Putting Wales on the Map: Using GIS to Uncover European Travel Routes, 1750-2016

Description

This lunchtime seminar showcases the contents and functions of the database “Accounts of Travel: European Travel Literature about Wales”, which contains over 350 entries with summaries of travel writing about Wales by European visitors, together with interactive maps and metadata relating to the records. Travellers from Europe have been writing about their diverse impressions and perceptions of Wales in diaries, letters, travelogues and, more recently, blogs for centuries. Remarks on the nature of travelling in a foreign country, its people, the weather, town and country life, industrial enterprise, social endeavours or encounters with unfamiliar food are only a few of the topics in these texts. These diverse topics are featured extensively in the database, which is one of the main outputs of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project “European Travellers to Wales, 1750-2010”. The project is a collaboration between Bangor University, the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies and the Department of Modern Languages at Swansea University.