Diary and Ego-Document Archives. Geographic Research Opportunities and Perspectives

Abstract

The paper aims to evaluate the potential of life writing within geographic research. Such genre has been far less explored than narrative and travel literature, whose heu-ristic value has long been asserted. Nevertheless, diaries, memories and autobiogra-phies, can be considered useful sources for recreating territories and landscapes, iden-tifying particular territorialisation processes, as well as discovering personal meanings and values associated to given places. In order to fill the gap in existing studies and prompt the interpretation of life writings from a geographic perspective, the essay pre-sents a twofold investigation. On the one hand, it addresses the possibility of applying well-established approaches from literary geography and environmental psychology to the analysis of autobiographic texts – the structuralist approach and the semiotic one. On the other, it examines a few possible case studies among the multiple ego-doc-ument archives and associations existing at the Italian and European scales, where scholars could undertake new research in the field.