Hesburgh Libraries

Early Modern Digital Itineraries (EmDigIt) transforms a key primary source base — itinerary books printed between 1545-1761 — into refined data and digital tools for answering questions about historical travel. Small, cheaply published itinerary books written by professional travelers indicated precisely which routes to utilize, where to stay, which sites to see, and even provided tools for navigating foreign customs, language, and currency.

Virginia Tech Professor Rachel Midura will discuss ongoing work to extract and analyze itinerary data for spatial analysis using Transkribus AI-powered text recognition. A planned web mapping platform will aid in recreating individual journeys, but also dynamically visualize how individual traveler choices came together to construct early modern space.

Registration is not required.

About Rachel Midura

Rachel Midura is an assistant professor of early modern European and digital history at Virginia Tech University. Her most recent article, "Itinerating Europe: Early Modern Spatial Networks in Printed Itineraries, 1545-1700" appeared in the Journal of Social History in Summer 2021. She is currently at work on her first book, tentatively titled Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe on early modern surveillance, espionage, and the origins of Europe’s postal systems. She finished her Ph.D. in early modern European history in 2020 at Stanford University, where she was also a senior graduate research fellow at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis.