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Itinera's Displacements: A Roundtable

Lily Brewer and Meredith North: Itinera as Site

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Displacement #2: Itinera as Site
Displacement #2: Itinera as Site
By Lily Brewer and Meredith North

This displacement represents not only a conversation between Lily Brewer and Meredith North, both past project managers of Itinera, but also a video tour of the project's front-end and back-end interfaces that they both choreographed and produced. The video represents a walk-through of what it takes to create life eventsLife 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. for Itinera, including the work of adding a new site when it does not already appear in the geographic hierarchy. The story of working with the data-entry interfaces of the project is told through the travels of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her sister, Lady Mar.

This walkthrough is a vivid reminder that "data entry" is not a mechanical process. Learning to Code in the Digital Humanities
The process of working mindfully with digital computing sits at the heart of Itinera as it is enacted within the Visual Media Workshop. Why we are using computing to get at our interpretations is as important as the individual effectiveness of our techniques. From a traditional computer science point-of-view, learning the "grammar" of computing often precedes the functional experience of using this tool in a context important to the student. In the VMW, we try to provide real-world experience for students to work with, through, and around digital computers, focusing more on their acquisition of a sense of self-sufficiency than on individual tasks completed, data entered, or lines of code written. For more thoughts on this approach, please see, David Birnbaum and Alison Langmead, “Task-Driven Programming Pedagogy in the Digital Humanities,” in New Directions for Computing Education: Embedding Computing across Disciplines, edited by Samuel B. Fee, Amanda M. Holland-Minkley, and Tom Lombardi (New York: Springer, 2017), 63-85. Transforming the historical record into structured data that can be manipulated and visualized effectively requires not only a great deal of time, but also intellectual, interpretive labor. It is not a simple thing to read, digest, and carefully re-present the information left to us from the past. The ability to think through the consequences of our actions is essential to the process. Critical reflection is key.

The system that they use, and that underpins all of Itinera, is called CollectiveAccess, an open-source collections management system designed and supported by a group called Whirl-i-Gig. The Whirl-i-Gig team, including Seth Kaufman and Sophie Byerley, have been critical to Itinera's current design, having been continuous collaborators with the team at Pitt over the past five years. CollectiveAccess has been chosen as a platform for a number of reasons, but perhaps the most critical is that it not only allows us to effectively model agents, objects, and sites as co-equal actants in a complex system, but it also allows us to describe the qualities and the characteristics of the links between them.

As Lily and Meredith discuss in their interactions with Itinera and one another, the visitor is invited to engage with the text-based annotations that appear below the video and that step through the work that is happening on screen, providing guidance and further information about the process of working with Itinera's data. The annotations will progress automatically as the video plays.

Click the arrow/play button to view the video. Choose the "ANNOTATIONS" tab below the video to view the entire list of timestamp-based annotations and to navigate between them at will. The video viewer works best on Firefox or Chrome.

Cite this page as: Lily Brewer and Meredith North, "Displacement #2: Itinera as Site," in “Itinera’s Displacements: A Roundtable,” Journal18, Issue 5 Coordinates (Spring 2018), http://www.journal18.org/2741

Header:
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s network visualization, generated by Itinera.
Screenshot by Nancy Um, modified in Adobe Illustrator, 2018.