DOI: https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/7230

Creating a census of Tuscan oral archives

Besides being rich in paper documents , Tuscany is also a privileged area for working on oral documents, as it abounds with both public and private sound archives, collected by scholars as well as amateurs. In creating a census of Tuscan oral archives, already existing censuses (namely , and ) were used and integrated with information about oral archives collected for linguistic and dialectological research purposes, such as Carta dei Dialetti Italiani, Atlante Lessicale Toscano and Vocabolario del Fiorentino Contemporaneo.

Subsequently, a priority list was defined according to three main criteria:

• relevance and antiquity of the materials (older materials might witness dead or disappearing language varieties);

• state of preservation of the materials (priority was given to those materials which looked more damaged and whose content, therefore, was more likely to be lost in the near future);

• geographic representativeness (so that every area of Tuscany was represented in the archive).

Collecting the materials

Following the above-mentioned priority list, the sound archives’ owners were directly contacted and the aims and organization of the project were explained to them. The Gra.fo staff met those who accepted to join the project, in order to collect their archives and sign legal agreements for the temporary borrowing and the dissemination of their materials.

In addition, the owners of the archives with no proper bibliography or accompanying material were interviewed so that they could explain the motivation and aims of their research. Indeed, unlike other kinds of materials, oral documents are often obscure objects: usually, the motivation behind them is clear only to the researcher(s) who collected them. Such interviews, called ‘Say something about your archive’, are crucial as they provide catalogers with the key for interpreting and describing the archive, and the users with an appropriate guide to understand it. The ‘Say something about your archive’ interview comprises the following questions:

1. How was your archive born?

2. What were the research aims?

3. Which difficulties did you find during your research? In which conditions did you work? How did you find the speakers for your research?

4. Did you publish something out of this research? Do you have any transcription of the material?

5. Was your research financially supported?

6. When was the last time you listened to the material?

7. What did you do for the preservation of the material?

In some cases, the owners actively helped to describe their own archives or the cataloging was carried out by someone who had been active in collecting the recordings.

As far as the naming and the arrangement of the archives are concerned, very often the owners provided some sort of organization to their archives, arranging them in subsections and usually giving each subsection a title related to its content. As a rule, Gra.fo followed the organization given to the archive by its owner and arranged and named the archives and their subsections accordingly. When no indication from the owner was given, archives and subsections were named according to some conventions established within Gra.fo. Private archives were usually named after the researchers who collected them (e.g. Archivio Roberta Beccari, Archivio Benozzo Gianetti ), while those belonging to an organization took the name of that organization (e.g. Archivio FLOG – Federazione Lavoratori Officine Galileo –, Archivio ASMOS – Archivio Storico del Movimento Operaio e Democratico Senese). Archives resulting from important geolinguistic enterprises took the name of those enterprises (e.g. Archivio Carta dei Dialetti Italiani, Archivio Atlante Lessicale Toscano ). The archives’ sections (fondi) and subsections (serie) corresponding to specific research projects were usually named after the topic of the specific research (e.g. Archivio Dina Dini, fondo Emigranti ), or after the researcher(s) who carried out the investigation (e.g. Archivio FLOG, fondo Andrea Grifoni, serie Vita di Fabbrica ). Furthermore, in some cases it was necessary to abandon or emend the arrangement given by the archive’s owner in order to overcome idiosyncrasies. For example, a subsection called Storie di vita (‘Life stories’) by the archive’s owner was renamed Storia orale (‘Oral history’), as it contained interviews on local traditions, peasant and material culture instead of biographies. Another example is offered by the Archivio Angela Spinelli , a public archive, protected by the Soprintendenza Archivistica and preserved in the Istituto culturale e di documentazione Lazzerini in Prato. It contains the result of an investigation carried out in 1982 by Angela Spinelli and Roger Absalom on the help offered by the rural population of the surroundings of Prato to the British soldiers who escaped from prisoner camps during World War II. In Gra.fo, these materials constitute a subsection (fondo Lazzeriniana ) of a larger archive (Archivio Angela Spinelli ) which also includes a preliminary investigation (fondo Appendice Lazzeriniana ) carried out by the same researchers in the same area that has so far constituted a private archive (kept by Angela Spinelli in her house).

In addition, in order to conform to the definition of open archive characterizing oral archives produced for scientific research purposes, which are open-ended and reflect the scientific experience of a researcher, Gra.fo provides at least one subsection for every archive. In this way, it is possible to accept unexpected subsections without disrupting the arrangement of the archive.

Active conservation

Once the audio materials were gathered into the Gra.fo laboratory (hosted at the Linguistic Laboratory of Scuola Normale Superiore), the conservation protocol took place. This protocol, inspired by well-established international guidelines (IASA-TC 03) involved i) preparing the original carrier for playback, ii) cleaning and restoring it (if necessary) so as to repair any climatic degradations which may compromise the quality of the signal, iii) choosing an adequate re-recording equipment in order not to introduce further distortions, iv) transferring and archiving the speech signal into the Gra.fo database. These activities were carried out differently according to the types of carrier and the recording formats, which often differ in the linguistic, anthropological, and ethno-musicological empirical research. Gra.fo mainly dealt with audiotapes, audio reels, Digital Audio Tapes (DAT), Compact Discs (CD), and mass-storage devices. Each of these presented distinct characteristics and thus required a specific approach.

An open-source software system for the preservation and the cataloging of sound archives was developed within the Gra.fo project. The software system is called Audiografo , it combines different technologies and its main components are: Audiografo PreservationPanel (Audiografo PP), the main function of which is to create preservation copies, and Audiografo CatalogingPanel (Audiografo CP), for the cataloging of the documents. The active conservation process, supported by the use of Audiografo PP, aimed at maintaining all the information represented by the carrier and lead to the creation of two distinct objects: the ‘preservation copy’ (with high quality uncompressed audio), and the ‘access copy’ (with lower quality and compressed audio). The former was intended for long-term conservation and contained all the information present in the carrier together with its description and the documentation of the conservation process. The latter, characterized by an equal or inferior sound quality, was further elaborated by the catalogers (the digital signal could be restored – by making use of DSP4 and iZotope software – or manipulated for cataloging purposes, see infra) and finally made available to the end user in the online archive. For a detailed account of the conservation protocols in Gra.fo and of the technical equipment employed, see and .

Classification of oral documents

According to the catalographic proposal described in , four criteria were used for the classification of oral documents:

1. Typology – The catalogers distinguished between the following options:

   1. controlled events (elicited by the researchers and under their direct control, e.g. interviews, answers to a linguistic questionnaire) vs. uncontrolled events (e.g. documents collected with the hidden recording modality, or recordings of folk performing arts events);

   2. sung (e.g. lullabies, narrative songs, spontaneous oral poetry) vs. spoken documents (e.g. interviews, narratives, ethno-texts, riddles);

   3. formalized (e.g. lullabies, riddles, poems) vs. non-formalized (e.g. interviews, ethno-texts) vs. improvised documents (e.g. narrative songs, spontaneous oral poetry). This distinction implied the analysis of the text format (rhythmic structure, forms of versification, rhymes).

2. Topic – The catalogers could choose among about 130 different topics (such as Agriculture, Anarchism, Animals, Art, Autobiographies, Biographies, Blacksmiths, Carnival, Cinema, Clothing, Coalmen, Cutlers, Dialects and language varieties, Domestic activities, Drug addiction, Emigration, Environment, Exhibitions, Family, Fascism, Fishing, Folk dance, Folk literature, Folk medicine, Folk music and songs, Folk theatre, Folk traditions, Food, Games, Handicraft, Human body, Immigration, Legends, Literature, Local history, Magic, Material culture, Museography, Music festivals, Nazism, Peasant culture, Peasant traditions, Political history, Politics, Postwar period, Pre-industrial society, Prostitution, Racism, Religion, Religious feasts, Rituals, School, Sharecropping, Theatre, Time, Traditional family, Traditional festivals, Traditional food, Traditional jobs, Traditions, Women’s condition, Women’s history, Work, 1st World War, 2nd World War, etc.). Only one topic per document could be chosen, working as a sort of subtitle stating the main theme of the document. Other relevant (secondary) topics were included in the keyword list.

3. Genre – The catalogers could choose among approximately 40 different genres (such as Answer to linguistic questionnaire, Autobiography, Ethno-text, Image/object description, Interview, Legend, Lullaby, Narrative song, Poem, Political song, Prayer, Proverb, Reading, Recipe, Religious poetry, Riddle, Ritual, Spontaneous conversation, Tale, Theatre, Tongue twister etc.). Creating a fixed taxonomy for such an interdisciplinary project proved to be really difficult, since the available taxonomies were partial (i.e. they referred to a single field of study, such as linguistics, anthropology, oral history, ethnography) and often blurred the boundaries between genres and topics.

4. Language variety – The catalogers could choose among approximately 30 different varieties. According to the taxonomy proposed by Luciano Giannelli , ), Tuscan varieties were divided into ‘urban varieties’ (of Florence, Prato, Pistoia, Lucca, Massa, Pisa, Leghorn, Arezzo, Siena, Grosseto), ‘areas of influence’ (of Florence, Pistoia, Lucca, Pisa, Leghorn, Arezzo, Siena, Grosseto), ‘areas of transition’ (of Volterra, Massa, Piombino), and other minor varieties (e.g. of the Elba Island). The sociolinguistic motivations for this choice were twofold: a) cities are a vehicle of linguistic identity and usually influence the surrounding areas; b) Tuscany does not have a hegemonic center that can influence the whole territory of the region (for a detailed account of these issues, see and ).

Accompanying materials

Oral documents need to be carefully interpreted in order to be understood , and any relevant note, drawing, diary produced by the researcher before, during and after the data collection constitute a precious resource for correctly interpreting the documents. For this reason, Gra.fo devoted great attention to the accompanying materials by digitizing them and making them available to the user together with the sound recordings, the cataloging records, and (if possible) the transcriptions of the documents. The accompanying materials are given in .pdf format and are watermarked, according to a convention established within Gra.fo, in order to avoid theft and improper use of the materials.

Gra.fo distinguishes between ‘historic’ and ‘interpretative’ accompanying materials. The former comprise all annotations and similar documents written by the researcher during the investigation (e.g. the diaries of Carta dei Dialetti Italiani). The latter include documents presuming some sort of mediation from the researcher (e.g. orthographic and phonetic transcriptions or unpublished relations). Three documents coming from the accompanying materials of two different archives are given here as examples. The first two come from Archivio Carta dei Dialetti Italiani , the main linguistic archive preserved in Gra.fo. The Carta dei Dialetti Italiani archive is a neglected open reels speech archive containing both answers to phonetic and morphological questionnaires and the oral performance of the Parable of the prodigal son (Lc, 15, 11-32) collected in a significant number of Italian towns by linguists and dialectologists. This important fieldwork, offering a unique database of Italian dialects from the Sixties and Seventies, sank into oblivion because of the death of its founder, Oronzo Parlangèli, and subsequent financial and organizational difficulties. Gra.fo succeeded in finding almost all the reels referring to Tuscan fieldwork, together with all the related reports and notes written by the équipe of linguists coordinated by Gabriella Giacomelli . shows a sheet containing information (date, place, name of researcher, etc.) on a survey carried out in Castiglion Fiorentino (Arezzo) on November 10th 1967 and exemplifies ‘historic’ accompanying material; is a phonetic transcription of the Parable of the prodigal son (showing the phonetic alphabet used at that time by Italian dialectologists) exemplifying ‘interpretative’ accompanying material. The third example comes from Archivio Angela Spinelli , an oral history archive collected at the beginning of the 80s in Valbisenzio (Prato) by Angela Spinelli and Roger Absalom for the publication of the volume Il distretto industriale (1943-1993) of the collection Prato: storia di una città. Angela Spinelli moved to a small village in Valbisenzio and interviewed the rural population in order to shed some light on the cultural process that brought about a search for a new socio-political status in the post-war period, and subsequently led to a migration of the rural population towards the city. During and after her investigation, she wrote down information about the informants (among other things, she drew the informants’ family trees in order to understand the relations between the different families of the village) and took notes of the proverbs, the popular religious ceremonies, the objects of material culture, the food, and the illnesses mentioned during the interviews. In the sheet represented in , Angela Spinelli put together all the information gathered about an illness and the relative popular remedies (‘interpretative’ accompanying material).

From the original carrier to the document

The relation between the original carrier and the document is one of the most problematic issues encountered by the Gra.fo team. Occasionally, a document (e.g. an interview, a biography, etc.) occupies various carriers, or portions of carriers (see infra). Yet, it is a single document and has to be treated as such. Therefore, in Gra.fo, the document is considered to be independent from the data carrier(s). In other words, each event, regardless of how long or short it is, and of how many portions of carriers it occupies, corresponds to a document. The carrier is seen as a mere container.

Because the theory of audio conservation was born in the domain of classical music, the literature only refers to (multiple) carriers . In fieldwork, however, researchers used to exploit the carriers fully, thus leaving no portion of tape unrecorded. Consequently, a document can be distributed across various carriers, and one and the same carrier might contain various documents. This depended both on the need to economize and on the fact that (in the past) the transcription and the analysis of the document were valued more than the recording itself.

Within the Gra.fo project, it was thus necessary to edit the recordings based on their content. After the creation of the preservation and access copies, which faithfully reproduce the original recording without considering its content, a cataloger edited the access copy and created as many different documents as there were recorded events. The resulting audio file was called ‘unit of audio consultation’ and was then cataloged, transcribed and made available to the end user on the web portal. Therefore, the preservation and access copies – which are the equivalent of the diplomatic edition – are not accessible to the final users: the object that is offered to public access is the result of an interpretative activity and there is no one-to-one relationship between the two objects.

The process of interpretation and editing was particularly delicate because of the very nature of the Gra.fo archive: an interdisciplinary repository composed of very different oral archives whose arrangement was often accessible only to the researcher(s) who collected them. For this reason, within Gra.fo, the definition of each basic documental unit was obtained ex post, after familiarizing oneself with the archive, the research aims and protocol, the elicitation modalities, and the communicative context of the investigations. Editing thus consisted of a series of conventional, critically informed choices and led to the definition of the following categorization:

1. Interview with questionnaire - the documental unit consists of all the answers given by the same person(s) to the questionnaire in a unitary communicative context.

2. Meeting - the documental unit is the recording of a single meeting.

3. Uncontrolled event, where the researcher is a mere witness and has no influence on what happens (e.g. public performances, or documents collected with hidden recording modality) - the documental unit is the recording of the single event.

4. Elicitation of particular genres (e.g. folk songs, proverbs, riddles, lullabies, etc.) - the documental unit is the single object elicited by the researcher (i.e. the single song, the single proverb, etc.).

For a detailed account of the issue of the relationship between the original carrier and the document, please see .

However, sometimes ecdotic issues clash with the materiality of actual data and with the need to reach a compromise between philological coherence and data accessibility. In fact, geo-linguistic archives, such as Archivio Carta dei Dialetti Italiani, are usually made of very long interviews (because the questionnaires used were very long and complex). Therefore, even if compressed in lossy .mp3 files, such interviews pose practical, technical problems to accessibility (end users’ ability to download them). For this reason, the interviews of Archivio Carta dei Dialetti Italiani , which occasionally last more than four hours, were divided into smaller parts corresponding to the different sections of the questionnaire (i.e. general information, phonetics, morphology, syntax, lexis, Parable of the prodigal son).

How Gra.fo dealt with confidential information

Another major problem faced within the Gra.fo project is the treatment of confidential information . Many archives included in Gra.fo were recorded before the national law on privacy (D. Lgs. 30 giugno 2003 n.196) was passed, so that the informants were not asked to give their authorization for the dissemination of the recordings. As a consequence, the Gra.fo team decided to only provide the initials, rather than the full names of the informants.

As far as the content of the recordings is concerned, documents are grouped into three categories:

• Fully available documents, which do not contain any confidential information and are, therefore, fully accessible on the web portal.

• Confidential documents, that is, those in which more than 90% of the recording time consists of confidential information); these are accessible on the web portal only through an edited summary. By contrast, the .mp3 file and the accompanying materials are only available for direct consultation in the Gra.fo Laboratory.

• Partially confidential documents, i.e. those containing some confidential data (less than 90%), which are edited in two different versions: a full version, only available for consultation in the Gra.fo laboratory, and a partial version (with edited summary), available on the web portal.

When containing confidential data, accompanying materials are made available for consultation in the Gra.fo laboratory; transcriptions, on the other hand, are accessible via the web portal once any confidential data has been removed.

For a detailed account of the ethical and legal issues related to use and re-use of research data and to online dissemination of research data, please see .

Documents containing other documents

In some cases, a document that constitutes a single archival unit contains other documents. For example, during an interview on rural traditions, the interviewee might start singing the songs that people used to sing during threshing, thus producing documents that differ substantially from the main document to which they belong. Such circumstances obviously pose serious editing and cataloging problems. On the one hand, one can focus on the main document, treat it as a single entity (i.e. edit and catalog it as a single cataloging unit) and give all the information about the different documents in its description. On the other hand, one can edit and catalog the main document as a whole and, at the same time, separately edit and catalog every other document it contains. The first choice would yield an inaccurate description of the documents, while the second would lead to the creation of audio duplicates. Gra.fo opted for a compromise between these two options: for each document – the main document and those contained within – a separate cataloging unit was created, but only the main document was edited as a unit of audio consultation. In this way, more than one cataloging unit can refer to one and the same unit of audio consultation, thus excluding the risk of overloading the system. The connection between the different documents is explicit in that the main document bears reference to any document contained within it and vice versa. shows the cataloging record of an interview from Archivio Roberta Beccari, fondo Letteratura popolare. The interview contains three poems and their titles appear in the keyword list (parole chiave).

Unfortunately, this procedure had to be suspended due to time constraints. Nevertheless, after this decision was taken, the presence of documents contained in other documents was still marked in an aggregate file and their titles recorded in the keyword list of the main document, so that, in the future, these can cataloged according to the protocol established by Gra.fo.

For the complete list of the oral archives preserved by Gra.fo, please see http://grafo.sns.it/.

Thus, the relationship between audio file and transcription appears to be static; the alignment between the audio and the text files is part of our research agenda for the near future.

Identifying a unitary communicative context is not always easy. In the case of geo-linguistic archives, such as Archivio Carta dei Dialetti Italiani and Archivio Atlante Lessicale Toscano , ideally, the documental unit should correspond to the length of an entire questionnaire recorded with the same participant(s) in a specific location within a single session. But, the picture appears to be much fuzzier because a) multiple informants of differing age and status were interviewed instead of a single informant, thus introducing significant sociolinguistic variability; b) interviews often ran for more than a day (due to the length of the questionnaire); c) some interviews are mute (only attested in transcription); d) some interviews are incomplete; e) there is no uniformity in the elicitation modalities (due to different researchers carrying out the investigation) .