Mapping Women’s Studies: Making History with Itinerary

Itinerary is a mapping-timeline–annotation tool, designed at Hofstra’s Digital Research Center (DRC) and intended for general use by scholars and students. The tool enables users to layer multiple historical maps on top of a satellite (Google Earth) map, geo-rectify the maps, drop points, draw lines and areas directly on each map, associate data with these markings, over time, and add editorial or historical commentary.

In our presentation, we will describe the tool’s present and future developments—including proposed enhancements that will facilitate geo-rectification and data entry—and we will demonstrate its applications in three prototype projects, accessible at http://hofstra.github.io/itinerary/.

* Dr. Adam Sills’s “A Frightful Number” visualizes the parish by parish and weekly spread of the 1665 London Plague, using data from Daniel Defoe’s 1720 Journal of the Plague Year and municipal sources.

* Dr. John Bryant’s Melville in Rome, for DRC’s Melville Electronic Library (MEL), traces Herman Melville’s 1857 tour of Rome, based on data culled from Melville’s journal and featuring Itinerary’s powerful alternate “route narratives” feature.

* Dr. Wyn Kelley and Bryant’s Melville in London follows Melville’s 1849 London tour, and features Melville’s journal texts and contemporary and historical site images.

We will conclude by considering future applications of Itinerary, in mapping New York City census and insurance data, women’s history, and women’s studies.