Gra.fo Reloaded: a New Census of Oral Archives in Tuscany

The Gra.fo Reloaded project, funded by the Tuscany Region, has launched a new census campaign of the regional oral archives. The initiative aims to bring the submerged heritage of Tuscan sound documents to light, which is growing rapidly thanks to the ever-increasing accessibility of digital recording technologies. A further objective of the census is the creation of an interdisciplinary community of scholars and enthusiasts of oral sources, providing compilers with the possibility of becoming aware of useful tools and initiatives for learning to take care of their materials.

Tuscany has a long tradition of studies of oral sources, starting from the pioneering works of Giovanni Contini in the 1980s, passing through the important census The Keepers of Voices by Alessandro Andreini and Pietro Clemente, up to more recent projects such as Gra.fo (Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and University of Siena), in the context of which, in the period 2007-2013, approximately 3000 hours of recordings were sorted and digitized.

The Gra.fo Reloaded project, coordinated by the University of Siena with the collaboration of the Fondazione Sistema Toscana, the Archival and Bibliographic Superintendency of Tuscany, the Ecomuseum of the Pistoia Mountains, the Institute for Computational Linguistics "Antonio Zampolli" of the National Research Council of Italy and CLARIN-IT, is part of this regional trend of study, protection, dissemination and reuse of oral sources.

After a pilot phase inspired by the methodologies of the United States Census Bureau, the Gra.fo Reloaded Census is now accessible here. This first census campaign will continue until April 2023.

For further information, please contact silvia.calamai@unisi.it or duccio.piccardi@unisi.it.

The Gra.fo Reloaded Consortium wishes to thank in advance all those who will take part in the census.