HNR lunch lecture Rachel Midura: Early Modern Digital Itineraries: Networks of European Space, 1545-1761 (May 20)

Dear all,

The Historical Network Research community is pleased to announce another event in the HNR Lunch Lectures SeriesThe next lecture will be on Thursday May 20. Our speaker will be Rachel Midura, assistant Professor of Digital History at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She collaborates in projects arising from the Stanford Mapping the Republic of Letters Project, such as the Grand Tour Project and Early Modern Mobility Research Group, which critically examine surviving early modern corpora, increasing accessibility and historical knowledge through digital curation and annotation.

Dr. Rachel Midura will join us via Zoom with her lecture entitled “Early Modern Digital Itineraries (EmDigIt): Networks of European Space, 1545-1761” (see abstract below). 

Because of the time difference, we decided to turn this lunchlecture into an afternoon tea lecture. The seminar will start at 4:00 pm CET (10 am EST / 3 pm BST) and finish one hour later.

If you would like to participate, please register via Eventbrite. If you have already registered for one of our previous lunch seminars and specified that you want to attend the whole series, then there is no need to register for this event. You will receive a Zoom link by email prior to the lunch lecture. 

We hope to welcome you online on May 20! Meanwhile, if you have any questions please contact us at events@historicalnetworkresearch.org.

Best wishes,

Aline Deicke and Ingeborg van Vugt

Early Modern Digital Itineraries (EmDigIt): Networks of European Space, 1545-1761

Abstract: From dictionaries to gazetteers, the early modern period was the age of the reference book, with more than 1,600 guides published between 1470 to 1599 alone. Itinerary books structured European conceptualization and navigation of space through the eighteenth century, yet have rarely been studied as a text technology and international knowledge project. The EmDigIt database represents the first attempt at a comprehensive bibliography, and currently consists of eighty-four itinerary books representing over 3,500 unique routes, connecting over 1,500 locations, published and republished over the course of two centuries. The talk will cover applications of Social Network Analysis in a forthcoming article for the Journal of Social History, as well as next steps for the project using the Transkribus text recognition software.

Published by Ingeborg van Vugt
April 27, 2021

Stay tuned

Subscribe to the HNR Newsletter


We use Mailchimp to send emails. By signing up you agree to their terms of use.