Digital Humanities and Travel in the Roman World
Originally published on my World History class blog on October 13, 2016. Roman relief depicting a carpentum. Maria Saal Cathedral, Austria. Wikimedia Commons. In class on Wednesday, someone asked about the speed of travel in the Roman Empire. As I mentioned, there are, in fact, scholars who have studied this very question and developed a website on it. Their site is called Orbis (Links to an external site.) Links to an external site. , and it allows you to interactively learn about travel in the Roman world. The Orbis project is an example of a larger trend in academia called digital humanities. Digital humanities projects use computer (often web-based) technology to gain deeper insight into their questions. These projects range from the digitization of historical texts (like Isaac Newton's handwritten drafts of his Principia Mathematica (Links to an external site.) Links to an external site. , available from Cambridge University, or the digitization of images and translat
