Digital Humanities and Travel in the Roman World
Originally published on my World History class blog on October 13, 2016.
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, 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, available from Cambridge University, or the digitization of images and translations of the Vindolanda Tablets, a cache of 1st-3rd century Roman documents found at a fort in northern Britain - this example, the most famous, is a birthday party invitation from the wife of the fort's commander to a friend) and databases (like the Medieval Soldier Project, which allows you to search for records of individual English soldiers in fourteenth and fifteenth century muster rolls). These projects provide access to these important texts to scholars who cannot afford to travel to the distant archives where they are located, as well as interested amateurs who do not have the credentials to get into archives at all.
Mapping projects like Orbis are particularly valuable, since they are able to take textual information and lay it out visually to achieve a deeper understanding of the subject. The Orbis map is fun to play with, but it is also an important scholarly tool. It can help estimate how long it took to send messages, move troops, and transport goods from one city in the empire to another in a variety of season along an assortment of different routes. This can be useful to the work of military, political, and economic historians - and I'm sure there are many more applications that others will come up with in the future. So go play with it and think about the ways modern technology has improved out ability to understand the world of the past!
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| Roman relief depicting a carpentum. Maria Saal Cathedral, Austria. Wikimedia Commons. |
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, available from Cambridge University, or the digitization of images and translations of the Vindolanda Tablets, a cache of 1st-3rd century Roman documents found at a fort in northern Britain - this example, the most famous, is a birthday party invitation from the wife of the fort's commander to a friend) and databases (like the Medieval Soldier Project, which allows you to search for records of individual English soldiers in fourteenth and fifteenth century muster rolls). These projects provide access to these important texts to scholars who cannot afford to travel to the distant archives where they are located, as well as interested amateurs who do not have the credentials to get into archives at all.
Mapping projects like Orbis are particularly valuable, since they are able to take textual information and lay it out visually to achieve a deeper understanding of the subject. The Orbis map is fun to play with, but it is also an important scholarly tool. It can help estimate how long it took to send messages, move troops, and transport goods from one city in the empire to another in a variety of season along an assortment of different routes. This can be useful to the work of military, political, and economic historians - and I'm sure there are many more applications that others will come up with in the future. So go play with it and think about the ways modern technology has improved out ability to understand the world of the past!
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