The Grand Tour Project was first established by Giovanna Ceserani as one of the individual case studies of the larger Mapping the Republic of Letters project, which investigated early networks connected by the transmission of postal letters. The Grand Tour Project continues this investigation, while mainly focusing on travels to Italy in the eighteenth century. It remains based at Stanford University and has involved several undergraduate and graduate researchers over the years. Giovanna Ceserani began her work with the Mapping the Republic project in 2008, and the Grand Tour project continues to expand till this day with current contributors such as Celena Allen, Cody Leff, Thea de Armond, etc.
The main purpose of the project is for it to be a scholarly resource, and the audience would largely be academics. According to Scheinfeldt’s theory of the Digital Humanities, this project did not have a main argument or thesis that they wanted to test. Instead the main goal of the project is to widen the understanding of eighteenth-century travels to Italy and generate insights for research and further study. The researchers also hope that more information can be added, and the project can expand beyond the main text source provided by Ingamells to include more documented history and travelers to Italy.
The project focuses on the Dictionary of British and Irish Travelers to Italy 1701-1800, which was compiled from the Brinsley Ford Archive in 1997 by John Ingamells, a professor at Yale University. As Posner would distinguish, this was the main source that was prepared for processing. Ingamells’ work contains 5213 entries that are ordered alphabetically by name, and each traveler listed varies greatly by their journal detail and depth.
Ceserani’s team started manually entering information about travelers’ journeys and biographies into a database structure. From there, this base material allowed them to discover a variety of data visualizations. This led them to the second phase of the project, or the processing of the collected data. Researchers on the project are trying to make it as interactive of a scholarly resource as possible, where people can ask specific questions about travelers and their duration in different parts of Italy in an aesthetically pleasing way. The work is ongoing, but they have established several different ways to interact with the data and examine various topics. For example, there is a time-chart of the tourists travels that allows a viewer to examine the length of a person’s stay in a region of Italy. There are other graphs that link specific traveler’s together according to various variables such as their educational background or their resources for funding. Most of these visualizations were custom made by the Stanford team using an application called Palladio.
In order to present these sources and tools to the world, the visualizations and project information is published on Stanford University’s website. Information about this work was also published in several academic journals such as the American Historical Review. This project enables several “scholarly primitives” functional for academics, such as discovery and insights into the Grand Tour and the experiences of travelers to Italy. This website is also useful for comparing the travels and experiences of different people according to their backgrounds and recorded historical information. Lastly, the visualizations help represent these numbers in an understandable and functional way.
This project has several strengths in its detail, longevity, and ongoing development of the technological resources. The staff members themselves acknowledge a few weaknesses that it is not an “exhaustive” coverage of the historical period and that there are some inconsistencies in the presentation of information. More development on the data visualizations and their searchability could make it an incredible academic tool.
