CESTA Seminar | R. Midura & E. Kim, "The Traveler's Companion: International Currency & Mileage..."

Date
Tue June 2nd 2020, 12:00 - 1:15pm
Event Sponsor
Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA)
Location
broadcast live via zoom
CESTA Seminar | R. Midura & E. Kim, "The Traveler's Companion: International Currency & Mileage..."

 

Rachel Midura and Evan Kim will join us to present:

"The Traveler’s Companion: International Currency & Mileage Conversion, 1550–1650"

Early modern publishers produced thousands of reference books for travelers and merchants providing multilingual glossaries, exchange rates, and postal routes. The Early Modern Digital Itineraries (EmDigIt) Converter Tool translates select guides to mileage and currency conversions into a web platform for use by students and researchers. This presentation will address the challenges of translating premodern sources into a reconciled dataset and clear user interface, while indicating the hermeneutic benefit for understanding the early modern information environment.

Rachel Midura is currently finishing her dissertation in the history department, “Masters of the Post: Northern Italy and European Communications Networks, 1530-1730,” on early modern surveillance, espionage, and postal systems. She will be starting as an assistant professor of digital history at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in August. In her research, she brings twenty-first-century understanding of media and social networks to the political and cultural history of the early modern period. She has previously worked as a senior graduate research fellow at CESTA, and collaborated on the Grand Tour and Early Modern Mobility projects. Her work appears in collected volumes such as The Renaissance of Letters: knowledge and community in Italy, 1300-1650 and Empires of Knowledge: scientific networks in the early modern world.

Evan Kim is a junior majoring in Symbolic Systems, with a minor in East Asian Studies. He is interested in the intersection of technology and humanities, and has worked as a research assistant at CESTA since Summer 2019 on the Early Modern Mobility project. Additionally, he participates in Stanford's chamber music program as a cellist. 

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