Crowdsourcing historical information in a contested city: A Geo-live Platform to Spatialize Rijeka’s Overlapping Layers and Narratives, in Ana Plosnic Skaric (ed.), “Mapping urban changes / Mapiranje urbanih promjena”, Institute of Art History, Zagreb, 2017

Abstract

As oral history has shown, we are all repositories of the past. Personal memories both of public and private places, fill in the gaps of more traditional histories drawn from archival materials, with all their limitations. In the context of the project "Cities and Regions in Transition after the Second World War," Brigitte Le Normand, Jon Corbett and Vanni D’Alessio have created an interactive map using the Geolive web platform, a participatory mapping tool that uses Google maps. Anyone wishing to share their memories and their collected first or second hand stories about localized events and places in Rijeka’s past and present, can log in and put a marker on the map, which can be navigated using a time-bar, layers and keywords. Markers can be written texts, pictures, audio and video files. The purpose of the map is to crowd-source the knowledge of Rijeka's transnational often-conflicting historical narratives, and of the overlapping layers of the city, in order to visualize intersections and interrelations in time and space. This article addresses the issue of Rijeka as a contested city and on how to study and analyze it using information from archival sources but also from this map. Rijeka is a city which has gone through many political transitions from the early 19th to the end of the 20th centuries, and whose buildings, monuments, schools, industries, and streets have repeatedly changed name, profile, identity and scope. In this article we analyze the histories of Rijeka and the different views on its past, and discuss the value of such web platform (which is available on line at http://rijekafiume.geolive.ca/themap) on which scholars have uploaded historical information and people have placed their experiences and views of the past