Daejeon, July 27–31
Southern Italy occupies an ambivalent position within Italian cultural and literary discourse: while central to national identity and collective imaginaries, it has also been historically marginalized and represented as peripheral or resistant to modernization (Schneider 1998; Pedullà 2016; Moliterni 2024). This tension is especially evident in post-war literature, where Southern landscapes emerge as spaces shaped by environmental exploitation, uneven development, migration, and historical trauma, making literature a key archive of the asymmetrical transformations of Italian modernity.
While a substantial body of critical literature has addressed individual authors or emblematic works (Motta 1979), systematic, geocentric, and digitally mediated approaches to Southern literary memory remain limited. Recent work in Spatial Humanities, geo-humanities, literary GIS, and digital literary cartography highlights how spatially encoded corpora can integrate close and distant reading, while TEI-based semantic encoding supports interoperable and comparative analysis of relationships between texts, places, memory, and cultural narratives (Bodenhamer et al. 2010; Gregory / Geddes 2014; Acharya / Panda 2022; Juip / Lafraniere 2026).
The PRIN 2022 PNRR-funded project, called Memory and Mezzogiorno (MeMo). A literary map from 1945 to the present (https://heurist.huma-num.fr/HEURIST/heurist/?db=f_aut_memo&website=137) is part of the national research project PRIN 2022 PNRR in Italy, funded by the European Union through the Next Generation EU program, within the framework of Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR). It addresses this gap by adopting a place-centered and digitally mediated perspective on Southern Italian literature from 1945 to the present. Rather than starting from individual authors or canonical works, MeMo foregrounds places as primary analytical units, according to a Geo-literary approach (Westphal 2007). Drawing on ecocriticism, material ecocriticism, trauma studies, and geo-literary approaches (Iovino 2006; Warf-Arias 2009; Iovino 2016; Scaffai 2017), the project conceptualizes literature as a form of spatial inscription through which communities articulate experiences of loss, resilience, displacement, and transformation (Fig. 1).
This methodological shift not only brings the relationship between human societies, environments and memory, but also enables the recovery of minoritarian and peripheral voices within the national literary landscape. These include authors writing from regional or dialectal contexts, texts produced outside dominant publishing circuits, and hybrid genres such as reportage, travel writing, autobiographical nonfiction, and literary inquiry. By moving materials into a shared digital space, MeMo goes beyond traditional archival models: TEI encoding, spatial modelling, and relational querying enable interoperable analyses of connections between texts, places, and historical processes that are not easily detectable through conventional reading, while also reframing engagement as an epistemic and ethical practice aimed at restoring visibility to marginalized literary forms excluded from institutional memory.
Fig. 1. From Place to Literature: an industrial plant and its literary evocations
The methodological framework of MeMo is explicitly interdisciplinary and digitally grounded. The project combines literary analysis attentive to genre, narrative strategies, and symbolic representations of space with ecocritical and materialist perspectives that emphasize the entanglement of human communities and environments. These approaches are further integrated with geo-literary and spatial humanities methodologies, which privilege mapping and spatial visualization as analytical tools rather than as illustrative supplements. Digital Humanities infrastructures provide the technical and conceptual foundation for managing, interconnecting, and reusing heterogeneous data at scale.
Within this framework, XML-TEI was adopted not simply as a descriptive markup standard, but as a form of semantic modelling capable of structuring machine-readable literary geographies through interoperable metadata, relational encoding, and reusable scholarly data, thereby enabling complex spatial, thematic, and comparative queries across the corpus (Fig. 2).
Fig. 2. MeMo Project Methodology: From Textual Corpus to Public Memory Interface (Image generated using the AI model Gemini).
At the core of the project lies the construction of a structured digital corpus of post-war Southern Italian literature. The corpus includes prose, poetry, and nonfiction texts written in standard Italian as well as in regional varieties and dialects. All texts are encoded in XML-TEI and enriched with detailed metadata that capture multiple dimensions of analysis: authorship, linguistic variety, genre, thematic categories (war, industrialization and deindustrialization, migration), and spatial references (Fig. 3). Special attention is given to the distinction between real geographical locations and fictional or symbolic spaces, allowing for nuanced interpretations of literary geography.
Moreover, the corpus is conceived not as a closed archive but as an open and extensible system aligned with FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) (Wilkinson et al. 2016). This choice reflects a broader understanding of Digital Humanities as a collaborative and cumulative field, in which data and tools are shared, reused, and reinterpreted across contexts. The shift from canon to corpus enables scholars to move beyond isolated close readings and to explore relational patterns, continuities, and ruptures across time, space, and genres, while maintaining sensitivity to textual specificity and historical context.
Fig. 3. Textual Encoding and Metadata Structure: XML-TEI markup capturing authorship, language, genre, themes, and spatial references
One of MeMo’s central outputs is a digital literary map of Southern Italy, developed using open-source technologies. The database infrastructure is built on Heurist, selected for its flexibility in modelling complex humanities data and its ability to represent hierarchical and transversal relationships among entities. Geospatial visualization is implemented through Leaflet, integrated with OpenStreetMap, ensuring openness, interoperability, and long-term sustainability (Giurdanella et al. 2025).
The map allows users to explore the corpus through multiple entry points: by place, theme, historical period, genre, or author. Layered visualizations make it possible to investigate thematic clusters, such as sites associated with wartime destruction, industrial expansion and decline, or migratory trajectories. Advanced filtering tools support targeted searches and comparative analysis, enabling users to identify spatial patterns and correlations that would be difficult to detect through traditional reading practices alone (Fig. 4).
Beyond its analytical function, the digital map operates as a memory interface (Alfano 2010). From a Spatial Humanities perspective, digital cartography functions as an interpretive and epistemological practice through which literary space, cultural memory, and historical experience are dynamically connected and recontextualized.
�unable to handle picture here, no embed or linkFig. 4. Back-End View: advanced filters for spatial analysis and pattern detection
MeMo critically reflects on how cultural memory is produced and shared through an open-access, user-centered platform and we portal designed to make literary data accessible and interpretable for researchers, students, educators, and the wider public.
Educational applications are a key dimension of engagement: the digital map supports interdisciplinary, inquiry-based teaching and fosters participatory models of Public Humanities, where students and non-specialists actively construct interpretive pathways rather than passively consuming cultural heritage.
Moreover, MeMo encourages critical reflection on the socio-political implications of literary memory. Users are invited to consider how narratives of modernization have obscured environmental damage, how migration reshapes identities and places, and how war leaves enduring marks on landscapes and communities. Engagement thus becomes a critical practice that links digital interaction to ethical and historical reflection, reinforcing the civic dimension of Digital Humanities.
As the project approaches completion, MeMo proposes a reusable Digital Humanities workflow based on scalable geo-literary modelling, interoperable spatial data, and TEI-based semantic mapping, while also fostering engagement across research, education, and public participation. More broadly, the project demonstrates how Digital Humanities methodologies can transform literary space into an analytically explorable domain for the study of cultural memory, in line with UNESCO’s vision of cultural heritage as a living and dynamic resource.
Future developments will expand the corpus through integration with resources such as Europeana and GeoNames, strengthen Linked Open Data interoperability, and enrich the platform with multimedia, educational, and AI-based NLP tools to support scalable analysis of literary geographies and cultural memory.