B4. TRAVELLER NETWORKS (15th-19th cent.)

The project aims to collect and classify systematically the textual and visual material derived from travel literature concerning South-Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean dating from the late fifteenth to the twentieth century.
          To date, work has been concentrated on the indexing of the content of the travel books related to the specific territory. Entries in electronic form concern: 1) bibliographical information of the book content; 2) information about the traveller and his journey; and 3) independent index records for the subject of each illustration (in print or manuscript form).
          Within the framework of 'PANDEKTIS: A Digital Thesaurus of Primary Sources for Greek History and Culture', the existing database information system was redesigned in order to meet international standards of data management, as well as the needs of a much more extensive and systematic research. The existing database is integrated into a geographical information system (GIS) in order for the user to have the possibility to search but also make use of statistical formulae for all the related travel literature material through a digital map. The researcher could choose the territories he is interested in and study the statistics across a chronological and a geographical axis. Moreover, the documentation of illustration subjects will be reorganized in order to answer queries related to image management and visualisation in travel books as a tool of producing or keeping social memory.
          In the near future, the project will focus on:

• the indexing of travel narratives, including also those of the twentieth century
• the indexing of the content of travel guides and travelogue journals issued during the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States (Tour du Monde, Annales des Voyages, Bulletin de la Societe de Geographie, Journal of the Royal Geographic Society, Revue d'Orient, National Geographic, Vokrug Sveta, etc)
• the indexing of manuscripts, consular reports, letters
• a comparative study with the content of travelogue narratives referring to lands beyond the project's framework (South Italy, Sicily, Black Sea, Egypt)
• the processing and the integration of all place names reported in the indexed texts in the geographical information system
• multiple entries on travel illustration, systematic documentation of illustration subjects from engravings to photographs and related in-depth study to create a standard model
• the comparison of the original designs created by the travellers and the final printed engravings
• the utilisation of the information included in the texts/captions accompanying the visual material of the travellers/photographers
• the tracing and better understanding of any distinguishable practices in travel illustration linked to social memory: such issues as the image location in the text, any existing consistency between textual and pictorial content, the frequency of the conceptualisations preferred to be visualised, and their relation to the experience acquired in the foreign country or to the dominant trends of each epoch.

Programme director: Ioli Vingopoulou, Research Associate