Cartografie della Storia — Archivio Corriere della Sera

The problem

Corriere della Sera has been telling Italy's story since 1876 and its archive in via Solferino holds 1.2 million digitised items, 54,000 front pages and more than 12,000 collections, yet it can be consulted almost only by appointment and by researchers who already know what they are looking for. The digital system under construction is designed for specialists, so the curious public stays out, while online visits to national archives grew by 600% in five years. The research question was how to make the archive accessible to users with different needs, paces and goals, building on what already exists.

The research

We worked on four levels: desk research on the Foundation, a competitor analysis of BBC Archive, Europeana and GNM Archive with comparables such as Atlas Obscura and Google Arts & Culture, an ethnographic visit to via Solferino with interviews to the curators, and finally a synthesis into personas and journey maps. Three sentences from the archivists became the project's principles, above all that the heritage is not the single document but the relationships between documents, that the archive has a grammar of its own and that digital has to tell a story, not just show beautiful objects.

The solution

A digital editorial system that turns the archive into an interactive narrative map, where people explore the connections between events, people and themes along paths built on their own interests. The same system serves two opposite users: the curious visitor finds multiple entry points, the front page of the day they were born and curated paths, while the professional gets full-text search on OCR, filters, citations in Chicago or APA format and thematic collections. The architecture rests on five areas, the wireframes were tested in two rounds with real users and against WCAG guidelines, and the design system speaks the newspaper's language with the Solferino and Brera typefaces. The navigable web prototype scores 100/100 on the Lighthouse accessibility test and adds a personalisation widget, a voice reader and automatic image descriptions.

Around the system we designed an ecosystem of six channels that point to one another: a newsletter about the archive itself, the podcast A Mano that starts every episode from a physical object, a YouTube channel, posters in the city, the yearly event La notte dell'Archivio and a physical-digital bridge with QR and NFC tags on the items. The delivery plan calls for 15 people and 24 weeks in six phases, from idea to go-live.

My role

A four-person project with Maria Chieregato, Yating Hu and Giampaolo Zirone. I focused on the information architecture and the navigable prototype, built in React and published online so the jury could try it on their own.