Itinera's Displacements: A Roundtable Main Menu Itinera's Displacements Framing #1: Itinera as renvoi Christopher Drew Armstrong Displacement #1: Itinera as Methodology Jennifer Donnelly Displacement #2: Itinera as Site Lily Brewer and Meredith North Displacement #3: Itinera as Code Vibeka McGyver Framing #2: Itinera as Classroom Alison Langmead
Published in Journal18: a journal of eighteenth-century art and culture
Issue 5: Coordinates: Digital Mapping and 18th-Century Visual, Material, and Built Cultures (Spring 2018)
Edited by Carrie Anderson and Nancy Um

Life Events and Tour Stops

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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.