For the scientific community, DiverSIta will release a digital resource documenting the oral Italian heritage, which is long due in linguistics and will contribute significantly to national and international research.
For the first time, academics will be provided with a massive amount of accessible language data, which include Italian spoken by underrepresented groups of people such those with plurilingual repertoires and a migration background. Moreover, additional gaps will be filled, as the existing resources for spoken Italian are of a relatively small size, extremely varied in terms of data collection methods and categories of speakers, and often do not provide full information about the speakers’ metadata. Finally (and crucially), the incremental modularity of the corpus makes it both expandable (through the addition of further modules) and upgradable (by adding new data to the existing modules). These highly innovative features, which make KIParla a dynamic collective resource from the very moment of its birth, are already oriented to the project exploitation, since anyone will be able to co-build the corpus in the future. In conclusion, once the new KIParla modules are released, the present as well as the future academic community will take advantage of an invaluable resource, which will improve knowledge of less-investigated language phenomena, enhance research quality and consistency, and reinforce the scientific community and its collaboration processes.
Second, the publication of the MIR corpus model and the related guidelines will enhance technological innovation in how spoken languages in general are collected, stored and researched, well beyond Italian and its varieties. Under this respect, KIParla will represent an innovative prototype that can be used as a viable example to investigate other languages. In other words, by making the overall corpus construction process fully accessible, the project will release a new ecological model of how to document orality worldwide.
Third, as the KIParla corpus will be included in the CLARIN ERIC (European Research Infrastructure Consortium) and thus will enter into a broad European network of corpora, its resources will also strengthen the internationalisation of Italian research on the Italian language and its speakers. Thus the project will boost the role of the Italian scientific community in leading research on these issues and bringing high-quality innovation in the creation of infrastructures for the analysis of spoken languages.
Outside academia, the project potentially has an equally breakthrough impact. Based on Milestone 5, the DiverSita team will share research evidence with a variety of public and private bodies (city institutions, trade unions, schools, etc.) that work with diverse constellations of speakers of Italian and deal with various intercultural dynamics. In particular, the project results on how social categories (‘foreigners’, ‘immigrants’, ‘Italians’, ‘Arabs’, ‘citizens’, etc.) are shaped through language uses in mainly monological discourses (interviews) and interaction (meal conversations) will be disseminated; this will be implemented through the design, publication, and presentation of a set of awareness-raising training materials (see Oral Compass) in order to raise social workers’ awareness of these issues, make public discourses more intercultural, and thus contribute to fair societies. In this sense, the project clearly commits itself to dissemination of scientific knowledge as well as to social well-being and cultural development.
Crucially, the training materials (e.g., data visualisations and reports, guidelines) will be shaped in such a way to entail forms of co-construction of knowledge: they will be tailor-made for specific professional and social contexts, imply the active involvement of local institutions, and foster forms of strategic uptake. These features in themselves indicate a dimension of sustainability: whatever forms the project results assume, they will be highly locally-relevant, and thus the project long-term effects will be guaranteed. In conclusion, with its intentional aim to involve the non-academic world, DiverSita proves to be highly engaged with society; it commits itself to raise awareness of oral Italian uses and heritage, as a way to promote more inclusive and fair societies.