The Dawn of Modernity in Rio de Janeiro: Historiographic Approaches to Digital Mapping the Everyday Life of a Changing City

Abstract [eng]

The present paper deals with an important moment of Rio de Janeiro’s history in the XXth century, when big transformations took place in its central area, in the beginning of the 1920s. At that time, while the International Exhibition that celebrated the Centenary of the Brazilian Independence took place, in the year 1922, Castelo Hill, the place of its first occupation, in the XVIth century, was being demolished. These two events, simultaneous in time and space, revealed, at the time, different visions about the city development in its way into the Modernity, in a narrative clash which stirred its everyday life in the first years of that decade.
To build a graphic interpretation of that moment, we seek to explore methodologies that allow the transformation of the primary sources known as "urban micro narratives", small everyday life narratives, in mappable information of time and space. Conceptually supported by the Italian Micro-History's authors, this study seeks to articulate the Mapping and Digital Modelling fields, to bring new points of view to a period of Rio's history that still keeps aspects not yet entirely explored in historiography.