Confined to the edges: Reflections on visual research in Bologna

The Urban Archives (UA) project was conceived to create publicly available digital records of “ephemeral street texts, allowing them to continue speaking as documents long after theyhave been removed from the physical landscape” (Gendelman, Dobrowolsky & Aiello, 2010,p. 190).We collaborated with undergraduate students and the University of WashingtonLibraries Digital Collections to build a searchable database of images of the city. The outcomeis an archive of over 2,000 fully catalogued and tagged images of political graffti, ghostsigns, commercial signage and storefronts, architectural landmarks, protest marches, murals,and so on (Urban Archives Database, n.d.).