• Maria Cristina Manzetti

University of Cyprus

Keywords: Grand Tour, Deep Mapping, GIS

The Grand Tour is a well-known phenomenon which occurred between the XVI and the XIX century in Europe. Above all British citizens, but from other countries as well, undertook their long journey towards the southern countries of Europe for several reasons. Till now, the researches about this topic have focused on the education received by that people who decided to leave their homeland for new discoveries and why, the itineraries, the visited places, the forged relationships.

The aim of this paper is to move the attention on the feelings, emotions and impressions that travellers had visiting different places  and on the possible influence their opinions had on their compatriots through letters written during the journeys and the dissemination of their travel journals once they were back home. Deep mapping is a powerful instrument to investigate such matter. Indeed, one of the aim of deep maps is the exploration of places according to their histories, the people and the relationships that were built in there. 

This project is a work in progress which purpose is to create a deep map, through GIS, based on the descriptions of the Grand Tour travellers who visited South Italy and Cyprus, which can be analysed with both a quantitative and qualitative approach to investigate the ideas and feelings that specific locations used to evoke. Places are solidly tied to the identity of populations. The examination of sensations and opinions about places is a valuable starting point to achieve a deeper level of knowledge about the identity of communities and how such identities were perceived and described by foreigners. 

• Ian Styler

University of Birmingham

St Æthelthryth was an early medieval English saint whose shrine at Ely was the subject of veneration from when her tomb was opened in 695, whereupon her body was found to be incorrupt and a tumour on her neck had miraculously healed, until her relics were removed over eight centuries later during the Dissolution of the Monasteries.  During this time, the fortunes of the monastic community at Ely were inextricably linked to those of its saint and her influence formed an integral part of how it dealt with events that impacted it.  Evidence of her influence occurs in a variety of forms: textual, archaeological, material, documentary, and cartographic, and when considered together they paint a picture of the foundation’s fluctuating fortunes throughout the Middle Ages.  GIS techniques have been employed within my PhD research on the range of source types to illustrate the extent of Æthelthryth’s cult’s influence, both geographically and chronologically, across its eight-hundred-year existence, and to determine the extent of her shrine’s popularity as a pilgrimage destination.  This paper will demonstrate how the GIS has been used within my research to store, visualise, and analyse the plethora of data I collected relating to Æthelthryth.  The application of the GIS enabled me to identify hitherto unrecognised patterns in and links between the sources that revealed insights into how Æthelthryth’s cult spread geographically from its epicentre at Ely and how its spheres of influence were defined and evolved across the cult’s lifetime.  Finally, I will demonstrate how the GIS was used to identify a number of possible routes which pilgrims would have used to travel to sites where veneration of Æthelthryth would have taken place.

Keywords: Cults of Saints, Medieval Pilgrimage, GIS

• Kajetan Mojsak

Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences

The paper’s aim is to present the newly created digital collection: "Atlas of Holocaust Literature (Warsaw)“ – its main goals, its structure, issues and questions that had to be solved, as well as new insights and research possibilities that it may open up.

The aim of the Atlas (a joint work of New Panorama of Polish Literature and The Holocaust Literature Research Group of Institute of Literary Research)  is to convey the knowledge about the history of Jewish ghetto in Warsaw and the experience of the Holocaust. It is based on 18 extensive autobiographical records (diaries, memoirs etc.) – and it is composed of 3 main modules: PEOPLE (module containing biographic entries), EVENTS (here short descriptions of subsequent historical periods of Warsaw Ghetto are presented) and PLACES (the central module, containing all the fragments of diaries that are related to the determinable areas, streets or precise addresses, as well as dynamic maps). 

The project’s principle was to use digital possibilities to narrate the story of Jewish ghetto through the prism of topography, hence the use of maps as main narrative tool. This mode of presenting the historical records not only seems to be vivid and possibly attractive for non-professional users, but – most of all – captures (more accurately than the traditional means) the fundamental spatial dimension of the Holocaust history (both on individual and social level). 

Atlas of Holocaust Literature brings a new form of presenting the history (both Holocaust and urban history), but most of all it will be a useful tool for historians and other researchers since it opens up possible new research paths, such as, for example: social stratification of ghetto in its spacial dimension, spacial dynamics of everyday life under Nazi regime, the role of institutions (including their specific physical localization) and their impact on daily life in ghetto.

Link to the discussed project:  http://nplp.pl/kolekcja/atlas-zaglady/

key words: topography, holocaust, urban history.