ON: Objects in network. The social life of things in the fifteenth century between notarial sources and semantic web

Areas: SH - Social Sciences and Humanities

Abstract:
The project ON: Objects in network investigates the social life of things in fifteenth-century Italy. Drawing on a concept elaborated by social anthropologists and sociologists, ON explores the written traces that different types of objects, and the social relationships around them, left in the exceptionally rich documentary legacy of the notarial serial sources of four cities: Benevento, Bologna, Genova, and Perugia. This comparative investigation of the Italian urban society will allow a deeper understanding of the lifestyle, purchasing power, consumption practices, and social relationships (within and beyond those institutionalized) as embodied by the (mercantile or not) circulation of objects. By programmatically focusing on the “micro-circulation” of different types of artefacts within clearly defined communities (i.e. inside the city), ON will contribute to shifting the focus of historiographical enquiry from the international market to human networks and from economic value to the social, material and relational value of objects. This approach aims to gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how exchanging things was able to shape and transform
personal relationships. In this perspective, notarial serial sources open an extremely rich field of research since they recorded not only the value of things but also the networks of relationships around them.
The fifteenth-century Italian urban environment offers an ideal context for this type of research, since it allows us:
1) to valorise the vast – and largely unexplored – deposit of late medieval notarial documents;
2) to trace the objects’ circulation in the consumption practices and the everyday life of specific communities;
3) to assess whether and how the incipient development of a (mass) consumption society is visible in the lifestyle of early Renaissance Italy, that is, whether and to what extent this transformation influenced everyday life and social relationships.
In addition to using historical, palaeographical, and diplomatic skills, the project will investigate notarial sources also through digital tools, particularly the databases already created ad hoc for this type of document. The adoption of the linked open data (LOD) technology will make possible: the georeferentiation of places; the indication of relationships of kinship or affinity; the connection
between people and places (birth, life, death); the connection between places and professions. These data will allow to draw a social map of the cities under consideration and, by sharing data online, the project will contribute to the collective effort to build the “big data of the past” and to the discussion about methodological issues and challenges that such process involves. For unedited
sources, the project will experiment also with AI systems for automatic transcription, since this type of tool promises to be crucial for the study of large corpora of serial sources.

Duration of the project: 28/09/2023 – 28/09/2025

Principal investigator: Tommaso Duranti

Partnership: CNR - ISPC Napoli, Università di Genova

Budget of the University of Bologna: 87.394 EUR

ERC sectors:
1. SH6_7 Medieval history
2. SH6_5 Palaeography and codicology
3. SH6_12 Social and economic history Website: https://site.unibo.it/on/it