1st Conference of the European Labour History Network (ELHN) December 2015, Turin, Italy

Transcription

1 1st Conference of the European Labour History Network (ELHN) December 2015, Turin, Italy SESSION: Women and Trade Unions in Europe PANEL: Women and Trade Unions in Italian History: A Biographical Approach. The Case of Emilia-Romagna PAPER: A Database of Female Trade Unionists in Emilia-Romagna: a Digital Humanities Project Roberta Mira University of Bologna Abstract The paper presents the online database created to harness and show personal information, information on work and role in trade unions, short biographies and pictures of female trade unionists born or active in Emilia-Romagna from the late 19th century to the late 20th century. In addition to these data, archival and bibliographical references about each woman are provided. The database aims to be an instrument for the researchers, who can use it as a basis for further research and in-depth analysis (i.e. to write the biographies of the women who appear in the database or for statistical surveys and investigations); and it seeks as well to provide information for Internet users interested in the history of trade unions or gender history. The database is published in a specific section of the Argentina Bonetti Altobelli Foundation website where users can also find a descriptions and the purposes of the project, articles by the members of the research team, news on the dissemination actions. 1

2 New technologies are increasingly being used in humanities: to produce digital editions of texts or multimedia products, to design maps, to realize apps for mobile devices, to allow hyper-textual or content analysis, to organize and study data. This last goal is what the project realized by the Argentina Bonetti Altobelli Foundation and the Department of History Cultures and Civilizations at Bologna University is doing. Create a virtual space to organize data and information about women who were active in trade unions and other similar organizations in the Emilia-Romagna Region between 1880 and 1980 and to provide the conditions to study their lives and activities, write their biographies or to analyse data in aggregated ways. The internet and a website enable us to reach a wide public, to make the project visible and accessible to people beyond the borders of Bologna and Emilia-Romagna, in Italy and abroad, to disseminate its results, and, possibly, to get in touch with other researchers, associations, institutions interested in our project or working on similar topics. The content of the project is organized so that it is accessible to web surfers, people interested in women and labour history without being specialists, trade unionists, students and teachers, professional researchers. It is possible to get some information on a basic level, to read short biographies, to find bibliographical and archival references useful to deepen the study. The project aims also to offer an instrument to analyse women s role in labour history and in history of trade unions providing a base of data for further researches. A section of the Foundation Argentina Bonetti Altobelli website has been dedicated to the project and I dealt with the architecture of this section, trying to make it adhere to the needs of the research team and work. Personally I am no computer scientist, since I am a historian too, and this helped me to better understand what was the purpose of the project as a whole and to design this specific section of the website as flexible as possible for the project s goals. In the section Progetto biografie, which can be accessed from the main menu or from this box on the home page 2

3 and is identified through this symbol, we have two main parts: - the list in alphabetical order of the women whose biographies are objects of this work 3

4 - and a series of articles, which present and explain the project, give some information on the research team and a list of bibliographical references. 4

5 The two parts are connected with internal links and they both are accessible from the main menu. 5

6 Even if the articles are essential to understand the project, its methodology and its purposes, the main part of the section Progetto biografie is the list of women and biographies. By clicking on a name the user has access to the biography of that woman. Together with the researchers we established to create the biographical form with some text fields for the biographical information (Surname, Name, Date and Place of birth, Date and Place of death, Marital status) and for the information regarding education, job, political affiliation, participation in trade unions. A field hosts the list of cities and countries where a woman worked and was active as trade unionist. I chose text fields, instead of date, number, and so on fields, because text fields allow the person who fill in the form, to write a few lines and this means the possibility to organize data which are various. An example shall explain what I mean: the project embraces a wide time period, during which the concept of trade unions changes. From a methodological and philological point of view it is controversial to use the term trade union as it is intended from 1945 onwards, for mutual aid societies that developed in the Eighteenth century, or to define the undercover organizations that fought against Fascism in the first half of the Nineteenth century. However women were active in both organisms, as they were active in trade unions after WWII. Furthermore after 1945 trade unions grew and spread in a sector-based way so that the expression trade union is no longer 6

7 adequate to represent all the different sectorial organizations. Therefore we needed a flexible field where it was possible to write specific and variable definitions of trade union organizations depending on the period concerned and on the role of each woman. A menu-field with a list of possible roles and organizations for the researcher to choose from would have probably been too strict or too large to fit the needs of the research and of its outputs. In order to enable the researchers to write the biographical profile of each woman I created a text area, which can host also a long text. The same was made for the bibliographical and archival references. Another field is dedicated to external links referring to the woman. 7

8 It is possible to create galleries of pictures and documents and to link them to the form in the field Immagini (Images). A picture of the woman can be uploaded at the top of the form. 8

9 Each researcher has a user name and a password and can fill in the biographical forms independently. At the bottom of each form appears the name of the researcher who wrote the biography. Along with the scientific and historical goals, this project aims to be a contribution to the study of traditional humanities topics such as labour history and gender studies with the help of digital technologies. 9