User Guide

The ITHACA project selects archival and bibliographic records, providing descriptions, finding aids and translations made by the ITHACA research team according to the project research priorities.
The archival institutions maintain every right to establish conditions concerning the custody and access to the public or private archives where the records are preserved.
Use of the records described in the ITHACA platform for commercial or promotional purposes is not permitted.
The archival institutions retains copyright of records.

The ITHACA user guide is available at this link.

The ITHACA team adopted a co-creative approach for the definition of the data structure (an increasingly established methodology in the digital humanities). Starting from an international standard (the Dublin core) and inspired by interoperability criteria, the ITHACA staff - which includes senior scholars and early-career researchers active in different fields (history, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, philosophy, linguistics, geography, demography, archival science) as well as associations working with migrants - defined which data should be collected by the project researchers, with the aim of fostering a comparison in a long-term historical perspective. Through numerous workshops, a shared data-architecture and data-collection method were thus defined. The guiding principles were: the effort to assume an interdisciplinary perspective, despite the fact that the individual researchers belong to a specific discipline; the definition of a number of controlled vocabularies (thesauri) that would allow the research of the various teams to interconnect; the centrality of the migration trajectory (i.e. the movement of an individual in space and time) as the focus and pivot of each entry. Due to the diverse range of scientific approaches described above, it was also fundamental to develop a shared definition and understanding of key concepts such as 'migration' and 'narrative', which underpin each case study included in the ITHACA database. A process was developed to establish a shared meaning attributed by ITHACA's multidisciplinary team to these key-words. This initiative - like the creation of the data-architecture - was carried out through a participatory approach. ITHACA's researchers were asked to define the meaning they attribute to the three terms: ‘narrative’, ‘migration’, and finally to their union ‘migration narrative’. The results were then processed, applying the thematic analysis method. The outcome of the participatory exercise led to a definition of migration narrative, understood, in the ITHACA project, as an experience of forced and induced mobility of/on an individual or an agency.

The data architecture focused on two aspects: on the one hand, the analysis of the source (archival, digital, iconographic, oral, etc.) by which a certain migration narrative was provided; on the other hand, the migration narrative itself, examined by assuming the point of view of its producer (the migrant in the case of self-narratives; or the observer of the migrant). This double level has the advantage of making the information verifiable by referring to primary sources, and above all it holds together a scientific analysis with the expression of the point of view contained in it. This makes it possible to retain the richness of the narratives and to preserve the personal perception of the migration entered in the database. At the same time, dividing the information into comparable and searchable categories facilitates aggregate analyses (quantitative analyses, statistical projections, geovisualisations, etc.) that would be complex and sometimes impossible with the adoption of an overly qualitative approach. Finally, in order to enhance the richness of the disciplines represented by the ITHACA researchers, it was decided to create a data-architecture which would include the research questions of all the project members. In other words, in the data entry concerning their own case studies, historians have been asked to collect useful data for anthropologists, geographers, demographers, sociologists, etc., and anthropologists, geographers, etc. did the same for the other categories of scholars. The result is, as we said, an interdisciplinary data architecture, in accordance with an approach well established in the digital humanities. 

The data structure can be outlined as follows:

Archival level - description of the source from which the migration narrative was extracted

a) the source title b) description and contextualisation of the source c) the source typology d) the language or languages used in the source e) the source’s author f) possible co-authors or contributors g) the traditional or digital archive in which the source is preserved h) possible editions or digitalisations of the source i) free notes or observations

Individual-story level - description of migration narrative

a) Individual, that is the protagonist of the migration narrative b) gender identification c) group identification (as described in the narrative itself) d) age (divided by category: baby, child, young person, adult, etc.) e) elements concerning the sexual orientation of the individual and/or LGBTQIA+ issues f) migratory status g) education (divided by category: primary education, middle education, higher education, etc.) h) profession (describing the economic field in which the individual operates: trade, agriculture, industry, etc.) i) trajectory l) analytic description of the migration narrative. The digital objects are available where authorized by the archives or the individual. Specific collections can be searched in the ITHACA collections:

Case study (short description)

The Jewish Diaspora in Italy during the Early Modern Era

Protestant migration from Italy in the 16th Century

Population mobility in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Anatolian Greek refugees in the early 20th Century

Migration in Morocco in the past and present

Documenting the Somali community in Rome

Migrants and refugees in contemporary Jordan

Migrants and refugees in contemporary Tunisia

Cataloguing narratives refugees under UNHCR protection during the 20th century

Economic immigration from Albania to Greece

Documenting LGBTQIA+ migration

Research on undocumented migrants in the current Mediterranean and in Italy in particular

Environmental migration in Azerbaijan