Virtual Italy: Data Science and the Birth of Modern Tourism

Catalog description

Classical Italy attracted thousands of travelers throughout the 1700s. Referring to their journey as the "Grand Tour," travelers pursued their intellectual passions, promoted their careers, and satisfied their wanderlust, all while collecting antiquities to fill museums and estates back home. How does the eighteenth-century Grand Tour compare with travel and tourism today? And what can computational approaches tell us about this origin-point of modern tourism - including who traveled, where and why? We will make use of Florence's archives, museums and monuments not only to better understand the meaning of the Grand Tour, but to explore the agency of Italians in its phenomenon. And we will read eighteenth-century travel accounts, experiment with parsing data from those accounts, and create visualizations of historical data. Final projects will be expected to combine original research and data visualizations. No prior programming experience is necessary. Students will have the opportunity to use Italian when researching their final projects.