Transnational Italian Studies Launches the First Departmental YouTube Channel
Last August 25, 2024, the Department of Transnational Italian Studies at Bryn Mawr College launched the BrynMawrCollegeItalian, that results to be the first departmental YouTube channel in the history of the college, after the institutional one opened in October 2007. This new department-based video sharing platform hosts students’ final video projects, a world premiere concert written by composer and alumna Jessi Harvey, as well as video recordings of talks and lectures by guest speakers invited to campus, such as the prize-winning author Dacia Maraini and the world-renowned content creator Lucrezia Oddone. As of now, the channel has reached almost 70 videos and 10,000 views in only 5 months since its opening, granting a large international visibility to the department and the college. This semester three students in the department have started collaborating to the project as Digital Scholarship Project Assistants, thanks to a Digital Bryn Mawr Grant that the department won to increase the accessibility and enhance the user-friendliness of their channel.
We interviewed the promoter and coordinator of this project, Assistant Professor of Transnational Italian Studies Luca Zipoli, to discover more about this pioneering digital initiative.
How did this project start?
Any time we host campus-wide events my chair Roberta Ricci and I enjoy working with Multimedia Services to arrange for video recordings of our activities, upon permission of our participants and attendees. We like to do that because we think that videos are excellent tools to keep memories not only of our initiatives but also of the students who were involved and of the prestigious speakers whom we were privileged to welcome. After a few academic years, we ended up collecting a substantial archive of audiovisual materials, so I started thinking about ways to make this repository available for a wider community rather than keeping it just for our records. My chair and I brainstormed our ideas with the Office of Communications and then proceeded to collect signed release forms from anyone recognizable in our videos. Finally, last August we opened our departmental YouTube channel and made our videos accessible to the open audience at no cost.
What is your ideal audience?
Honestly, when I decided to open the channel I did not have a specific kind of audience in mind – if not the broadest possible. Ideally, through my project I was aiming to reach out to anyone interested, passionate, or just curious about past and present Italian arts, poetry, films, language, books, students’ projects, and so on. In sharing online what my chair Roberta Ricci and I have been working on over the past few years I hoped essentially to serve our whole college community, from students to colleagues, from staff members to alumnae, and to foster the same interests in scholarly discussions and intellectual challenges that we all nurture at Bryn Mawr. In opening this channel, I also thought more practically of anyone who missed our events when they took place because either involved in one of the many activities happing on campus every day or because physically distant from our community. I hope that the YouTube channel will allow for this form of participation, especially thanks to the interactive tool of the comment sections that each video offers.
What is the best usage of the videos that you recommend or you hope for?
Our videos span a broad variety of topics, formats, and styles, from students’ final projects to guest lectures and talks, from readings and performances to roundtables, from concerts to podcasts. Given this wide spectrum of materials that they offer, I guess that these videos can serve in many possible ways, as many as our viewers can think of. For instance, I would be elated if our videos could serve as scholarship (thinking of the prestigious guest lecturers we hosted) or as tools to hone language proficiency skills (for those videos in Italian). I also hope that they will be sources of inspirations for current or prospective students (who can explore our former students’ projects), or as outreach opportunities for the free and public dissemination of culture to the wide audience.
What is the role of the students in this project?
When I came up with the idea of this channel, I decided to apply for a Digital Bryn Mawr Grant in support of it. The Teaching, Learning, and Research (TLR) Leadership Team generously accepted to fund this initiative, and thanks to their collaboration, we have been able to hire three of our current and future majors to help us improve our platform. Eleanor Taylor ’25, Evangeline Welch ’25, and Liv Arp ’26 are working collaboratively this semester to add subtitles, captions, and video markers both in Italian and in English with the aim to make our videos more accessible and user-friendly for everyone. In developing these important additions, they are taking advantage of some useful AI tools, while building on their own language skills to translate the contents from Italian into English.
What is the most viewed video in your channel?
I have noticed that the video that enjoyed the biggest success soon after being released is the recording of the talk “Humanities in the Metaverse” that featured the Italian content creator Lucrezia Oddone. This video reached more than 6,000 views in only 2 months and we were very impressed by this outcome. It was interesting to discover that the discussion on these timely topics, that lie at the core of liberal arts education, continued to spark huge interest way beyond the first audience who attended it here on campus. We hope that this popularity will grant international visibility both to these crucial subjects and to our entire college community who work on them every day.
What is your favorite video so far?
One of my favorite (and most entertaining videos) is surely “I Promessi Sposi”. This playlist shows the theatrical adaptation of the famous 19th-century Italian novel “The Betrothed” that the students designed as their final project within Professor Roberta Ricci’s course on its author (Alessandro Manzoni). I think that the students did an amazing job in rewriting one of the best-known masterpieces of global literature from their own perspectives, interests, and interpretations. I enjoy it every time I re-watch it and I am glad that this innovative project is now accessible to a wider audience. I think that in general all the videos by our students are a great testament to their great talents and I hope that they will inspire further creative projects, adaptations, and performances in the future.
What are the next steps of this project?
My chair Roberta Ricci and I would like to start recording our videos in high definition and high resolution, so we are partnering with LITS to discuss ways to equip some of our classrooms and conference rooms with more advanced recording equipment. In addition, I would like to explore further ideas to include our students as content creators of our channel, by designing more video projects to let them enhance both their language proficiency and their digital skills. We of course welcome feedback, ideas, and suggestions from students, colleagues, staff, and alumnae, so, grazie e buona visione!