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EmDigIt Workshops
Brief profiles of workshop participants …
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Open Call for Workshop Participants & Application Form
The 2023/2024 call for applications has closed. Thank you for your interest, and watch this site for future opportunities! …
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About EmDigIt
EmDigIt stands for Early Modern Digital Itineraries. …
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EmDigIt Team
Brief profiles of project affiliates …
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The Journey Begins: EmDigIt Receives NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant
The historical experience of travel fascinates a wide audience. Scholars, authors of historical fiction, tabletop game designers, and curious readers or players pose similar questions, such as how far could I go? How much would it cost me? How would I know where to journey next? At the heart of these questions sits a foundational inquiry for the humanities: what does it mean to navigate space without scientific cartography, never mind GPS? Answers remain elusive even to advanced scholars, often further stymied by the lack of analysis-ready spatial data for the premodern world. …
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Itinerating Europe Article in the Journal of Social History
Abstract: Before the advent of formal cartography, with its emphasis on observation and accuracy and its reliance on global standards, the itinerary was the height of geographic knowledge. These lists of cities and their relative distances, represented by many national “miles” or the location of postal waystations, opened European travel to a broad readership. This article traces the repetition and modification of route headings across a newly comprehensive bibliography of eighty-five itinerary books printed from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. The application of Social Network Analysis (SNA) models the organizing logic of the itinerary genre and hierarchization of regions, cities, and routes. Digital methods prove to be key for moving between scales of consideration, from following the fate of one city, to many linked cities, to entire regions or the network as a whole. While the pilgrimage path of St. James and transalpine commercial routes were widely republished, dynamic networks based on the dates of first and last publication indicate the influence of new postal hubs, sea travel, and borders on early modern conceptions of a connected Europe. Instead of a sharp break brought by the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), the 1620s saw the extension and diversification of routes, while the 1680s marked their curtailment. State-patronized cartography reshaped the genre, as authors and publishers increasingly incorporated maps into itinerary book production. …
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Historical Network Research Community Lunch Lecture
Abstract: From dictionaries to gazetteers, the early modern period was the age of the reference book, with more than 1,600 guides published between 1470 to 1599 alone. Itinerary books structured European conceptualization and navigation of space through the eighteenth century, yet have rarely been studied as a text technology and international knowledge project. The EmDigIt database represents the first attempt at a comprehensive bibliography, and currently consists of eighty-four itinerary books representing over 3,500 unique routes, connecting over 1,500 locations, published and republished over the course of two centuries. The talk will cover applications of Social Network Analysis in a forthcoming article for the Journal of Social History, as well as next steps for the project using the Transkribus text recognition software. …