Observing South Caucasus' Historical Landscape: An Open Photo Archive. Tools, Activities, and Purposes of the OSCOP Project
Riccioni, Stefano; Penoni, Francesca, and Spampinato, Beatrice · 2025
Presents the OSCOP project, which collects, digitises and catalogues a photographic archive documenting the cultural heritage of the South Caucasus, held by the Centro di Studi e Documentazione della Cultura Armena in Venice. The collection derives from the research missions led by Adriano Alpago Novello from 1967 onward and comprises roughly 10,000 items. Preservation work targets three layers: the photographic object itself, the intangible historical layers (site ownership, historical stratification and toponymy), and the architectural and natural heritage of historical Armenia and Georgia. The authors devote substantial attention to cataloguing method, arguing for transliteration over translation of Armenian names in order to resist toponymic erasure and appropriation of contested heritage.
Read the publication ↗Citation
Riccioni, Stefano; Penoni, Francesca, and Spampinato, Beatrice 2025. Observing South Caucasus' Historical Landscape: An Open Photo Archive. Tools, Activities, and Purposes of the OSCOP Project. Armeniaca. International Journal of Armenian Studies, Vol. 4 (2025), pp. 173–196; DOI 10.30687/arm/2974-6051/2025/01/007 (Edizioni Ca' Foscari, Venice). https://doi.org/10.30687/arm/2974-6051/2025/01/007
What this offers a reader
Photographs of Armenian monuments taken before some of them were destroyed, and the fight over what to call them.
Digital-humanities heritage project; explicitly engages toponymic erasure as a cataloguing problem.
Ten thousand photographs of our monuments, many taken before the erasure began. And they refuse to rename them.
The photo archive preserving Armenian monuments: some no longer standing.
Topics
Related in the repository
Citation checked against the publisher's record on .