Displacement #1: Itinera as Methodology

By Jennifer Donnelly

Itinera approaches historical information from a different theoretical standpoint than that of a traditional dissertation, book, or article project. A written history typically unfolds within a linear narrative. The author shapes, mediates, and manipulates the raw data that are history's primary sources. By working with Itinera, I learned to challenge the implicit sequencing of the historical narrative by subjecting this same information to a standardized set of curated criteria and presenting it as structured data through dynamic visualizations that map mobile collections of humans and objects in space and time, but do not necessarily adhere to fixed developmental or teleological frameworks.

My work on German Naturalist Alexander von Humboldt’s South American (1799-1804) and Russian expeditions (1829), which I began during my tenure as Itinera's project manager, focuses on the interactions of people moving across the globe, making use of the possibilities and affordances of Itinera’s non-linear, non-hierarchical approach to represent both the mobility of people and objects. Humboldt traveled the world taking measurements and collecting data, hoping to trace the universal geographies of natural history. Humboldt's example demonstrates the potential of Itinera as both a graphic model of data visualization and a methodological approach that can be useful beyond Itinera's boundaries.

The fundamental building block of Itinera is the life eventLife Events and Tour Stops
Sometimes we talk about Itinera as a re-envisioning of the traditional linear narrative that has long-structured our understanding of the "Grand Tour" in Western Europe. And that was, indeed, one of the foundational concepts for the project. For this reason, we spoke of the collocation of an agent, a time, and a place as a "tour stop." Since that time, however, we have come to see that what we are producing is not the trace of one trip or one tour. Instead, we are collecting information about the trajectory of a given life. Indeed, the project team had its change of heart at a very particular moment. Karen Lue, an undergraduate research assistant at the time, looked up from her work and said, "Is baptism a tour stop?" The room quieted down, we knew we wanted to track this sort of information, and therefore we also knew our terminology needed to change. In part because of a large helping of technical debt, the back-end interface still calls these data points, "tour stops." However, nowadays, when we speak of these events within the Visual Media Workshop, we make an effort to call them "life events," whether we are talking about people, objects, or sites., a record of a specific event in the life of an Itinera agent. The data collected to record a life event in Itinera includes geographically specific information, which can be a specific street address or a more general place, such as "Rome;" a timestamp, which can be the exact time of day in which an event takes place or a series of days or weeks; and links to a series of other actors, who also participated in that life event at that specific place and time. This data is mined from historical narratives, memoirs, travel diaries, and other types of records that typically conform to a more conventional narrative format. Each actor is associated with his or her own unique timeline of life events and an agent profile that records, among other things, his or her date and place of birth and death, life role or occupation, and any pertinent familial or professional relationships. All of the relationships between time, place, and historical actor are carefully recorded in Itinera according to a defined schema. However, Itinera does not entirely avoid narrative history. The “description” portion of the life event is the only component that requires a traditional narrative account, and it is often in these narratives that the drama of human experience comes to life.

The Itinera user can then access this data through several different visualizations on the front end of the interface, which provides graphic modes of picturing journeys, social relationships, and biographies. When viewed through the "Routes" visualization, Humboldt's voyage on Itinera reads, like all journeys on Itinera, as a series of dots snaking across the globe. Fragmented groups cluster in Europe, a long, irregular line cuts across Russia, and two twisting paths meander along the western edge of South America and Venezuela (Figure 1). A single dot highlights the Canary Islands and a few marks accumulate in the United States, Cuba, and Mexico. With these specified points, the map itself gives a sense of the chronology of Humboldt's journey, but speaks more to the dispersed sites and the spatial density of his life experiences. A scroll along the bottom of the map allows the user to manage the dates of travel displayed on the map. Each dot itself opens into a window with a painting of Humboldt taking notes, the location and date of each of Humboldt’s life events and a description of the events that unfolded at that place and time.

The Networks Visualization cuts across these life events in a different way, allowing convergences between selected historical actors to emerge. As more and more users add data to Itinera, these networks will become richer and denser. Itinera flattens traditional hierarchies of historical importance or preeminence. Connectivity emerges between known historical actors, such as Alexander von Humboldt and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as well as lesser known agents, such as Don Ignacio, a tiger hunter on the Apure River in Venezuela (Figure 2).

Switching to Itinera's "Chronology" function, the same dots are flattened into a temporal sequence. Here, the timeline reveals the intensity of Humboldt's movements in 1800 and again in the 1820's and early 1830's (Figure 3). Choosing another traveler from Humboldt's dense wheel of acquaintances creates an overlapping sequence of differently colored dots on both the "Routes" and the "Chronology" visualizations, revealing where Humboldt and his companions converged in time and space. In large urban contexts such as Paris and Rome, multiple life events from numerous narrative-structured sources convene, offering the potential for new historical discovery (Figure 4).

As Project Manager of Itinera, I collaborated on the implementation of a new feature, the object module which adds data about mobile objects, such as scientific collections, monuments, and works of art, to the travelers, routes, and chronology functions. This new module extends Itinera's capabilities to map the mobility and intersection of physical artifacts as well as human endeavors in both space and time. Itinera's agents are continuously moving, creating, and interacting with objects, essentially constructing and deconstructing both communities and collections. Humboldt gathered physical samples, produced books, and created collections of natural objects during his travels. The object module was developed as a way to represent those relationships. Presently, it is complete but still in the early stages of implementation. The ​Itinera team is currently researching object collections to include in ​the database. This new module also links effectively to my current dissertation research, which explores the development of French history through a chronology of displaced cultural artifacts at the short-lived Parisian Musée des monuments français, which was open from 1795 to 1816. Its collection was composed of art objects, sculptures, and architectural fragments mobilized due to the nationalization of property during the French Revolution, when artifacts of the church and the aristocracy were gathered into depots and processed for sale, reconstitution, or preservation. At the Petits-Augustins depot, Alexandre Lenoir, the museum’s first director, found an opportunity to shape a collection for public display from displaced artifacts and art objects, a formative moment in the development of museums in France.

Indeed, the methodological implications of the reorganization of artifacts into museum collections during the French Revolution also play a role in the categorization of human remains, a data type that introduced a unique challenge to Itinera’s data model. When I entered the exhumed body of Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne, Vicomte de Turenne, the French Marshal General under Louis XIV, into the system, I was asked to confront the boundaries of personhood and objecthood in both Itinera and in my own research. Turenne died in 1675 and was buried in the Basilica of Saint-Denis. His body was exhumed in 1793 and taken to Paris, first displayed at the Muséum d'histoire naturelle, then incorporated into the Musée des monuments français, until finally interred at Les Invalides. This object/corpse presented a new set of problems to the recently created objects module. How does objecthood affect agency?People-Object-Sites
From the very first planning sessions for Itinera in late 2011, we knew that we wanted to be able to model the movement and interaction not only of the human beings that were traveling across the globe, but also of objects and even monuments, such as the Parthenon, that have also found themselves distributed far and wide. We have always thought of people, objects, and sites as co-equal "actants" in this model, borrowing the implications of that term from Actor-Network Theory. In terms of digital practicalities, each of these actants has different needs in terms of Itinera's data model, and so we have treated them as "modules" that we have been implementing over time. We began with the human travelers, in part because they seemed the most tractable. We have since been able to turn our attention to implementing the Objects Module, starting in 2016. The work on the Sites Module will be closely related to that of the objects, and will begin in the near future. One day, in fact, it is a dream to design a way to model events—such as wars and celebration—into the workings of Itinera. For a review treatment of our initial plans, please see also, Jason M. Kelly, “Reading the Grand Tour at a Distance: Archives and Datasets in Digital History,” The American Historical Review 122.2 (April 2017): 451–63. Namely, is a deceased body a person or an object? We concluded it was both. The agent Turenne became the creator for the object Turenne at the moment of his death in 1675. New network relationships emerged between the agent Turenne, the object Turenne, and other Itinera agents who interacted with Turenne as a person, an interred body, or a museum object across space and time (Figure 5).

Following my tenure as Project Manager on Itinera, I continued my dissertation research on the Musée des monuments français, which, having closed in 1816, only exists today in texts, images, and archives. Lenoir organized the collection of the Musée des monuments français into a sequence of architectural and sculptural experiences. An Introduction Hall presented the origins of French art, followed by five immersive century rooms decorated in the manner of their eras, a sequence of exterior courtyards framed by large architectural fragments transported from Gaillon and Anet, and a picturesque garden, the Jardin Élysée, where monuments mingled with the tombs of selected important figures from French history, including Turenne. After 1816, the museum was dismantled and the objects relocated and reconfigured into new collections.

To organize my thoughts and data on this collection, I began thinking about the systematic way Itinera processes historical information as a methodological research tool for my own work. To create a life event, we must mine a narrative for specific data standardized by Itinera's data model. In the case of my research, thinking more like Itinera helped me to understand that the existing narrative descriptions of the museum were creating imbalanced accounts of its collection: certain objects on display were given prominence, while other features were ignored or barely described, thereby presenting an incomplete record of the holdings. Moreover, the Musée des monuments français was ephemeral, and each object in its collection had a unique history of mobility. I established a standardized set of criteria for each gallery of the museum. Using archival images and texts, I began to identify the origin, age, creator, position in the Musée des monuments français, and contemporary state of every object in the museum (Figure 6).

The outcome of this research is the most complete written description of the interior and exterior spaces of the Musée des monuments français to date. I identified several lesser-known potential pieces of the collection and carefully researched the organization of both primary and secondary spaces, including the hallways, courtyards, and other auxiliary spaces of the museum. My forthcoming dissertation, "The Physiognomy of a Collection: Architectural Legibility and Historical Expression at the Musée des monuments français (1795-1816)" offers a complete impression of the overall museological experience. My work builds on the INHA and the Musée du Louvre's 2016 exhibition of Lenoir's work "Un musée révolutionnaire: Le Musée des monuments français d'Alexandre Lenoir," which included a 3-D reconstruction of the Sixteenth-Century Room.

My work using Itinera to study Alexander von Humboldt and Alexandre Lenoir resulted, in both cases, in a unique visualization of a large collection of data. For Alexander von Humboldt, this visualization took the form of an interactive interlace of points on a map and a timeline representing the extent and intensity of major scientific enterprises. The graphic representation of Humboldt’s journey in Itinera offers a dynamic platform for further historical research and collaboration. Examining the Musée des monuments français through the lens of Itinera, the reconstructed physical spaces and mobile relationships recovered from the data revealed new object relationships and a comprehensive view of the development and transformation of the collection. As an apparatus of visual knowledge and a research methodology, Itinera challenges the boundaries of narrative history for a richer, more complex understanding of journeys, social relationships, and object life histories.

Cite this page as: Jennifer Donnelly, "Displacement #1: Itinera as Methodology," in “Itinera’s Displacements: A Roundtable,” Journal18, Issue 5 Coordinates (Spring 2018), http://www.journal18.org/2741​

Header:
Alexander von Humboldt’s network visualization, generated by Itinera.
Screenshot by Nancy Um, modified in Adobe Illustrator, 2018.