Itinera’s Displacements: A Roundtable

Christopher Drew Armstrong, Lily Brewer, Jennifer Donnelly, Alison Langmead, Vee McGyver, Meredith North

 

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Abstract: Itinera is a digital environment for creating and exploring historical narratives that incorporates cartographic visualizations. The project was inspired by the central role that the mobility of people and objects played in eighteenth-century culture and grew out of a need to better represent and disseminate the spontaneous discovery of historical capta. It facilitates the collaborative production of knowledge and is always in a process of becoming, both as a digital object housed on the internet, and as an exploratory environment imagined and produced by its community of inquirers. Like the renvois in the Encyclopédie, the paths of actants represented by Itinera intersect in ways that create possibilities for unanticipated inspiration. Each week, new data is added using rigorous scholarly protocols. Each year, the visualizations are changed and updated. The project is not a passive agent; its users are also its makers. The multimedia roundtable presented here was created by six members of the Itinera team, each of whom have worked on Itinera at various times since its inception. They present their lived experience of working with the site, exploring their own reconfiguration of Itinera’s knowledge possibilities.

As part of the digital innovations of this special issue on art history and digital mapping, this article has been produced on Scalar, a digital publishing platform developed by The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture at the University of Southern California. Alison Langmead (Corresponding Author) and Nancy Um (Guest Co-Editor) oversaw production. Special thanks are extended to Lauren Cesiro, who served as Digital Content Manager, and Lex Taylor, who developed and customized the project.

 

Cite this article as: Christopher Drew Armstrong, Lily Brewer, Jennifer Donnelly, Alison Langmead, Vee McGyver, Meredith North, “Itinera’s Displacements: A Roundtable,” Journal18, Issue 5 Coordinates (Spring 2018), https://www.journal18.org/2741. DOI: 10.30610/5.2018.8

Licence: CC BY-NC

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