The Grand Tour Project was funded and conducted under Stanford University. The project was led (and essentially created) by Giovanna Ceserani, a Stanford professor specializing in the study of the intellectual history of classical scholarship. Ceserani has authored a book on Greek influences on Italian architecture, and is currently writing on the “emergence of modern histories of ancient Greece.” Ceserani’s credentials, coupled with her clear knowledge of the subject at hand, as well as her considerable contributions to the project, make her the clear and undisputed Project Lead for the Grand Tour Project.
To understand what the Grand Tour Project (GTP) is, one must first understand what the Grand Tour itself is. To provide a brief summary, the “Grand Tour” is a route oft travelled by classical architects in the early eighteenth century that is peppered with ancient Greek and Roman architecture. The GTP attempts to “reconstruct the footprint” left behind by the vast number of scholars who participated in this intellectual pilgrimage by studying the published and unpublished accounts of their travels. An interesting thing to note when observing the GTP is that it is, in fact, a small part of a much larger Digital Humanities Project. The Mapping the Republic of Letters project—a project which Ceserani also has considerable stake in, and may have been one of the original individuals to propose the project—is an attempt by Stanford Digital Humanists to analyze and partially reconstruct the scholarship of the classical world (loosely defined as in and around the eighteenth century) solely through the correspondence of individuals across great distances via letters, journals, etc. The Mapping the Republic of Letters is a massive project, and the GTP is only one cog in the vast machine of analysis involved.
The GTP does not have a specific target audience—the work is done for scholarship’s sake, to learn more about the classical world and how it functioned. However, those learned in the classical arts—e.g. those concerned with the art, literature, and architecture of the late Renaissance—will be able to put the information discovered by the GTP to good use.
As a work of pure scholarship, the GTP did not reach a specific conclusion either. There was no point to be proven, no argument to be won: the GTP represents straightforward analysis and presentation of data, nothing more or less. While individuals in the future may use the data gathered during the project to argue for or against certain conclusions, the GTP itself stakes no claim in any argument, and simply exists as pure data.
Much of the GTP was mapping: researchers mapped out individual ‘pilgrim’s’ area of travel and the time which they stayed there, and converted this data into various images, graphs, etc. which aid the visualization process. All of the data regarding the intellectual pilgrims who undertook the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century (including names, dates, and locations) comes from a single source: The Dictionary of British and Irish Travelers to Italy 1701-1800, which is a compiled work from the Brinsley Ford Archive by John Ingamells. This can be considered as the GTP’s ‘primary source,’ and was absolutely essential to the project’s completion.
Initially proposed by Ceserani in 2008 following a conference concerning the Mapping of the Republic of Letters project, the GTP continues to this day to map scholarly visits to eighteenth century Italy, with the last update on the project being November 2017.
The GTP is a very strong project, with few weaknesses to speak of. The simple and easy-to-understand nature of the project makes it applicable to all, and the use of translation-based primitives (e.g. recognizing and converting data into digital form) led to clear results and comprehensive visuals. Personally, I found the organization of the GTP website to be a bit confusing, but otherwise the project was very well executed.
