Since 2013, the Carleton Guide to Medieval Rome (CGMR) has been an ongoing digital project associated with an off-campus studies program that Professor Victoria Morse (History, Carleton College) co-leads in Italy every two years.  The program is focused on medieval Rome and looks at the continuous re-appropriation of Roman buildings and artifacts, the role of Christianity in shaping the built environment of the city, and the political, social, and economic history that influenced life in the city.

The medieval period in Rome is often overlooked because it is sandwiched between the Romans and the Baroque, which are more familiar to most travelers. That gave Victoria the idea of creating a digital guide book to introduce the medieval city to English-speaking travelers in more depth and with more historical context than you can get from existing guidebooks.

While initially developed primarily with the learning goals of undergraduate students in the course in mind, the audience for the CGMR is any curious traveler who wants to have a better, guided understanding of Roman history through digital resources. For the DH community, we also hope that the project’s custom omeka plugins and theme will serve as a model of successful and sustainable open-source software development by undergraduate students at liberal arts colleges.

How to Explore the Site

The website is publicly accessible and usable as a browser-based application anywhere in the world, and also planned to be a geo-located mobile web application that will provide walking tours for those on site in Rome. 

Users can explore Exhibits thematically organized or go on Walking Tours to explore a particular aspect of or area in Rome.  

The site uses the Omeka Histories of the National Mall template

Technical Infrastructure

With the adoption of the Omeka platform, we came to understand that it would be possible to build a more elaborate feature set to make the project a truly innovative digital tour guide. We were impressed by the Histories of the National Mall project created by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University, which included a location-aware map incorporating digitized historical map layers. We saw great potential to add both walking tour capability and georeferenced historical maps to our project, following their template.

Who has been involved in the creation of the site?

Content idea,  framework, work with students

Victoria Morse, Director of Medieval and Renaissance Studies; Director, Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching; Humphrey Doermann Professor of Liberal Learning; Professor of History 

Technical innovation, infrastructure, project management

Austin Mason, Director, Digital Arts & Humanities; Assistant Director for Digital Humanities, Humanities Center: Lecturer, History

Sarah Calhoun, Reference & Instruction Librarian for Humanities and Digital Scholarship 

Digital Humanities Associates and Digital Scholarship Interns since 2013 (with a special shout out to Evan Lauer ‘24, Digital Scholarship Intern)

Academic Technology (ITS)

Content Creation

Off-Campus Studies participants of the History, Religion, and Urban Change in Medieval and Renaissance Rome

Scott Shafer ‘22 

Support

ILiADS