Mapping cinema experience as living knowledge across Italy's generational divide (ICAMAP)

The proposed project will create innovative engagement and impact activities with different generations of Italian audiences, building on from resources and activities created by the AHRC-funded "Lost Italian Cinema Audiences" project (2013-16) (referred to below as ICA). The project is a collaboration between the ICA team and our community co-investigator, UNITRE (University of the Third Age), a key partner in the oral history data collection, dissemination and validation within the ICA research project, and whose public engagement events provided our pathways for impact. UNITRE and ICA will collaborate on producing, testing and widely disseminating an interactive digital archive. The new digital archive will significantly enhance the oral history narratives collected in ICA with previously unavailable data supplied by Italian archives (publicity material, photos, plans of cinemas etc.) and by UNITRE members (photos and artifacts of Italian cinema-going in the 1950s). The ICA project has demonstrated that memory preservation places audiences in control of their cultural heritage. Our audiences felt the custodial responsibility of their cultural history when their memories were preserved in the video-interviews and shared in public engagement events. These memories must now be made easily available in sustainable form to younger generations, so that they can become the living curators of a virtual archive of cinema-going experience. A pilot project lead by Dr Treveri Gennari has suggested that sharing experiences and memories of cinema-going between older people and schoolchildren has the potential to generate strong cultural and affective cohesion. The project will therefore offer different generations of Italians the possibility to function as living curators of a virtual archive of their own cinema history. Moreover, this new project will reach and train different communities on the use of the digital archive, hence making the new resource available to a great number of user-groups. These are:
1. Older generations of cinema-goers (through our community partner UNITRE)
2. Schoolchildren (through a national competition through the Education Ministry - Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Università e della Ricerca - MIUR, which will ensure development of class activities and curriculum integration)
3. The general public (through audio-visual libraries that supply audio-visual resources in different regions)
As the main aim of this project is to establish innovative, digital humanities-based impact and engagement activities to connect different generations with the research gathered under the "Lost Italian Audiences" project (ICA), it will:
1. Empower older people to take control of their own memories of cinema-going and 'map' them in our digital archive; this will be made possible by a close working relationship with our community Co-Investigator UNITRE;
2. Engage schoolchildren in interpersonal digital encounters with the older generations of Italians in order to collaborate in the investigation of their neighborhoods, their community and their shared cultural history. We will achieve this by working with schools in 8 regions of Italy to stimulate and facilitate the use of the portal through a national competition, where schools will team up with the elderly in order to map their memories of cinema-going, add further data and metadata, and thereby share ownership of their own cultural heritage;
3. Involve a much broader community of users through Italian audio-visual libraries, across 8 regions of Italy to ensure greater access and contribution to the digital archive;
4. Train all these different communities of users (school teachers, audio-visual librarians, older people) in the use of the archive to make it available in their learning spaces across the country and to develop a sense of 'shared authority' not only in relation to the history of Italian cinema, but to the history of Italian cultural heritage.

Potential beneficiaries include:
1. The co-investigator, UNITRE, and older generations of Italians, who will benefit from participation in: the development of the digital archive, training sessions, and the national competition for schoolchildren;
2. Schoolchildren and teachers in Italy, who will benefit from the use of the digital archive in schools, and the collaboration with UNITRE;
3. Educational experts, who will benefit from the reflection on this activity in two articles;
4. Members of the general public, who will be involved by the audio-visual libraries promoting the digital archive.
The benefits are expressed in the following impacts:
1. UNITRE representatives will benefit from developing and testing the digital archive collaboratively. This will ensure a user-oriented approach in producing the archive, crucial for sharing online content as well as encouraging active participation among marginalized older users. Older Italians will benefit from learning how to use the archive and engaging in dialogue with UNITRE representatives in the training sessions, held in branches across the country. Using the archive will give older generations of Italians new spaces to develop a more sophisticated collective engagement with a wider audience to share individual memories of Italy's cultural history. Older generations of Italians will also engage in discussion and 'share authority' with researchers, schoolchildren and teachers. UNITRE will build recognition of their professionalism and expertise and enjoy stronger mixed networks for developing their practice in Italy and beyond. The project is also set up to help isolated urban elderly communities to overcome the barriers of age that marginalize them and further increase residents' civic engagement and commitment to the place they call home through their collaborative contribution. Reconciling the gap between the oral history tradition and digital technology, the project will be disseminated and replicated in other settings.
2. Schoolchildren will learn about their cultural heritage and how to share ownership of it. This will have a radical impact on local communities, where barriers that prevent different minority groups from collective engagement will be removed through interpersonal encounters between older people and schoolchildren. Acting as internet-savvy mentors, the schoolchildren will help the older community by 'rewarding for active participation' and promoting 'continuous engagement of users in the network'. This user-friendly approach will be accessible to technologically-challenged older users but without alienating digital natives. To ensure a long-term legacy for the project, pedagogic material will be developed and made freely available online to encourage creative use of the archive by teachers. Close collaboration with teachers will ensure that material is appropriate and easily embedded in the school curriculum. The use of the national competition will guarantee a wider dissemination of the project's archive and materials across the country.
3. Educational experts, especially those working in the areas of arts, cultural and digital heritage will gain deeper insight into how to embed cultural heritage practices within the school curriculum. This will be encouraged through reflection in the articles written in an academic journal and in the online teachers' journal. Moreover, they will benefit from a more nuanced understanding of the importance of cultural digital heritage as a dynamic process in which participants across different generations are able to actively contribute to the shared ownership of their own cultural history.
4. Members of the general public will benefit from increased understanding of cinema-going as cultural heritage and being better informed about participatory processes, strengthening cross-generational community networks. Using libraries will allow access to different communities with the potential to 'scale-up/out' impacts.