Virtual Communities as a Crossroads for Global Knowledge

The Corpus Africanisticum-Comunità virtuale per la cultura africana in Italia, developed and maintained by the Institute for Multimedia Information Technologies of the National Research Council is an experimental prototype that demonstrates the process of the globalization and universalization of knowledge that the synergy of new technologies, communication, and specific disciplines can activate, exploiting the interdisciplinary nature and the potentials for interconnectivity and interaction peculiar to the Internet. By community we mean a social group whose founding characteristic is communion: participation by a number of members with the same objectives, sentiments, ideals, intentions, and interests--whether of the living or with the past through the bonds of memory. There are communities of people and of things: a community of human beings is a collectivity cohesive in participation; a community of things is a collection of objects, sets of containers, and instruments for registering and organizing documents and historical traces together with those not produced by the same community of beings, of which they form the memory.