This program is brought to you by the Stanford Humanities
Center.
For more information, please visit us at shc.standord.edu.
Palladio is an analytic tool for looking at historical data
across time and space.
I tend to think of it as a historical viewfinder.
Palladio is a web-based platform that we produced
to allow researchers to visualize the data as part
of the research process.
We call Palladio a research tool designed specifically
for humanistic inquiry.
Palladio is a project in which there
is a great interplay between designers, developers,
and scholars.
The whole tools has been built to actually accommodate
the ways humanities work or could
work with data and technology.
What can you do with Palladio?
Here on the initial web page, you
realize the different possibilities.
You create your projects by uploading.
And there are different ways of uploading your data.
And then you can have a view that can be a map view,
or you can add a list view of your data, a gallery view,
filter your data either in a timeline or a time span
or use a phased filter and at the end, save an expert.
The big challenge is precisely thinking
about new tools which are able to integrate these two
aspects, so data-driven insights versus human experience,
human knowledge.
Palladio was one of the byproducts
of doing mapping the Republic of Letters.
Mapping the Republic of Letters is a project
that is trying to look at scholarly, intellectual
networks in the early modern period,
roughly from 1500 to 1800.
After we'd experimented with a lot of different ways
of visualizing the data for mapping
the Republic of Letters, we began
to think, what are the most useful visualizations,
and how could we put them more or less
in one program that might share enough features that it would
be useful, not only for all of our projects,
but could be shared with other scholars
when we go to correspondence, to study an especially
important figure like Voltaire or Franklin or Galileo,
[INAUDIBLE].
We're going to study them.
They are the protagonist of the story.
In a project like this, we've actually reversed that.
Virtually every correspondence we've looked at
has proven to us that there are a lot of really important
people in the network that we have just ignored, that we just
simply don't know because in retrospect, they
weren't famous.
The Galileo Project is trying to apply digital humanities tools
and perspectives to the letters written by Galileo, letters
written to him and by him.
Galileo leads a rich and interesting life
that's full of discovery.
It's full of difficulty.
It's full of ideas.
And yes, it's full of lots and lots of letters.
It occurred to us that it would be
really interesting to do a map of Galileo's correspondence,
not only to see the patterns in what survived, but perhaps
as an analytic tool, to talk about what hasn't survived.
We started the Galileo Project with a database
of Galileo's letters that one of Paula's
undergraduate assistants had compiled for us.
We built a database that initially was just
a database of what's called the metadata of the letters--
in other words, the who, where, when--
you know, the basic things you can put into, yes, an Excel
spreadsheet, as simple as that.
Then we began to kind of correlate it
in a way that would be useful in the program that
became Palladio.
In fact, the Galileo Project became the beta test
for Palladio.
What this material shows very clearly
is that many of Galileo's important disciples
find their way to Rome after the trial,
so that he actually has a new Roman network which is quite
different than his old one.
One of the most exciting discovery on the Galileo
Project has been that he was writing in code, to conceal
and mask his correspondence during a very intense period
of his life, during the second trial.
Now that we've started reading for those kinds of questions,
we keep seeing more and more about it,
but it's things that people haven't
known about Galileo before.
With the Grand Tour project here at Stanford
by Giovanna Ceserani, we are starting
from a book, a real object, analog object, a dictionary
made many years ago.
This is a dictionary of British and Irish travelers
to Italy in the 18th century, which contains entries for more
than 5,000 individuals.
It's one moment when you still detect
how crucial classics was.
Ironically, the Grand Tour is also
the origins of mass tourism.
What Palladio provided was the opportunity
to create a natural graph, in which you have the possibility
to use two different kind of nodes.
And so what you see is a network in which
you can connect places and institution, organizations,
or other categories and see if patterns or clusters emerge
from that.
For example, a question like who was in Pisa in 1756
becomes a very easy one to answer.
To know which traveler, British traveler would
be in the same place at the same time,
in the absence of a distinct record of conversations that
did happen allows you to speculate
about human connections, human interactions.
Another exciting aspect of this, I think,
is that the students who began as research assistants
on this project have developed also their own projects,
and now come to what is by now a lab.
The tools evolved as we've figured out
better what kinds of questions we
want to ask of this material.
It's not that all the answers are going to be there,
but as an enhancement to more qualitative and textual
approaches to the same material, I think it's been invaluable.