Cinergie – Il cinema e le altre arti. N.20 (2021), 85–95
ISSN 2280-9481

A Website for Cesare Zavattini’s Work: Digitizing and Dynamizing a Personal Audiovisual Archive

Antonella CapalbiUniversity of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy)

Antonella Capalbi, PhD in Work, Development and Innovation at University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. She is currently working on a research project about the application of platforming to cultural and creative industries, with particular reference to the audiovisual industry.

Nicola DusiUniversity of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy)

Nicola Dusi, PhD in Semiotics, is Associate professor of Media Semiotics at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy), Department of Communication and Economics. He is the author of the books: Il cinema come traduzione (Utet, 2003); Dal cinema ai media digitali (Mimesis, 2014); Contromisure. Trasposizioni e intermedialità (Mimesis, 2015); Capire le serie TV. Generi, stili, pratiche (with G. Grignaffini, Carocci, 2020).

Maria Doina MaregginiUniversity of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy)

Maria Doina Mareggini is a PhD Candidate in Work, Development and Innovation 4.0 at the Marco Biagi’s Foundation, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Her exploratory research investigates the macro-themes “work” and “women representation” in movies, opening to the current production studies and from a socio-semiotic perspective.

Mauro SalvadorUniversity of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy)

Mauro Salvador holds a Ph.D. in Communication Culture. He has written various academic essays and books on game studies, on gamification processes and on the spreading influence of games in media environments. He is Adjunct Professor at the University of Bologna and at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. He works as a game designer with the Dotventi Collective and he teaches Game Design at the Event Horizon School of Digital Art.

Submitted: 2021-06-15 – Revised version: 2021-12-02 – Accepted: 2021-12-02 – Published: 2021-12-20

Abstract

Digitization has been changing the methods of production, distribution and use of written and audiovisual products, according to a process of “platformization” (Van Dijck, Poell, de Waal 2018). Following the “network society” model (Castells 1996), platforms, as creative ecosystems (Montanari 2018) and medial ecosystems (Pescatore, Innocenti 2011), have introduced a new mindset that connects producers and consumers within a digital environment, breaking down space-time barriers, controlling data and simplifying the supply chain (Nasta and Pirolo, 2017). So even the audiovisual field has undergone a transition to companies with a service provider role, following a user-based model that feeds different forms of participation and spreadability through intermediality and storytelling (Abercrombie and Longhurst, 1998; Jenkins, Ford, Green 2013).The project of digitization of written material of the Zavattini Archive (Biblioteca Panizzi, Reggio Emilia) starts from a productive theoretical (and methodological) intersection between platform design and game design. As we will see, the paradigm shift that platform design has brought resembles certain characteristics of the “play” experience. The concepts of collaboration and intermediation lead to a rethinking of users as pivotal and at the centre, not only regarding their user experience (as in certain types of digital games) but also in the production of various types of content (as in platforms), leading to asynchronous collective experiences, whether they are related to gaming or to participating in platforms.

Keywords: Digitization; Personal Archives; Platform Design; Game Design; Zavattini Archive.

This article is the product of work carried out in common by four authors and the result of a single shared process of reflection. As far as the writing of the individual sections of the article is concerned, section 1 can be attributed to Antonella Capalbi; sections 2 and 5 to Mauro Salvador, section 3 to Nicola Dusi; section 4 to Maria Doina Mareggini.

1 Platforms as Creative Ecosystems

In this article we will discuss the project of the digitization of the written material of the Zavattini Archive (Biblioteca Panizzi, Reggio Emilia), to analyze practical digitization and cataloging and the construction of the metadata necessary for the ISAD-G standard. We will then focus on the building of different user paths for different audiences, with the aim to create a dynamic digital archive that not only conserves but that also “transmits” knowledge and experience (Parikka 2011, Ernst 2013, Røssaak 2010).

According to “platforming” process (Van Dijck, Poell, de Waal 2018), digitization has been changing the methods of production, distribution and use of written and audiovisual products.

Most audiovisual contents are available via streaming platforms, through a wide range of devices (PCs, tablets, smartphones, smart TVs and video game consoles), which have speeded up the process of media convergence (Jenkins 2006). The following analysis investigates the ongoing process related to audiovisual products and then makes a comparison with archive products related to writing and images, equally affected both in the digitization process and in the resulting impact of platforms. During the 20th century, the audiovisual industry was characterized by the “Hollywood model”, a fordist pipe-based model (Hesmondhalgh 2007; Manovich 2001) in which a small circle of producers provided their products to a large number of consumers, according to the classic value-chain model. «Pipeline businesses create value by controlling a linear series of activities […] Inputs at one end of the chain (say, materials from suppliers) undergo a series of steps that transform them into an output that’s worth more: the finished product» (Parker et al 2017, p. 4). Instead, the platform model has introduced a new mindset that acts horizontally, connecting producers and consumers within a digital environment, breaking down space-time barriers, controlling data and simplifying the supply chain (Iacovone, 2017; Guarascio e Sacchi 2018). The audiovisual field has undergone a transition, from “monomedia industry” to “multimedia industry” (Preta 2007), because the use of audiovisual products is now connected to different digital platforms, devices, and media.

Therefore, the new audiovisual industry relies on some fundamental elements: contents, cheapness, and control over data (Corvi 2020). Platforms, thanks to social media’s feedback (Brunetta, Peruffo, Pinelli 2017), provide an open infrastructure, which encourages the user’s participation and satisfaction. Audiovisual fields too, following a user-based model that feeds different forms of participation and spreadability through intermediality and storytelling, have undergone a transition to companies with a service provider role (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998; Jenkins, Ford, Green 2013). Accordingly, comparing media ecosystems (Pescatore, Innocenti 2011) and economic theories about cultural and creative industries (Montanari 2018), we can consider a platform as a creative ecosystem: a digital environment that becomes a place of co-production of contents thanks to the users. According to the service economy, the producers have moved from passive consumers of products to active users of services (Brunetta, Peruffo, Pinelli 2017).

As a result, the main concern of platforms is about the user-experience. Streaming platforms are characterized by a refined customer profiling just to please the users’ high expectations (Corvi 2020). The new audience gets the real possibility to enjoy lots of audiovisual contents becoming more discerning. This is typical of the “prosumer culture” (Collins 2010), characterized by users’ ability in terms of “distinction” (Bourdieu 1984) that produces personalized media (Tryon 2017). The high quality of users-experience therefore is strictly connected to the platform's ability to profile their tastes and interests. This makes the data dimension crucial. On one hand, users definitely provide a large amount of data on their profiles and consumption choices that the platform uses to track their experience of use and for marketing purposes (Corvi 2020). On the other hand, platforms use lots of metadata just to organize audiovisual contents, classified according to several specific criteria for each platform that establishes its own taxonomy useful to its business model (Avezzù 2017). Hence, organizing audiovisual contents is an absolutely “human” fact: «There is much more than meets the eye, in the setup and operation of these systems: theory, subjectivity, unquestioned (scientistic) assumptions, judgements, values, habits. People who decide, define, describe, choose, interpret, think and believe» (Avezzù 2017, p. 65). Platforms act as a filter and as a non-neutral intermediary during the user-experience because data are never meaningless (Compagno, Treleani 2019): «data are never neutral, in the sense of being unaffected by the observer’s procedures» (Ibid., p. 2).

From a prosumer’s perspective, the platform model supports the active role of users. Moreover, the platform guides and mediates the user-experience and organizes metadata with a very “human” performance, with various criteria possibly influenced by several biases. Although the inclusion of the users in the consumption choices promotes their active use, there is a risk of an algorythm-based use. This could produce participation “bubbles”, where one communicates with those who already have similar points of view, according to a polarized “collaborative individualism” (Bandinelli, Gandini 2019; Klein 2019) rather than a real sense of community (Tryon 2017). Moving from this framework, there is also the risk of an American editorial perspective, especially if we consider that main streaming platforms are often strictly connected to main American companies (Van Dijck, Poell e de Waal 2018). Furthermore, other risks are connected to the heterogeneity of the catalogue, often shown through some filters and categories that are based on different criteria selected by the platform. These criteria are generally connected to the previous user-experience, to the similarity between contents and, obviously, to the business model of the platform. It can be said that platforms could have a virtuous impact on the user-experience in terms of active role but, at the same time, we need to meditate on the non-neutral role of platforms in organizing data and metadata, which obviously have a significant impact both on the user-experience and on the construction of the “model user” (Eco 1981).

Platforms without audiovisual contents convey similar problems. The user can be involved in an active way even in the processes of digitizing archive catalogues. In the case of the Italian Estense Digital Library the III F technology1 allows users to annotate and comment on the document in additional layers form. Moreover, to encourage and enhance the active role of the users without damaging the digitized documents, the staff of the Estense Digital Library checks and selects the most significant comments. Having access to these comments, all platform users who attend the Digital Library are encouraged to co-produce knowledge. This makes the platform a real creative ecosystem. Our first example briefly shows how, even in the archival field, from a prosumer’s perspective platforms could have a larger role, acting as intermediaries within the user-experience and the organization of contents, thanks to the “human gaze” that lies behind the digital infrastructure.

2 Games as Playful Environments

The idea of “collaborative individualism” cited above and its application through III F recalls a similar concept regarding gaming practices and game design strategies. As a premise, it is necessary to say that, in gaming, game designers build systems within which players, endowed with an evident and powerful agency, make decisions. Such an experience takes place within a more or less closed structure, based on the design of the game, and subject to several unavoidable technical constraints given by the computer code (see, among others, Fullerton 2008).

Moving on, in the last decade, a new model emerged as a standard in mobile gaming: the free-to-play game as a service, based on a monetization system integrated into the design of the experience. Games as services require users to participate constantly over time and promote an indirect collaboration between players through an asynchronous system of barter or exchange of gifts. It allows them to contribute to their mutual progress in the game without interacting directly. Moreover, games as services do not present a finished narrative or a finite series of objectives to be accomplished, but are constantly updated in order to keep the player “engaged” for multiple and periodical slices of time (Sotamaa and Karppi 2010; Salvador 2015). To conclude, these experiential structures are clearly based in a strictly teleological way on performativity through the pursuing of game objectives and, as mentioned, on slow and constant progress in the game. So, while this “collaborative individualism” can be considered a first connection between game (as service) design and platform design, the idea of performativity must be further discussed. Granted the fact that, in gaming, performativity is an almost ontological matter, in recent years new hybrid forms of play have emerged, changing some perspectives: with “pervasive play”, games expand themselves renegotiating the limits of the playful situation in a spatial, temporal or social sense (Montola et al. 2009), while with “gamification”, game mechanics are applied in non-playful contexts to improve engagement (Deterding et al. 2011). Although gamification is often used as an instrumental solution rather than as a possible resource to address design challenges, some of its reformulations, i.e. Ortoleva’s “semi-ludic” (2012) or Frissen et al.’s “playful identity” (2015), move the focus from rigid frameworks to fruition or co-design processes in an interesting way, similar to the idea of participation in terms of production in platform design (Schouten et al. 2017).

Actually, the deep performativity of games as services can be nuanced (or redirected) to a more free and non-finalized use, a playful approach similar to what Bernard Suits called “lusory attitude”, a way to approach everyday things rather than a strictly structured activity (Suits 1978). The performativity we are talking about moves then from the strictly teleological approach of games as services to a more open non teleological approach, through which games are to be considered triggers of non-functional experiences rather than objective hunts.

Therefore, the digitization of the Zavattini Archive moves from a theoretical basis that stands between platform design and game design, intended as a playful approach. The dynamics generated by this approach seem suitable for dealing with the design of asynchronous collective experiences, whether they are related to gaming or to browsing digital archives. Before moving further on with the project, in the next section we will compare existing digital archives of the same field.

3 Exploring Digital Personal Archives: Cristaldi, Antonioni, Chaplin

Platform logics and game design principles can be found in many websites or digital archives eventually dedicated to film products, to written and multimodal and intermedial documents. We will present a brief socio-semiotic analysis of three selected patterns of our project for Zavattini's website. In a semiotic perspective, digital archives are syncretic texts (and multimodal ones) with a structural strategy that organizes at least three levels of signification and communication: the perceptive and affective one, the narrative one, and the more relational (or communicative) one. These levels and their organization work as a “design of the media experience” (Eugeni 2010). According to Landowski (2005) we are dealing with “meaning strategies” that regulate diverse logics of interaction and risk, starting from a textual “programming” strategy that organizes the main paths for the users and involves some relationship tactics (such as “manipulation” tactics), a way to organize knowledge and to create a trust pact with the user. The manipulation tactic includes user’s beliefs and the possibilities to get involved in the various paths of the syntagmatic process. Landowski (2005) also provides other related meaning strategies (of “hazard” or “chaos”, the maximum risk of misunderstanding), losing the trust pact. This semiotic user (always a “model reader” according to Eco 1979) reacts not only with cognitive tools but also with continuous emotional “adjustment” tactics (Landowski 2005): a way to negotiate an agreement that above all is affective and intersubjective. Some of these problems will be cleared in the comparative analysis of the websites.

The CristaldiFilm website dedicated to archival materials offers a reorganization, inventorying and digitization of the producer Franco Cristaldi’s archive based on the xDams platform,2 thanks to a collaboration of the Cineteca of Bologna Foundation to a research project called Producers and production practices in the history of Italian cinema 1949–1975.3 As the website claims: “the unit of description is the folder. The documents are organized according to a chronological criterion within series and subseries”, allowing searches both in Italian and English through keyworks and archival criteria. The most interesting series for our research is the “Unrealized film projects (1959–1987)”, which contains about twenty projects, each one opening a sub-series. For example, the Nanni Loy’s film The unemployed consists of various documents with an excellent digitization quality; the list of technical and artistic staff; the original story of the film (written by Loy) condensed into four typewritten pages; the “journal” of the Vides Cinematografica indicating incomes and expenses of the production period. Therefore, reasons for the non-realization of the film should be researched elsewhere, perhaps in the series dedicated to “Documents and various notes by Franco Cristaldi (1961–1989)”. Each document bears the watermark “Cineteca of Bologna”, and the document cannot be interrogated or downloaded. Furthermore, to read some special documents we must request specific written permission to the archive manager. The online digital documents are samples of what the real (paper) archive (and the complete reading of all documents) would probably allow you to discover when building an expertise on the economic and productive cinema aspects. The authorization request allows the complete access only to specialized public. However, the website also tries to foresee possible paths for non-specialized users, but the proposed documentation is full of technical data. Therefore, the website asks its users to be competent and well-informed “model readers”, who know how to connect Italian and international cinema, history, economics and so on.

The Michelangelo Antonioni Archive is part of the collections of the Modern and Contemporary Art Galleries of the Municipality of Ferrara and includes various documents as the director's library and the music archive, many films, letters, the photographic archive, screenplays, subjects, notes, paintings, and many others. The digitization and re-organization as a website are very promising, but it is a work in progress and mainly in Italian. For example, by clicking on a photo representing two actors of the twenty-eight series of Antonioni’s films, under the heading L’amorosa menzogna (Lies of Love, 1949), you find a technical sheet with some basic information containing a link to a wiki-data page. Other documents follow: a couple of stage photographs (with low definition), the won prizes, and a precious list of preserved movies with their exact cataloguing and format. The “Treatments, story, screenplays” series are proposed providing only the archival references. The website structure is organized in a simple but effective way, with a clean graphic layout that differentiates the various series, among which we also find the “Unrealized projects”. This series is introduced as “treatments, stories, excerpts and drafts of screenplays in various stages of drafting of some projects that seemed destined for an actual realization […] there are also photographs and films related to the locations”. The “Unrealized projects” series contains also the archive cataloguing and the description of the format. Searching for example for the Tecnicamente dolce project, many documents indicate only their archival characteristics: a “complete typed script” of 1973 (of 129 pages); the indication of some notes (between 1958 and 1968); the “Notes for the Tecnicamente dolce script [1966–1973]” (38 pages), with a critical note saying that they are a sort of treatment, but with non-consecutive pages; other fragments in which the project appears; a page of “Notes” with an extensive critical comment where we learn that the story is about “a man around forty, rather disenchanted, who begins a relationship with a girl different from the others”. Anyway, regarding Antonioni’s realized films in particular, the website most interesting aspect are the detailed critical and historical sheets. In this case the philological annotations provide rich metadata in a narrative form. The Antonioni Archive’s model user is a skilled one, aware of the complex artistic life of Antonioni, who becomes frustrated by not being able to read the digitized documents (available only in the real archive). Nonetheless, the clarity and usability of the website allow other playful uses, particularly for Antonioni’s paintings.

The Charlie Chaplin Archive has been digitized and catalogued in English and Italian by the Cineteca of Bologna Foundation and provides immediately a philological attention to the use of international standards cataloguing and to the interoperability of the used tools:

The official catalogue and information site of and about Charles Chaplin’s […] professional and personal archives […] From the first handwritten notes of a story line to the shooting of the film itself, stage by stage documentary evidence of the development of a film, or a project that never even became a film. Poems, lyrics, drawings, programmes, contracts, letters, magazines, travel souvenirs, comic books, cartoon strips, praise and criticism, good times and bad […] the vast online catalogue lists them all and allows you to read nearly all the documents. Certain reserved documents may be consulted upon request.

The Chaplin Archive teaches us how a digital exploration should be: high quality digitization and immediate searchability of the documents (respecting the copyright). Instructions on the archival standards claims that: “The various document types in the Chaplin Archive are described according to the areas and punctuation prescribed by the International Standards for Bibliographic Description of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions”. The instructions are also about how to intertwine metadata, because: “each bibliographical record has a link to lists of Authors, Subjects, Filmography and Bibliography”. But the catalogue outline provides additional fields of description such as “Type”, “Series” and “Summary” which enable the documents to be defined and critically analyzed giving further access, since all the words act as search keys.

The Chaplin’s website presents in a very clear visual design some series defined as “Images; Documents; Topics; Stories”. Nearly every document can be clicked and enlarged (and even copied or downloaded directly), although the owner logo of the Chaplin Archive is always overwritten. An example of metadata for stage photographs is: “Film/Project; Series; Type; Nature; Color; Technical; Subject; Physical description; Record Number”. Very often a thematic description line is found. The series “Stories” furnish a continuous update of short thematic paths and connections within the documents. The most consistent part is clearly the “Documents” series, searchable by: “Type; Series; Film/Project; Year (from-to)”. Exploring non-realized films you find The Freak4 project, with a list of 71 documents: writings, interviews, drawings and storyboards, and many test photos of the costume made for Chaplin’s daughter playing the protagonist (a girl born with bird or angel wings). But the available documents are “only” 33: the others are indicated with the cataloguing descriptions and appear just as “content reserved”. In order to access the whole series of documents, the user must log in to the portal. The design of the website forecast a privileged way for specialists, when following this accreditation step. But, as said, you have in the “Stories” series some more playful paths, inviting a non-specialist public.

4 The Becoming Digital Zavattini’s Archive: A Theoretical Overview

As a matter of fact, digital libraries are not only the digital version of traditional archives, but they also offer means which go beyond the mere presentation of the content stored in digital repositories (Agosti et. al. 2007). Before working in specific on the design of a website for the Zavattini Archive, we are considering theoretical and conceptual issues. On the one hand, we would like to wake up a cultural heritage now dormant; on the other hand, we want to preserve the original papers from deteriorating and protecting them from unintentional damage (Parrika 2019).

The Zavattini’s Archive, in the Panizzi Library in Reggio Emilia, is Zavattini’s personal and professional archive; in this phase of the project our attention is focused on the “Unrealized projects” series. We are conducting an in-depth study of the narrative contents of the documents to design a prototypal user experience for the website, based on semi-guided paths that accompany the “model-user”. These paths can be produced from content-based algorithms that rely on metadata (Avezzù 2004).

A summary revision, which contains the main characteristics, peculiarity, and criticality, has been made for each storyline. Therefore, these details have been translated in a digital format and neatly catalogued in a datasheet database. Some of the collected data are archive collocation; title; folder description; year of production; author; potential name of the commissioner; division and numbering of the papers; potential handwritten notes or reviews; variations; potential publications or citations of the story. The volume of textual descriptions is significant, mostly because a digital simplification is never self-explanatory, but it documents itself at the minimum level of a single atom of information (Vitali 2004). These details, collected as metadata, are filed in the datasheet, in compliance with the international standard archiving system ISAD-G (Magherini 2017), as most practices of bibliographic cataloguing in an electronic environment (Day 1998). This filing process is still a work in progress because at every stage of archival description, the information about the materials remains dynamic and not always organic or coherent with the archive itself.

Our digitization began from this database, becoming the firm reference point of our theoretical thinking about the structure of the archive. Every paper is now being scanned, respecting the division of the material made by the archivists. The OCR of the scan is easier when the original sheet is cleaner, meaning that it is devoid of handwritten revisions. If difficulties are found, then an operator will type each word using a computer keyboard (Ridi 2004). To prevent the website from becoming the mere digital copy of the physical archive which, at the same time, needs to be protected for copyrights, we will upload a view-only PDF version. Moreover, the PDF document will not have the possibility to be downloaded and every page will have the library’s watermark at the bottom. Thanks to the themed studies already conducted on the unrealized stories, each page will be searchable. Due to tags, each play will be recognizable from others, summed up and questioned. At the same time, tags will give the possibility to search within the same document — like finding where a specific subject is covered — or crossing the documents — like finding other plays with pertinent topics all over the entire archive. By doing so, the main themes can be organized leading to a double reasoning: on the one side, from a vertical and diachronic point of view; on the other side, from a horizontal and synchronic perspective, regarding the intertextuality inside Zavattini’s works.

Two are the case studies we will propose in this paper, both subjects for films that have been written but never realized: Amore a Milano (1945–1949) and La bomba (1965), respectively catalogued “ZA sog NR 1/3” e “ZA sog NR 3/7.”5 The first one is a love story of a young and poor couple that meets up by chance. The two fall in love, they go into debts for love, lose their jobs for gifting each other what they could not afford individually. Consisting of twelve typewritten folders, some of the topics grouped together as tags are “love”, “poverty”, “lire”, “Milano”, “early postwar”. The hypothesis is that the sketched idea has not been perfected, for unknown reasons, but surely some effort has been put in it, as more than one title has been proposed. As a matter of fact, whenever Zavattini suggested some title options, he was starting a thought process which often led to more variations of the same story (Dusi 2019). Unlike the typed document, the end is entirely handwritten. Then the work has been interrupted, even if some corrections and additions have been made.

A keyword query using the tag “love” leads us to other subjects including La Bomba, described from others tags like “bomb”, “truth”, “problem solving”, “Roma”, “postwar period”. This story, written approximately twenty years later, consists of six typewritten folders with a lot of handwritten notes, a perfect example of the variations practice. The plot is about the finding of a bomb during a family lunch. The way the emergency is handled by the loving couple, wake up the girl about the real nature of the fiancé, who turns out to be a weak person. The story was written many times: three different stages can be distinguished, improving each time Zavattini made some adjustments and corrections. As the writing develops, we can go over the different stages of the story processing thanks to the handwritten revisions made by the author. At first, a black pen is used: the page layout is fixed, spelling errors are corrected, some additions are made, and unnecessary parts are erased. Then, a second review is distinguished because a red pen is used instead. Particularly, details are improved, a lot of work is put in the finale, insisting on a tragicomic ending. Actually, when this kind of problematic cases are faced, it is up to the researchers’ team to decide which versions will be accessible and digitized, according to some guidelines based on theoretical and historical knowledge concerning Zavattini’s writing style, and comparing the unrealized projects to the works of the same period.

5 The Digitization of the Zavattini Archive

Based on the theoretical premises of the first paragraph and the subsequent analysis, the starting point of the digitization of the Zavattini Archive will be the building of a digital environment suitable for contributions from its users, for comparisons between various versions of the same document, and for free forms of exploration. We aim at building a dynamic archive, in the sense proposed by media archaeologists such as Parikka and Ernst: an archive capable of conserving but also of communicating, or transmitting, knowledge about its documents through its experience (Parikka 2011, Ernst 2013, Røssaak 2010). This objective, proper of the digital archive, is not in contrast with the Biblioteca Panizzi’s physical archive and its documents. On the contrary, the digitization will serve as a means of promoting it, proposing constant connections between digital and physical documents. Hence, the Zavattini Archive will be developed above all as a dynamic environment, ultimately to make static archive materials as paper documents manipulable through their digitization. In this passage a non-trivial theoretical short circuit emerges: Parikka’s approach, in fact, deals with the materiality of the archive starting from the object, the device, which the visitor “uses”, experimenting, rather than simply observing. In the work presented here, materiality is lost or, better, reinterpreted, to the advantage of the goal of the project. Thanks to digitization, static documents, otherwise kept in their tangible version in real places that are obviously difficult to access, are made manipulable. This will happen using technologies such as III F, capable of allowing the addition of layers of notes or comments to existing files. Since many of Zavattini’s papers contain plenty of handwritten notes, erasures, rewrites, etc. III F lends itself well to a vertical use of the digitized document. This verticality is represented by the exploration of subsequent levels of reading, produced and made available by other users. In particular, scholars and experts can leave traces of their passage allowing more casual users, who intercept the document in less targeted and more playful explorations, to read and follow them. It is important to stress the fact that the original digitized document will never be permanently modified: all the annotations and contributions by users are intended as digital layers that can be voluntarily activated or deactivated.

The website of the Zavattini Archive will be built by digitizing and watermarking a selection of the documents kept in the physical archive at the Biblioteca Panizzi and will propose three modes of use:

  • free and managed exploration through metadata, aimed at scholars and experts;

  • specific educational paths created for schools, as guided examples of free explorations which highlight various transversal thematic aspects linked to Zavattini’s work (as we have seen in a similar way with the Chaplin Archive);

  • suggested or most popular routes, generated mapping of the most frequent (or less frequent!) connections chosen by other users during their explorations.

In the first case a mostly free use emerges; in the second case, a mostly guided use emerges; in the third case, what emerges is a hybrid use, still to be defined in detail. This hybrid use should stimulate a process of progressive discovery of the archive also through a comparison between the experiences of different users. All these paths allow, as mentioned, the insertion of comments and differentiated information layers: from those of scholars and experts of Zavattini’s works, to those of casual visitors that, hypothetically, remember a personal episode linked to the time or the setting of the story they are reading. All these contributions will be subjected to a validation process through an access filter or by the archive curators: scholars will sign in and their notes will be traceable while casual users’ works will be manually filtered. The described manipulations translate static documents, originally intended as closed and stored, into changeable and processual ones. The value here is the chance to create dynamic documents that transmit the knowledge built on them over time. The paradigm of collaborative individualism, transversal to platform design and to certain game design becomes central in this archive project. Alongside this, the construction of a deeply explorable and open digital environment, even if supplemented by explicit suggestions for use, aims to stimulate in non-expert users a playful approach. This specific approach is not based on precise and defined objectives, but is rather based on curiosity and surprise as means to stimulate further explorations.

6 Conclusions

The digitization of a selected portion of the Zavattini Archive will continue in the coming months, starting from these first structural hypotheses. As mentioned before, the aim of the digitization process is to create a dynamic digital archive which not only conserves but also “transmits” knowledge and experience (Parikka 2011, Ernst 2013, Røssaak 2010). The semiotic analysis and the comparison of the three websites presented as case studies give us some good practices: the close correlation with the physical archive; the management of standards and metadata; the distinction of different categories of users and paths of use. These good practices will be adapted to the particularity and variety of the documents to be digitized. This variety has been exemplified through the analysis of two unrealized projects preserved in the Zavattini Archive: La Bomba and Amore a Milano, that have been converted, translated and dynamized (Lotman 2001; Cronin 2012) through digitization and metadata.

The dynamism of the archive will also emerge from the use of platform design and game design, two logics that we discussed above, particularly in their user-centered sense of collaborative individualism and free and non-formalized exploration. This free exploration is intended as a trigger of playful fruition processes, in which the accumulation of information, whether casual or critical, gives value to the digitized materials (and indirectly to the entire archive, both physical and digital) in a decisive way. These hypotheses will be tested with the two cited categories of users (the expert and the casual), to be validated and definitively adopted in the design of the digital archive, of which a first version is supposed to be published during 2022.

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  1. The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) is a set of open standards that allows deep and various interactions with digital repositories (e.g. zoom, pan and annotation capabilities). See https://iiif.io.↩︎

  2. xDams is an open source platform in the field of Cultural Heritage and digital archives. It is commonly used to manage and organize documents and other materials. See https://xdams.org.↩︎

  3. A research promoted and organized by the Department of Film and Television Studies of the University of Warwick with the funds of the Arts and Humanities Research Council↩︎

  4. On this project the Cineteca of Bologna Foundation has recently published the Italian translation of the volume by David Robinson, Charles Chaplin. The Freak. The story of an unfinished film (edited by Cecilia Cenciarelli, Bologna: Cineteca of Bologna, 2020).↩︎

  5. Thanks to the Cesare Zavattini’s Archive (Biblioteca Panizzi, Reggio Emilia) for letting us consulting these two written story.↩︎