Digital archives as a tool to strengthen tourism research: the Italian case

Abstract

The essay aims to analyse the impact of the digital turn on tourism history in Italy by adopting a multifaceted approach and answering the basic research question of whether or not Italian tourism history has fully experienced the digital turn and what the consequences have been in terms of methods and contents. Our starting point is that the transformation we are facing is comparable to the invention of the printing press and the mass production and reproduction of books and documents (Dittmar, 2011); in the words of Ash et al., “digital pervasively inflects thought, scholarship, and practice” (2016, p. 25). As noticed for other disciplines, this turn implies not only the use of digital devices, software packages, and digitalised archives, but also new conceptualisations, narratives, and logic. To see how the digital turn has impacted tourism history in Italy, we will briefly describe the state of the art of digital history (section 1), discuss the relationship between the digitalisation of archives and new publications (section 2), and finally, we will provide some examples of the innovative use of digital technology for the history of tourism (section 3). Some concluding remarks and future perspectives for tourism history will be discussed in section 4.

Keywords

• digitalization
• database
• medical conferences
• Italy