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The research is focused on the representations, both visual and linguistic, which people give of their own places of origin. The factual work of collection of the texts was not merely "empirical" because all the members of the research group proceeded in a predetermined way, following a protocol carefully and preliminarily discussed. In other words, we have made a list of the most relevant questions to address in the analysis of the corpus in order to obtain the answers we are looking for. Some of those answers concern: (1) how the visual language and the oral language integrate each other in the reconstruction of a memory; (2) how people nowadays experience the memory of their places of origin, in an era marked by large displacements and diminished sense of belonging to a place; (3) how emotional and cognitive components work together in the reconstruction of the past; (4) how the past is expressed through its spatial dimension. Interviewees were asked to draw their own place of origin on a white A3 sheet, using either a pencil or a coloured pen, according to their choice. If they did not remember their native place precisely because they had moved away many years before, they could draw the place they remembered as the scenario of their early childhood. The team is formed by scholars from different disciplines such as Semiotics, Psychology and Geography, because we aimed at understanding the materials under investigation from various and interdisciplinary points of view.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-68858-9_1

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