About

Introduction

OpenSisma has been carried out for the exam Open Access and Digital Ethics as a Digital Humanities and Digital Knowlegde course at the University of Bologna. The two contributors of OpenSisma are:

• Milena Corbellini;
• Anna Sofia Lippolis.

In the context of the eartquakes that happened in May, 2012, in Emilia-Romagna, OpenSisma aims to study and show the effects of such natural disasters in terms of reconstruction works' progress, quality of education for primary, secondary and high schools, both pubblic and paritary; availability of safety certificates and/or environmental constraints and entrepreneurship drive. Although the aim was to make a comparison between 2012 and 2020 information, creating an "Emilia Romagna earthquakes: 8 years later" study project, the unavailability of education data brought us to include less up-to-date data sources for that aspect, while the other thematic areas' data are updated in real time.

With this perspective, we hypotesized a correlation between:

• total works and damage entity;
• amount of reconstruction works that still have to be done and low schools score; in this context we also analyze the score of both pubblic and paritar schools, in order to study the differences between them;
• disaster effects and rise in an entrepreneurial processes.

We then wondered whether schools had the safety certificates they needed in the case such tragic event happened again, a necessity that could grow in relevance if environmental constraints were also registered.

Scenario

We selected the 19 most damaged areas among those affected by the earthquakes of May 2012. Many of them are still in state of emergency. In this struggling scenario, our study can be useful to have a deeper look at the effects of eartquakes on the population, not only in terms of damage and reconstruction, but also in terms of the impact of some aspects of day to day life. More specifically, we found it meaningful to analyze how the educational and entrepreneurial field have been affected over the years. The OpenSisma project's purpose would be to involve citizens of sensitive areas to be aware of the changes and the effects determined by gomernment measures and the way in which those affected the life of citizens themselves. Our research would not only be useful for this portion of population but also for the researchers and the scholars that are interested in this topic.

You can read more about our project here: Documentation