Time, Routes, and Places of Nineteenth-Century Travelers is dedicated to compiling, querying, visualizing, and interpreting the narratives by men and women who traveled to Spain from over ten countries of Europe and the Americas over the course of the “long” nineteenth century (1789-1914). We approach the travel literature of the time as a mass-produced modular type of writing, since the authors of travel books were driven by market demands and a wish to sell as much as by their desire for self-expression. Although these writers were following the conventions of such genres as scientific questionnaires, art criticism, life writing, and adventure stories, they were seeking to achieve “truth-effect” and create an illusion of authenticity. As the result, nineteenth-century travelogues are hybrid texts that reproduced cultural conventions and pre-conceived ideas from their authors’ places of origin just as often as they reconstructed foreign lands and narrated individual experiences. This is why, we claim, scholars need interdisciplinary tools to analyze travel literature. Examining it “in bulk” using the instruments of computer analysis and visualization is a new strategy that this project is set to explore.

This project’s ultimate goal is to offer a web-mapping tool for connecting the spaces of authors’ imagination to real world locations. This website documents the preparation of the work on the "demo” a pilot map of Spain as imagined in one hundred 19th century travelogues. Such a module would not have been possible without the work of those who mined the data in phase one of the project in 2012-13. We used their contributions to arrive to a hypothesis and build a prototype of the map. The prototype is still a work in progress. 

As this an ongoing work, the website will be regularly updated as the project moves along. 
 

Website designed and maintained by Jim Bauer

 

 

Currently  Dr. Eugenia Afinoguénova, Associate Professor of Spanish (Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures) is working on the project with the assistance from Donna G. Genzmer, (GISP Director, Cartography & GIS Center, UW-Milwaukee), and Valeria Navarro (class of 2015, Spanish Language, Literature, and Culture for Native Speakers and History).