The Grand Tour Project, made by Stanford University and\nheaded by Giovanna Ceserani, began in 2008 and is still being worked on today. Ceserani\u2019s\ngoal was to widen understanding of the British architects who participated in\nthe Grand Tour during the eighteenth century by using digital tools to graph\nand map their journeys across Italy. They aimed to make an interactive\nscholarly source that would be accessible to scholars and students with an\nacademic background of the Grand Tour itself. The Grand Tour Project\u2019s argument\nwas that insights could in fact be gained from studying the records of those\nwho participated in this cultural phenomenon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The source\nfor this project was the Dictionary of\nBritish and Irish Travelers to Italy 1701-1800 <\/em>which was compiled by John\nIngamells from the Brinsley Ford Archive that contained letters and journals of\nthe different travelers. This book contains 5,213 entries that detail\neverything that is known about each academic that embarked on the Grand Tour\nduring these years. Although this work is not an exhaustive source of\ninformation on these travelers, Ceserani and her team decided that this source\nwas unparalleled in its scope and comprehensive enough to warrant their\nundivided attention. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To process\nthis material, researchers manually drew from this text and input all the data\ninto a spreadsheet or database. During the first few years of the project, they\nexperimented with different ways to represent the information but because of\nthe vast amount of information that Ingamells was able to assemble, Stanford\ndecided to focus on just sixty-nine British architects. They engaged in text\nmining and disambiguation to digitize the entries and create searchable and\nusable data for their various visualizations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As mentioned\nabove, the Grand Tour Project\u2019s ultimate goal was to create an interactive tool\nthat could be used to supplement scholarly research of these British architects.\nEven though it is still a work in progress, their current tool, the \u201cGrand Tour\nExplorer,\u201d accomplished this task. The interface allows multidimensional\nsearching and includes data visualizations that benefit academics who study the\neighteenth century. Visuals include a color-coded time chart of the architect\u2019s\ntravels by month, a web graph showing the source of each architect\u2019s funding, a\nseparate web graph that displays each of their educational backgrounds, and a\nmap of the architects\u2019 travels. These interactive tools can be filtered and\nsearched to show specific people, places, and years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n These tools\nwere produced using the Palladio application which was developed at the\nHumanities + Design Research lab at Stanford University. Programs such as\nPalladio Bricks and Timechart were created especially for this project and\nimplemented on several of the graphs and maps. The website is presented using\nstandard HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but also uses JSON and Markdown files to\nmake the whole website work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Like the\nVincent van Gogh Letters, this project did not yield any concrete conclusions\nabout the Grand Tour members itself but did provide a valuable tool to the\nacademic community. The scholarly primitives of discovering, sampling, and\nrepresenting are seen in this project: new facts about the architects were\ndiscovered, data was sampled from Ingamells\u2019s text, and the information was\nrepresented visually. There are several weaknesses in this project that will\nmost likely be fixed as researchers continue to expand their scholarship. One\nweakness is that it only draws from one source \u2013 finding other sources may fill\nin some of their gaps in research. Another pitfall is the use of two separate\nwebsites to display the data. Consolidating the separate sites would improve\nusability. Although there are some flaws, the Grand Tour Project has an\nexcellent variety of visualizations and\nclean design and can be considered a successful digital humanities project. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Grand Tour Project, made by Stanford University and headed by Giovanna Ceserani, began in 2008 and is still being worked on today. Ceserani\u2019s 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. 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