Itinera's Displacements: Front Matter
We are pleased to present this digital roundtable to the readers of Journal18. It contains contributions from six authors, all focusing on the topic of Itinera, a web-based digital humanities project that engages with modelling and visualizing culturally-motivated travel in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is housed in the Visual Media Workshop (VMW) at the University of Pittsburgh. The VMW is technologically-focused humanities lab that engenders and environment of collaboration and creativity where students and faculty from a number of departments across the University can come together to work on projects that apply digital methods and techniques to intepretive projects with focus and intention.
The contributors to this roundtable are listed in alphabetical order, designating our equal efforts on this piece. We are all currently affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh.Christopher Drew Armstrong is currently Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. He is the Academic Director of Itinera, and co-principal investigator on the project with Alison Langmead.
Lily Brewer is currently a PhD student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. She was the Project Manager for Itinera in the 2016-2017 Academic Year.
Jennifer Donnelly is currently a PhD student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. She was the Project Manager for Itinera in the 2014-2015 Academic Year.
Alison Langmead is currently the Director of the Visual Media Workshop in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, and is the corresponding author for this piece (adlangmead@pitt.edu). She is the Technical Director for Itinera, and co-principal investigator on the project with Christopher Drew Armstrong.
Vibeka McGyver is currently an undergraduate student majoring in Computer Science. She is a Technical Undergraduate Research Assistant on Itinera.
Meredith North is currently a PhD student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. She was the Project Manager for Itinera in the 2015-2016 Academic Year.
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 who have conducted research, entered data, and supported the technical needs of the project. Their voices are included prominently in this roundtable, along with those of the academic and technical directors of Itinera. Each project manager takes their own approach to the project, entering data on people and objects of their choice, and also mentoring younger students in the work. The four student collaborators 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.
Scattered throughout the text you will also find a few Scalar notes. Clicking these links will not take you away from the current page, but will instead reveal brief annotations about the highlighted phrases. These notes repeat across the contributions, creating connections and reminders between and across these texts.