Arch of Titus, Forum Romanum, Rome
(In the declaration for this blog I promised occasional glimpses of the daily ordeals of life in Academia. Here it goes - scroll down if you find it boring. It's okay, I sometimes feel the same listening to myself.)
During the past week I have been experiencing a slightly worrying level of scatter mindedness, presently of the magnitude where I have to double check that all clothes are on and that it is the work bag, not the garbage, I am carrying before taking off for work. The reason for this - or so I hope, at least - is our imminent move to Rome for a period, and the thousands of big and small details to get sorted before we go: school for the children, care for our half-blind cat, copies of manuscript sources, packing for four persons (weather: Hot? Cold? Rainy?), deciding what small number of toys and children's books to bring, arrange all cloud based computer storages, databases etc so they work together, writing good old paper letters to research funds to requisition money, sending sad aging smart phone on the last journey, replace with new and happier phone, and so on. Like that, night and day, while simultaneously going back and forth to my university in Umeå and preparing the last lectures in Museology on 17th century antiquity politics before I leave. I will make sure to count the children an extra time before boarding the plane, and the rest will just have to work somehow. (End of Ordeals, back to Research.)
The reason for me to start this blog was, as I wrote previously, the PhD course on Digital History where academic blogging is one of the tasks. Another task is to figure out, design and technically develop a digital project related to my thesis, and at best something that actually helps me in my work and can be useful even after the course is finished. Being childishly delighted over technical gadgets and the countless possibilities of the digital development - in particular when applied to the premodern period and sources I work on - I find this task exciting and challenging, and actually also a bit tricky to solve. Why? The focus of my research topic, the heritagisation of sacredness and religion, are processes that are characterized by the fact that they are invisible to the eye; the statue of a saint which was perceived as sacred and an object of worship and devotion yesterday is being transformed into a museum object today, physically exactly the same but with new and completely different sets of narratives connected to it. So, my challenge seems to be: How do I visualize the invisible in an interesting and academically relevant way?
When starting to explore the possibilites offered to historians in the digital world, one finds quite an impressive number of useful, beautifully designed and generally really cool projects (and, needless to say, some less brilliant work as well). Just to give you an idea of the possibilities brought by various visualization projects, take a look at the Mapping Statues project, where you get a visual idea of statues and their placement in Rome on a chronological line. Or the amazing Orbis: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World, where you can calculate the length of time, resources needed and much more for journeys through the historical Roman Empire. Besides the fact that stuff like this give me goosebumps of excitement, I am convinced they add important dimensions to our understanding of theoretical and immaterial processes, events and cultures. Again, it is the use of all our senses and the way they help us learn and understand things, abilities that have been looked down upon and excluded from academic history research for long periods. I believe much potential knowledge and understanding has been missed in this.
As for my dissertation case study with the Swedish Lutheran peregrination travelers to Rome in the 17th century, one of my crucial questions is: How did these young men, coming from a culturally not very developed country (at least not in comparison to Italy at the time) where a heated debate about the dangers of Catholic influences was going on, experience the Catholic objects, habits, rituals, culture etc. when coming to Rome for a brief visit as (what we now call) tourists? My aim is to say something about how they might have reacted to and classified these objects and events - as exotic, sacred, threatening, aestetic, historical, etc. - based on their travel journals or diaries, but also by trying to find out what they saw and how they saw it.
No matter how well I do my source studies and my background research, I must be aware of the risk of speculating and getting lost in assumptions; there is an inevitable gap between what I know to be true, what I can read and see and touch, and what I assume and guess to be true. I imagine creating visualizations of a lost past offers not only the fantastic thrills and possibilities to find and share new knowledge and understanding, but also a rather severe temptation to jump to conclusions, draw the lines just a little longer and thicker, to fill in the gap instead of minding it. Is this a risk, or am I being over-cautious?
What I am considering as my digital project at the moment, when having given up on the possibilities of visualizing the invisible (well, perhaps not forever, but for now), is a map based digital visualization of a selected few of my diary writers and their movements and primary sightseeings in Rome. The tools I have started to try out for this are Omeka and Neatline, and among the sources I plan to use are diaries, archive records etc related to these travellers. Her is an example from Uppsala University library of what it can look like:
Travel journal of Olof Celsius sr (1670-1756) showing a plan over the Vatican Library
When I started to think of possible ways to perform this task, I imagined how it would be to actually walk with my travelers through Rome as it looked at the time: no cars, no concrete buildings, no Mussolini streets. Searching the web for inspiration I found that Emory University, US, had done exactly this and launched the project just a couple of weeks earlier. They have made a visualization that can be explored with gaming controls, based on Giovanni Battista Falda's famous map Roma in Prospettiva from 1676, and where even the shifting light of the day can be adjusted. Check out a presentation of the project here. I am hoping to get a possibility to try this model at some point, and to be able to almost literally walk in the footsteps of the travelers I am trailing; to see at least some of what they saw, based on their own accounts, and then add some of that - after all, inevitable - ingredient of magic that is Imagination.
Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome. Added to and altered since the 3rd century, but still there.
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