HNR lunch lecture Rachel Midura: Early Modern Digital Itineraries (1545-1761)
Channel: The Historical Network Research Community
Date: 2021-07-10

This lunch lecture took place on May 20th, 2021. Due to a recording error, for the first few minutes black boxes had to be added to the video to protect the anonymity of the live audience. We apologize for the error!

Rachel's website: https://emdigit.org/
Rachel's twitter: https://twitter.com/rcmidura

Rachel's slides for the presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1s-qROASrRsi3bHpOQmQEP0lo_yys119vw8jLFARjfsk/edit#slide=id.p

**Early Modern Digital Itineraries (EmDigIt): Networks of European Space, 1545-1761**

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.

For more info, see also Rachel's recent paper in the  Journal of Social History: https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab011


More info on the HNR lunch lecture series and on upcoming lectures: https://historicalnetworkresearch.org/hnr-events/hnr-lunch-lectures/