PRIN 2022 PNRR

As part of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) – Mission 4 – Component 2 – Investment 1.1, Fund for the National Research Program and Projects of Relevant National Interest (PRIN), financed within the Next Generation EU Program (NGEU), with D.D. n. 1371 – 01/09/2023 (ERC Sector SH4 “The Human Mind and Its Complexity”), the CNR coordinates the project “DIgital preservation, LInguistic analysis and valorization of historical archive of the former psychiatric hospital of GirifalcO (DILIGO)”.

Project partners are the University of Naples “Federico II” and the University of Foggia.

The main objective of the project is the recovery and enhancement of access to the medical records (CC) of the former psychiatric hospital of Girifalco (CZ) through processes of digitization, transcription, annotation and linguistic analysis to investigate cultural, political, social and sociolinguistic aspects of the late 19th century and early 20th century.

The specific objectives of the project are:

• Digitization of over 3,000 medical records (MR) from the years 1932 to 1944.
• Transcription and annotation of MR from 1894 to 1943.
• Exploration of the metalanguage, “logonyms” (words for words), and, more generally, the lexicon used by healthcare professionals to describe the patients’ modes of speech, report their words; describe the stages of the illness, compile diagnoses, and note treatments. The information is extracted from the nosology and the “language and writing” and “expressive attitudes” sections of the MR. The section of the MR concerning “psycho-sociological functions” is explored to analyze the denotative lexicon of the patient’s mood.
• Exploration of the metalanguage and lexicon of illness and treatment during World War I (1914-1918).
• Exploration of the metalanguage and lexicon of illness and treatment during Mussolini’s dictatorship (1922-1943).
• Organization and participation in events to disseminate the results of the medical record analyses and to highlight their value as uniquely important sources of linguistic, sociological, and medical history information.

Girifalco and its neighborhood will be actively involved in this project, as the old psychiatric hospital was deeply connected to the social context. An additional objective of the project, which will have a significant impact on the local area, is to connect the archive with the local oral tradition, which still preserves the memory of the life and illness stories that the psychiatric hospital reveals to us through the analysis of its medical records.