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 their own approach to the project, entering data on people and objects of their choice, and mentoring younger students in the work. 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.
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.
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.