Anna Lanfranchi

Anna talks about her postgraduate research placement with Digital Humanities at Manchester.

The placement

In autumn 2017, I worked on a short-term Mnemosyne Fellows placement offered by DH@Manchester.

It involved designing an online exhibition for the AHRC-funded project The Dialectics of Modernity, led by Dr Francesca Billiani (Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies).

The placement ran in collaboration with both the project PI and RA, Dr Laura Pennacchietti, and the University Research IT team, who provided training at the beginning of the placement, weekly follow-up meetings and constant support.

The Dialectics of Modernity proposes to explore the arts system in Fascist Italy in order to cast light on the tension between aesthetical trends, the political and intellectual milieus and the debate on cultural and social modernisation in Italy in the interwar years.

As part of the research outputs of the project, the online exhibition exploits the features of the Omeka-based Mnemosyne platform to showcase artworks (1920-1940s) selected from the vast project database - comprising public and private buildings, paintings, sculptures, mosaics, exhibition designs and theatrical plays - to make the arguments and results of the project accessible to a wider audience.

My duties

In line with the principles of the project, this interactive exhibition allows you to visualise artworks situated in time and space using Neatlines.

Having recorded the metadata of the artworks in DCMI standards (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative), and populated the website with items (objects) and collections (groups of items), I built the exhibition using plugins and tools which help deliver narratives and contents through an accessible and straightforward interface.

The choice of the image-oriented Daily theme further enhances navigating the digital records that compose the exhibition, some of which are of archival provenance and publicly accessible here for the first time, thanks to the courtesy of the partner institutions. 

The Dialectics of Modernity online exhibition will open in the last quarter of 2018.