Tag: networks

Who I am

Hello and welcome to my first blogpost. My name is Martin Schaller. I am a PhD-candidate in Modern History at the University of St Andrews but currently living in Vienna.

In 2009, I commenced my studies in history and economics at the University of Vienna. After obtaining Bachelor degrees in both subjects I relocated to St Andrews in 2012 where I graduated with a MLitt in Modern History. The focus of my research is the outside perspective on the Habsburg Empire. I am examining British and German travel accounts to better understand how this huge entity in the middle of Europe was perceived and located during the 19^th century – after all it was situated on the crossroads between East and West Europe. This is only a rough outline of my PhD-project but I am more than happy to discuss details during the Summer School.

A longer research period in Vienna allowed to concurrently work in the R&D-Department of the Austrian National Library, coordinating the Europeana Newspapers Project, a project that focused on newspaper digitization and its refinement by applying Optical Character Recognition. My involvement within the Austrian National Library facilitated a deeper understanding of the foundations necessary to allow Digital Humanities to work with historic material.

The research I am doing

For the Summer School I am preparing a small scale project that is aimed at clarifying some issues in my general research. Hence, what I am doing here should at some point feed into my PhD-project.

Traveller’s networks – textual networks

The notion of ‘networks’ often evokes the idea of researching the relationships between people but this is certainly only one form of networks. Equally important, though not that often in the centre of interest are connections between people and goods, the interconnection of different goods but also between objects in general.

To limit the topic to a manageable size I concentrate on British travel writers on the Habsburg Empire in the 1820s and 1830s. The genre of travel literature on continental Europe was thriving at the time. Influenced by late Enlightenment ideas of knowledge accumulation and progress, the genre kept the agenda of collecting and distributing knowledge into the 19^th century.[1] Besides technological and economic development the political situation of the researched time period aided the boom. As a scholar remarked: “…years of Napoleonic war had whetted the public appetite for information and sketches of places so recently famous…”[2] In short, a lot of British travellers were on the continent, visiting also places not necessary found on traditional itineraries.

In the course of my research for the Summer School I realized that there are actually two types of networks relevant to understand travel and travel writing of the time: a more abstract type of intellectual network and a more tangible personal network. In the following lines I would like to describe both kinds of networks briefly.

Networks based on writings?

As any publication, travel literature was not only published but of course also discussed. Reviews, sometimes even reviews of reviews, appeared in newspapers and magazines across Great Britain commenting on each published travel account and thus fostering a discourse on the Habsburg Empire. But this process was certainly not unidirectional. German speaking audiences were highly aware of the ongoing discussions and had, despite official censorship, access to them. Thus by examining biographies, primary works and their reviews we are able to trace a highly interesting net of responses and counterstatements across borders. This net allows for valuable insights into transnational links that formed certain ideas about a foreign entity.

A more tangible network is the result of the social practice of travel. 19^th century travellers faced a problem also known to modern day travellers who voluntarily relinquish modern tourism infrastructure: How to get in touch with locals? The answer of the time was the letter of recommendation. A contemporary traveller furnished with appropriate letters was able to unlock doors and enter circles otherwise closed. This was also an important possibility to acquire new information that would later help to sell the book or render it controversial and thus have a direct impact on the narrative these travel writers were producing eventually.

What I can offer

I see myself as a person who knows both the ‘user’ and the ‘producer’ side in Digital Humanities. I can give insights in technologies that are used in creating the digital content from historical documents (first and foremost OCR) that allow for visualisation and further analysis by researchers. However, my main motivation is to meet and discuss with researchers and students applying a transnational view on History.

Bibliography:

As outlined above, my research is much more focused on transnational history than on the study of networks. Therefore my selected works have a bias towards the former. However, I am convinced that these articles and books are also relevant to understand networks across borders.

Scales do matter; I my opinion also for the study of networks. Therefore I’d like to suggest the following, more theory driven article, which examines the relationship between scales and transnational history: Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris and Jacques Revel, Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History, in The International History Review, 33:4, pp. 573-584.

A good overview of traveling and travel writing as a research topic as well as the social practice (and hence networks) of travel gives: Hagen Schulz-Forberg, European Travel and Travel Writing: Cultural Practice and the Idea of Europe in: Hagen Schulz-Forberg (ed.), Unravelling Civilisation: European Travel and Travel Writing (Brussels 2005), pp. 13-42.

On transnational history and my own research, I see two works as really important: Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The map of civilization on the mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford 1995) and Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York, Oxford 1997).

[1] Casey Blanton, Travel writing: The Self and the World (New York 2002), pp. 3-4, 15.

[2] Helen Heineman, Mrs. Trollope: The Triumphant Feminine in the Nineteenth Century (Athens 1979), p. 121.