Itinera

Travel played a pivotal role in the shaping of the intellectual and artistic culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. While the capital cities of Rome, Paris, and London had always served as major attractions for travelers, the increasing specialization and ease of mobility over the course of these centuries began to open remote areas such as Greece, Egypt, and the Near East to scholarly inquiry. Simultaneously, an interest in national landscapes and antiquities made other less highly-trafficked local regions the focus of new forms of tourism.\ud \ud Visualizing, understanding and creating new knowledge about the changing patterns and objectives for these types of travel are the primary goals of Itinera. Designed to allow scholars and students to better comprehend the interconnected phenomena of travel, object collection and site documentation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Itinera will be a map-based, interactive, digital resource that overlays and juxtaposes these travelers’ movements alongside the objects of their study and their own creative output.\ud \ud This digital environment has been proactively designed to collect and present historical data within a visual context of discovery capable of driving new research and generating new understandings. This system will not only represent the scholarly community’s pre-existing knowledge on the topic of cultural tourism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it will also serve to create an innovative academic apparatus richly and transparently structured enough to allow new interpretations to find their ways into and among the assumptions that underlie that structure