Intervention
Community over Commercialization: Celebrating Open Access Week with Giovanna Ceserani

Giovanna Ceserani’s latest book, A World Made by Travel: The Digital Grand Tour, is an open-access, digital publication released in June 2024 by Stanford University Press. This digital publication transforms the foundational Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800 (published by the Paul Mellon Centre and compiled from the Brinsley Ford Archive held at the PMC) into a rich, interactive interface. In celebration of Open Access Week, Ceserani writes about her motivation to publish her book in an open-access, digital format.

It was always important to me to publish my work on the Grand Tour project in an open-access format. It is thanks to SUP Digital of Stanford University Press that it now appears as a multidimensional, online book in open access, allowing me to create the dynamic and participatory model of scholarship I had only dreamt of before. The digital format has made it possible to make visible the collaborative and multifaceted nature of digital humanities research, integrating in one interface the data and the text, my own scholarship and case-studies by colleagues, contributions by students who participated in the project at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), and a wealth of material to teach the project and its data in the classroom. This publication, A World Made by Travel: The Digital Grand Tour, stands as an example of how open access can transform not just how we study the past, but how we invite others to engage with it.

A World Made by Travel explores the vast network of eighteenth-century travelers on the Grand Tour. While these journeys have been understood through the lens of elite British male travelers, by transforming A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800 into a digital and openly accessible platform, I was able to create a more inclusive and data-rich resource, which brings to light over a thousand new figures, including women, servants, and Italians who had previously been omitted from traditional narratives of the Grand Tour (see Figure 1.).

Image
Image of six British gentlemen from the eighteenth century standing against the Colosseum
Figure 1. Katherine Read, British Gentlemen in Rome, c. 1751, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art. This is a typical "souvenir" of eighteenth-century travel to Italy: a conversation portrait of Grand Tourists, typically all young, elite and male, against the background of Roman antiquities. It is also noteworthy because art historians have determined (after four mistaken attempts at attribution) that, ironically, the painting was the work of Katherine Read, one of the very few female artists who traveled and worked in Italy in the eighteenth century.

The open-access format of A World Made by Travel has allowed this expanded, more representative version of history to be freely accessible, encouraging broader engagement from scholars, students, and the public. At the core of A World Made by Travel, the creation of the Grand Tour Explorer—a platform that offers raw, downloadable data alongside interactive visualizations—exemplifies how open access can transform traditional scholarship into something more participatory. Scholars, students and general readers who engage with this platform are no longer passive readers, but active participants in generating new insights about historical travel, expanding the boundaries of the field.

Image
Image of a network of names all interconnected.
Figure 2. A network graph based on the data of the Grand Tour Project showing some of the associations of the six elite travelers portrayed in Read’s conversation piece British Gentlemen in Rome (see Figure 1.). Using the database of the Grand Tour Project, one begins to see a more varied Grand Tour world, including famous Italian artists such as Pompeo Batoni or Piranesi, as well as unnamed servants, and women.

The open-access roots of A World Made by Travel

The Dictionary of Travellers, which is the origin of the database of A World Made by Travel, was the culmination of the life work and generosity of Brinsley Ford (1908–1999), whose archive of the Grand Tour, just like his art collection, was always open to scholars from everywhere. Brinsley Ford donated this archive to the Paul Mellon Center for British Art in London to ensure the publication of the Dictionary of Travellers. The Paul Mellon Center for British Art is a dedicated open-access institution: their award-winning online and peer review journal British Art Studies is an innovative open-access resource. To honor this spirit, I did not want A World Made by Travel to be anything but open access, as opposed to Adam Matthew Digital, which published their digitization of the Brinsley Ford Archives beyond a steep paywall.

Open-access and digital humanities at Stanford University

Open access was born digital, and this makes it a close relation of the digital humanities. They hold in common many values, experiences, and, yes, challenges—but let’s celebrate this week first, while acknowledging the latter. The collaborative ethos and the will to lower barriers to knowledge is key to the mission of digital humanities and open access alike. And so is the experimentation with new formats of recovery, preservation and communication of research and human culture beyond the print book and journal. As examples of what I mean, here are some additional digital humanities projects by scholars who work at the Stanford Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis: the Chinese Railroad Workers project, spanning online engagement, video interviews, teaching resources and an award-winning traveling exhibition, which brought to light the story of the Chinese immigrants who built the California railways; the Modernist Archives Publishing Project, an international collaboration that brings scholars, students, and the public together to recover and disseminate knowledge from publishers’ archives dating from 1900–1950; and Open Gulf, another international collaboration that explores, preserves and publicizes historical documentation about the Gulf. (Explore many more projects here).

SUP Digital and digital humanities

In celebrating open access, a shout-out is owed to Stanford University Press and their digital projects series. Supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, SUP Digital has put out sixteen publications—as exciting as they are varied, featuring cutting-edge digital humanities scholarship, and bringing dynamic research to the public (ranging in topics from 3-D representation and analysis of ancient Egyptian monuments to spatial narration of the multifaceted 1935 Harlem disorders, to a transnational atlas of Palestinian literature, and more. 

SUP Digital has set new standards on two essential questions for digital humanities and open access: 1) how to ensure the status and privileges of the traditional book for digital scholarship (establishing models for imprint, ISBN, discoverability, peer reviews, press release, etc.); 2) how to grant sustainability to the fragile ephemerality of the digital (establishing models for documentation, data deposits, manually curated digital archiving, etc.). In so doing, SUP Digital has also demonstrated that on open-access platforms, the future of humanities scholarship can be both rigorous and accessible, encouraging a broader and more diverse dialogue.

Final thoughts

A few weeks ago, in London, I visited Osterley House, a Georgian country estate and now a National Trust treasure embodying the elite culture of the Grand Tour and eighteenth-century creative arts. I went there as recently the National Trust acquired the Brinsley Ford Grand Tour art collection which will be displayed at Osterley. On a sunny weekend, I visited this extraordinarily peaceful park—once reserved for elites and now open to the public—that was full of the sights and sounds of children playing and dogs running, amidst family picnics and friends strolling. This vivid image of the meaning and value of community over commercialization is a fitting reminder to celebrate the open access movement for its transformation of how we, as scholars in the humanities, might produce, share, and engage with research. It is significant not just as a response to the gatekeeping of knowledge by traditional publishing models, but as a vital tool for democratizing scholarship.

My Colloquies are shareables: Curate personal collections of blog posts, book chapters, videos, and journal articles and share them with colleagues, students, and friends.

My Colloquies are open-ended: Develop a Colloquy into a course reader, use a Colloquy as a research guide, or invite participants to join you in a conversation around a Colloquy topic.

My Colloquies are evolving: Once you have created a Colloquy, you can continue adding to it as you browse Arcade.