Angelo Agosti

A Digital Sound Archive for the First World War: restoring a voice to silenced histories and research trajectories

This PhD project seeks to establish the first digital sound archive in Italy dedicated to the First World War. The initiative focuses on a vast body of oral sources collected during the second half of the Twentieth century by local, non-academic researchers who, acting independently, not only carried out the interviews, but also preserved their materials in private homes.

These archives have until now remained inaccessible and have not been adequately safeguarded by public institutions. Through the PHAIDRA platform, the project aims to collect and disseminate these resources for the first time, thus responding to the long-standing demand of Italian historians for access, while also seeking to restore a voice to historians and archivists who have cultivated their passion and developed independent research practices beyond academic institutions.

The digital archive housed on PHAIDRA recognizes the questions posed by historian-archivists, the meanings they attributed to their archives, and the motivations that guided their work as fundamental not only for the proper reuse of interviews, but also for bringing to light ways of practising oral history that were largely neglected by universities, which promoted a historiography distinct due to academic orthodoxy. In this sense, the digital sound archive also becomes a basis for a social history of historiography, shedding new light on the ways in which the First World War has been narrated and understood.

The presentation will focus on how this complex task of transmitting research experiences and sources has been undertaken in collaboration with Phaidra, as well as the results achieved to date, two years after the beginning of the PhD project.