Lessons from Crises and Disasters
Lessons from Crises and Disasters: The Role of Information Flows between Individuals, Communities, Institutions. Comparative case studies between Italy and Poland (16th-19th century)
Joint Bilateral Agreement
2025-2027
National Research Council of Italy and Polish Academy of Sciences
Principal Investigators: Agata Błoch (Poland) and Idamaria Fusco (Italy)
Participants:
Polish side: Dr Anna Horeczy, Dr Clodomir Santana, Dr Saddam Hussain
Italian side: Paola Avallone, Isabella Cecchini, Geltrude Macri

The aim of the project is to compare different case studies in a global context. Crises and disasters have inherently global aspects. Comparing different situations in areas that are sometimes even distant from each other allows for a better understanding of specific crises and disasters and the impact they had in a broader context that goes beyond the area that each scholar intends to analyse.
In this sense, the role of information and information dissemination is crucial. The aim is to understand whether and how certain information circulated and what impact this information had in distant territories, often characterised by different institutional, economic and social aspects. These comparisons will help us to better understand the crises and disasters studied and how they were managed.
This project aims to:
● Compile relevant bibliography and archival collections and analyze case studies on crises and disasters in the regions of Italy and Poland.
● Identify and analyze documents related to communication in crises and disasters.
● Using concrete case studies from the two distant and in many respects different countries, the aim is to examine whether common ways of disseminating news in times of crisis and disaster can be found;
● Investigate the influence of information dissemination on crisis management.
● Reconstruct the flow of information between Italy and Poland in relation to crises and disasters.
● Identify common patterns in news dissemination in times of crises.
● Demonstrate the relevance of historical experiences for today's crisis management.
● Formulate recommendations for current emergency preparedness and preventive action based on historical analysis.
The integration of digital methods can improve our historical research and increase our ability to analyse and understand complex data sets. This integration enables a more nuanced understanding of disasters through a digital historical lens. We will utilise our extensive expertise in digital techniques, which includes the use of a variety of algorithms that we have developed as part of our past and ongoing digital projects (see, for example, A. Bloch, D. Vasques Filho, M. Bojanowski, ‘Networks from archives: Reconstructing networks of official correspondence in the early modern Portuguese empire’ in Social Networks 69 (2022), pp. 123-135., Figueiredo, E., Macedo, M., Siqueira, H. V., Santana Jr, C. J., Gokhale, A., & Bastos-Filho, C. J. (2019), ‘Swarm intelligence for clustering—A systematic review with new perspectives on data mining’ in Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 2019, 82, pp. 313-329). These include social network analysis, topic modelling and sentiment analysis, among others. By using such tools, we can recognize hidden patterns and gain a better understanding of the spread of information about disasters.
