever necessary, which allow an efective aggregation of diferent information levels and types of data, in order to avoid redundancies or lack of data. The research should also include a shift from traditional databases to SW databases, in order to achieve interoperability between resources and set up the field for the transition to Big Data. All these research aspects will be considered within the development of the WOW Semantic Archive that will have an expected impact in supporting the digital transformation of the cultural sector, following the suggested focuses by the PNR related to Digitization and Valorization of the Cultural Heritage, but also strengthening the social inclusion, by reducing gender inequalities. [16] L. Pandolfo, L. Pulina, Building the semantic layer of the Józef Piłsudski digital archive with an ontology-based approach, International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (IJSWIS) 17 (2021) 1–21. [17] M. Rizzarelli, L’attrice che scrive, la scrittrice che recita. per una mappa della ‘diva-grafia’, Vaghe stelle. Attrici del/nel cinema italiano. Arabeschi, edited by Lucia Cardone, Giovanna Maina, Stefania Rimini, and Chiara Tognolotti 10 (2017) 366–371. [18] G. Simi, L’occhio che palpita. monica vitti e gli scritti sull’arte, Cinergie–Il Cinema e le altre Arti (2021) 153–166. [19] M. Rizzarelli, Il doppio talento dell’attrice che scrive. per una mappa delle “divagrafie”,
Cahiers d’études italiennes (2021). [20] C. Tognolotti, Una diva fragrante. l’immagine divistica di sophia loren nei libri di ricette (2019). [21] L. Pandolfo, L. Pulina, G. Adorni, A framework for automatic population of ontology-based digital libraries, in: AI*IA 2016: Advances in Artificial Intelligence - XVth International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, Genova, Italy, November 29 - December 1, 2016, Proceedings, volume 10037 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, 2016, pp. 406–417. [22] ADnOTO: a self-adaptive system for automatic ontology-based annotation of unstructured documents, in: Advances in Artificial Intelligence: From Theory to Practice - 30th International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems, IEA/AIE 2017, Arras, France, June 27-30, 2017, Proceedings, Part I, volume 10350 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, 2017, pp. 495–501.