Studying Italian Universities Recent Pasts through Their Digital Traces

Italian universities have a strong tradition of innovation in communication technologies. On the 30th of April 1986, the University of Pisa activated its connection with ARPANET, thereby making Italy the third country in Europe to be “online”, and in the same years Italy also became the first European country on BITNET. In 1987 the National Research Council (CNR) registered the first “.it” domain and in 1991 the Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia (CRS4) created the first Italian website (www.crs4.it).

During the last two decades these academic institutions have published an overwhelming number of different materials online, which could be extremely useful for historians. However, as most of these documents are available only in digital formats (i.e. information related to courses, materials shared during lessons, news about the university, the repositories of academic publications, the websites themselves, the hyperlinked network that connected these universities), they are at the same time extremely difficult to preserve in their integrity and too many to be analyzed with a traditional approach. Therefore, it is evident that a study focused on the recent years of these institutions will be deeply influenced by the shift from paper primary sources to digital ones.

Starting from this assumption my paper will describe how the historical method has to deal with this change especially in a situation, such as the Italian web-sphere, which still lacks a National Web archive (thus researchers can rely only on international platforms, like the Internet Archive).

Both issues related with the scarcity and the abundance of web sources will be considered and different methodological approaches (the use of other national Web archives, the retrieval of information from other media, the implementation of computational approaches as Natural Language Processing and Text Mining techniques) will be presented and discussed.