Stefano Morello

Making the Invisible Visible: Digital Humanities Approaches to Italian American Ethnic Periodicals in North America

Over the past two decades, the expanded digitization of Italian American periodicals has provided unprecedented access to queryable data. While metadata creation and OCR technologies, further enhanced by recent developments in large language model processing, have significantly improved discoverability and accessibility, on their own they do not adequately surface patterns and relationships across the ethnic press archives.

My presentation explores the potential of digital humanities methodologies in examining Italian-language ethnic periodicals in North America, moving beyond digitization and data accumulation toward interpretive analysis, legibility, and critical interpretation. Drawing from my current research, I propose three case studies:

1. A hybrid study, combining Social Network Analysis and microhistory, of the transatlantic literary and cultural networks underpinning the New York-based Italian-language magazine Divagando, highlighting previously invisible mediators and market dynamics shaping post-war Italian American culture.
2. The archival recovery and digital publication of the serialized literature of Bernardino Ciambelli, a foundational figure in the Italian American literary canon whose work remains largely inaccessible.
3. An interactive digital map documenting the spatial distribution, historical mobility, and cultural geography of Italian-language periodicals’ headquarters in the New York metropolitan area.

By showcasing the potential and limitations of these methodologies, I advocate for building shared, sustainable infrastructures that support both individual and collaborative digital scholarship in the study of ethnic periodicals.

Stefano Morello is Assistant Director for Digital Projects at the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning (CUNY). His work combines digital and traditional methods to investigate the infrastructure and transnational reverberations of American popular and unpopular culture. His research has been supported by the New York Public Library, the Wellcome Hub, the Italian Ministry for Education, and the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute, among others. He is a founding editor of JAm It! (Journal of American Studies in Italy), a member of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy editorial collective, and editor of the Italian American Studies Open Syllabus.