The Grand Tour Project, made by Stanford University and headed by Giovanna Ceserani, began in 2008 and is still being worked on today. Ceserani’s goal was to widen understanding of the British architects who participated in the Grand Tour during the eighteenth century by using digital tools to graph and map their journeys across Italy. They aimed to make an interactive scholarly source that would be accessible to scholars and students with an academic background of the Grand Tour itself. The Grand Tour Project’s argument was that insights could in fact be gained from studying the records of those who participated in this cultural phenomenon.
The source for this project was the Dictionary of British and Irish Travelers to Italy 1701-1800 which was compiled by John Ingamells from the Brinsley Ford Archive that contained letters and journals of the different travelers. This book contains 5,213 entries that detail everything that is known about each academic that embarked on the Grand Tour during these years. Although this work is not an exhaustive source of information on these travelers, Ceserani and her team decided that this source was unparalleled in its scope and comprehensive enough to warrant their undivided attention.
To process this material, researchers manually drew from this text and input all the data into a spreadsheet or database. During the first few years of the project, they experimented with different ways to represent the information but because of the vast amount of information that Ingamells was able to assemble, Stanford decided to focus on just sixty-nine British architects. They engaged in text mining and disambiguation to digitize the entries and create searchable and usable data for their various visualizations.
As mentioned above, the Grand Tour Project’s ultimate goal was to create an interactive tool that could be used to supplement scholarly research of these British architects. Even though it is still a work in progress, their current tool, the “Grand Tour Explorer,” accomplished this task. The interface allows multidimensional searching and includes data visualizations that benefit academics who study the eighteenth century. Visuals include a color-coded time chart of the architect’s travels by month, a web graph showing the source of each architect’s funding, a separate web graph that displays each of their educational backgrounds, and a map of the architects’ travels. These interactive tools can be filtered and searched to show specific people, places, and years.
These tools were produced using the Palladio application which was developed at the Humanities + Design Research lab at Stanford University. Programs such as Palladio Bricks and Timechart were created especially for this project and implemented on several of the graphs and maps. The website is presented using standard HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but also uses JSON and Markdown files to make the whole website work.
Like the Vincent van Gogh Letters, this project did not yield any concrete conclusions about the Grand Tour members itself but did provide a valuable tool to the academic community. The scholarly primitives of discovering, sampling, and representing are seen in this project: new facts about the architects were discovered, data was sampled from Ingamells’s text, and the information was represented visually. There are several weaknesses in this project that will most likely be fixed as researchers continue to expand their scholarship. One weakness is that it only draws from one source – finding other sources may fill in some of their gaps in research. Another pitfall is the use of two separate websites to display the data. Consolidating the separate sites would improve usability. Although there are some flaws, the Grand Tour Project has an excellent variety of visualizations and clean design and can be considered a successful digital humanities project.
