Class started with a ten minute discussion on the reading,“British Travelers in Eighteenth-Century Italy: The Grand Tour and the Profession of Architecture.” Dr. Levy had us try to lead our own discussion. It wasn’t the greatest success. Although, we did raise good questions and we were able to add on to each other’s ideas throughout the talk. Even though the discussions aren’t great, they have improved since the beginning of the semester. Hopefully we’ll keep improving. We also analyzed the different graphics in the article and their meaning. These graphs focused on different aspects of the travelers who participated during the Grand Tour. Using the graphs as a transition, we began learning about geocoding and georeferencing. To get a tangible understanding of what geocoding is, we visited http://gis.ucla.edu/geocoder and entered in our address. The algorithm then determined the latitude and longitude of our address, which we then copied over into a spreadsheet which allows for geocoding and georeferencing to be a lot simpler. Plugging in an address isn’t as easy as it sounds. I entered mine with the wrong punctuation and got a coordination that was completely wrong. Eventually, everyone figured it out and now will use this information for our next Task.
Digital History at the University of Scranton