Giovanna Ceserani | What Can Data Do for Public Humanities: The Case of A World Made by Travel
Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa Street, Stanford, CA 94305
Levinthal Hall
How can data reshape the way we approach public humanities? This talk explores the transformative potential of digital tools and datasets in making complex historical phenomena more accessible, inclusive, and engaging for diverse audiences. By integrating data visualization, interactivity, and open-access principles, digital public humanities can challenge established narratives, amplify underrepresented voices, and invite new forms of collaborative inquiry.
Using the Grand Tour as a case study, this talk highlights how data-driven approaches can open up new perspectives on eighteenth-century travel and its cultural significance. Digital projects like A World Made by Travel illustrate how combining historical datasets with dynamic interfaces enables us to go beyond elite histories, offering a more inclusive view of travelers, workers, and communities previously excluded from traditional scholarship.
The talk will discuss strategies for building public-facing digital tools that prioritize accessibility, engagement, and educational impact. It will also address the broader implications of applying these methods to other public humanities initiatives, emphasizing the potential to foster deeper connections between scholarship, teaching, and public audiences. By rethinking the role of data in the humanities, we can create innovative platforms that not only preserve the past but also inspire new ways of understanding and engaging with history.
About the Speaker
Giovanna Ceserani works on the classical tradition with an emphasis on the intellectual history of classical scholarship, historiography and archaeology from the eighteenth century onwards. She is interested in the role that Hellenism and Classics played in the shaping of modernity and, in turn, in how the questions we ask of the classical past originate in specific modern cultural, social and political contexts. She has been the faculty director of the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), Stanford's hub for digital humanities, since 2019.
She is the author of two books. A World Made by Travel: The Digital Grand Tour was published by Stanford University Press in 2024, and Italy’s Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology appeared from Oxford University Press in 2011. She is also working on books about the emergence of modern histories of ancient Greece, and on ancient women in modern historiography. She was a founding member of the Stanford digital project Mapping the Republic of Letters, and is director of the Stanford digital project The Grand Tour Project.