Itinera’s Displacements

We are pleased to present this digital roundtable containing contributions from six authors, all of whom have worked with Itinera, a digital humanities project that engages with, models, and visualizes culturally-motivated travel in the 18th and 19th centuries. Itinera is housed in the Visual Media Workshop (VMW) at the University of Pittsburgh, which is a technologically-focused humanities lab that strives to encourage collaboration and creativity. Students and faculty from a number of departments come together in the VMW to work on projects that apply digital methods with focus and intention to interpretative research and teaching.

Students at Pitt have served as significant collaborators on Itinera since its inception, which has been lucky enough to have had an ever-changing staff of both graduate and undergraduate assistants over the years who have conducted research, entered data, managed the project, and supported its technical needs. These voices are included prominently in this roundtable, along with those of Itinera's academic and technical directors. Each year, the project gets a new project manager in the form of a PhD student assigned to the VMW as a teaching assistant, and each of these project managers has taken her own approach to the project, entering data on people and objects of her choice, and mentoring younger students in the work. In line with these individualized experiences, the four student collaborators to this roundtable have each contributed different pieces that reflect their own engagement with the project. These “displacements” are numbered, but may be read in any order. They have then been framed at the beginning and end by reflective pieces that situate their work within the context of the larger project by Itinera's faculty leads.