Project Updates

In this course students will explore travels to Italy of three hundred years ago, and learn and experiment how we can reconstruct these travelers' visits and analyse and understand their significance using data science, language processing and…

On May 30 Justin presented his work at the CESTA poster symposium. Since January he has added 736 new entries, created for the travelers who were revealed to us by NLP of the entire text, and who were previously subsumed within the entries of…

Justin is a sophomore double majoring in classics and American studies and minoring in art history. After securing a Cesta Research Assistnt position for Winter and Spring quarters 2018, he was drawn to the Grand Tour Project because of his…
With the 'mentioned names' data complete and cleaned (thanks Teresa), we are proceeding to create new entries for the hidden travelers that have emerged (such as the wives and other relatives who are traveling, but do not appear in the…

Focusing on the case of travels by families, this article shows the ways in which our digital approach transforms the understanding of eighteenth-century British tours in Italy--check it out in The Journal of Tourism History (vol 9,…

The current website launched today--we are grateful to Stanford web services and for the the generosity of the Dean's Office; special thanks go to Patty Castaneda and Tori Steere who spent many hours in the fall discussing and developing ways to…

Teresa Ceserani joins the GTP and brings her deep expertise on dataset-building in the biological sciences, taking on the time-consuming and painstaking task of reviewing the Grand Tour Explorer entries (in GTE editor) in order to add missing…

On September 8 & 9 2017 a group of world renown scholars of Grand Tour studies and eighteenth-century culture visited Stanford for a two-day long workshop to present research developed while using the Grand Tour…

Clara Romani, class of 2020, worked as CESTA Summer Research Assistant on the Grand Tour Explorer. She focused on cleaning the data to better represent every person mentioned in the entries of several travelers to Naples. In her words, “I went…

Noam Shemtov, majoring in Comparative Literature and Symbolic Systems Program, chose the Grand Tour Project for an Independent Study program in Spring 2017. He focused on resolving and cleaning the data concerning ‘groups’ entries, that is the…

‘Mapping the Grand Tour: British travelers in eighteenth-century Italy and the design of architecture’ (with Giorgio Caviglia, Nicole Coleman, Thea De Armond, Sarah Murray, Molly Taylor-Poleskey) is out in American Historical Review 122:2 (2017)…

Christine Phan, majoring in Computer Science, joined the Grand Tour Project as CESTA RA, with an interest in contributing to the project while putting to test her growing skills in natural language processing. Her task was to parse the narrative…

Emilia Moore, 6th grader of Terman Middle School, Palo Alto, listening in on a project planning conversation, sketches interactive dot visualization to represent travelers from the database. See her sketch here below:

 

Kevin Garcia, class of 2017, Classics major in Greek and Latin, minor in French and MA in Classics, joins the Grand Tour Project, conducting invaluable data cleaning and transformation, with a specific focus on resolving ambiguities and…

Celena Allen, CESTA manager and GIS specialist, joins the Grand Tour Project team offering her expertise in consultations about website design, coordination and supervision of CESTA undergraduate research assistants, and general project planning…