The RSA Digital and Multimedia Committee is pleased to invite you to the second Speaker Series presentation of the season! Please join Giovanna Ceserani and Rachel Midura on  “A World Made by Travel: the Digital Grand Tour and Early Modern Digital Itineraries.”  This webinar will be held on Wednesday, November 13, 2024, at 12:00 p.m. EST.  Easily convert the time zone .

A World Made by Travel: the Digital Grand Tour  is an open-access publication that combines —in dynamic format— original research with data and visualizations about the lives and journeys of 6,007 historical travelers to eighteenth-century Italy, the journey known then and since as the Grand Tour. Framed by introductory chapters explaining its digital approach and centered on a groundbreaking interactive database containing raw downloadable data and visualizations,  A World Made by Travel contains exemplary essays by leading scholars who worked with its data exploring questions such as: What does digital history offer that is new? Can it change our image of the past? Does it change how scholars and readers interact with the past? It also offers resources designed to help teachers bring this wealth of new material into the classroom. 

The Early Modern Digital Itineraries  project explores textual, spatial, and network digital methods that can advance our understanding of historical travel. Scholars, authors of historical fiction, tabletop game designers, and curious readers or players pose similar questions, such as how far could I go? How much would it cost me? How would I know where to journey next? Small, cheaply published itinerary books written by professional travelers indicated precisely which routes to utilize, where to stay, which sites to see, and even provided tools for navigating foreign customs, language, and currency. EMDigIt is currently transforming these books into geo reconciled, linked data for a platform for planning journeys into the past.

Panelists:

• Giovanna Ceserani is Professor of Classics and (by courtesy) of History, and the Faculty Director of the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University.  Read more about her here .

• Rachel Midura is Assistant Professor of Early Modern European and Digital History at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.  Read more about her here .

Please email us  with any questions. We look forward to seeing you on November 13.