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Data Schema and Table Viewer

Giovanna Ceserani

The data schema is a description of the author's data model. It is both a guide to understanding the values in a data set and a model that may be applied to other data sets. For example, the data schema for John Locke's correspondence network might also be applied to the correspondence of Thomas Hobbes or René Descartes. We consider the data schema an essential research product which, by itself, expresses the design of the research inquiry while also supporting effective data sharing, discovery and analysis.

The visualizations of the data tables on this page were created using Breve, a free, open source tool developed at Humanities + Design.

Data Table Viewer

Travels table

This table contains the records for the tours of Italy of the architects in our data set. This travel data is organized by trips, which we define as visits to individual places. For some trips we have temporal information: the Start date (arrival date to a place) and/or the End date (the departure date from a place), which allows us, when both are present, to attribute specific duration. Architects’ tours are constituted by the trips, set in chronological sequence, occurring during the same journey to Italy (some architects traveled to Italy more than once, thus for them we have in our data more than one tour).

Trip ID: (Numeric/Unique) A unique identifier generated to distinguish individual trips. There are 620 trips in our data set.

Person ID: (Numeric/Unique) A unique identifier generated to distinguish individual travelers; this number matches across with the Person ID in the People table. There are 69 persons in our data set.

Name: (Text string) Name of the traveler in the format: last name, first name.

Tour: (Numeric/Ordinal) This is an ordinal value from 1 to 5, which is used to distinguished subsequent tours for architects who traveled to Italy more than once. This number allows us to group trips by tour.

Sequence: (Numeric/Ordinal) This is an ordinal value, from 1 upwards, which is used to order the trips in the same tour according to their occurrence in time. Decimal points are used to express when one trip occurred within another trip (that is when an architect visited place x while primarily staying in location y—for example when we know that someone was in Rome during a certain span of time “with visits to Naples and Pompeii”).

Place ID: (Numeric/Unique) This is a unique identifier number generated to distinguish places; this number matches across with the Place ID in the Places table. There are 128 places in our data set. Note that most places are cities, towns, and villages, but there also regions (such as Calabria, or Sicily), geographical locations (such as Mount Cenis, which is a mountain, or Solfatara, which is an area of volcanic craters near Naples, or Pontine Marshes, which were marshlands nearby Rome), or entire countries (such as Greece, Egypt or Italy).

Start: (Date) The arrival date to a place, if available (we have Start date for 377 trips out of 620). This date, when present, is variedly expressed in our sources, ranging from a specific day to a generic year; we have made the dates uniform in the format year-month-day, assuming the first day of the month, and the first month of the year when either or both of these are unknown.

End: (Date) The departure date from a place, if available (we have Start date for 193 trips out of 620). This date is variedly expressed in our sources, ranging from a specific day to a generic year; we have made the dates uniform in the format year-month-day, assuming the first day of the month, and the first month of the year when these are unknown.

Beyond the Italian Peninsula: (Numeric/Binary) 1=yes, 0=no. This number distinguishes trips to places within the Italian peninsula (marked by 0) from trips beyond peninsular Italy (marked by 1). Architects at times took trips beyond the Italian peninsula during their tours, ranging in destination from closer by Sicily and Malta to further away locations in North Africa and the East Mediterranean—these are the trips distinguished by the number 1.

Duration: (Numeric/Ordinal) This number expresses the length of each trip. The unit is a month. We approximate to full month when our record indicates less than a month, and we attribute a month when no date at all is given.

People table

This table contains the records of a variety of biographical information we have collected for the architects in our data set. We have recorded, when available, information concerning each individual’s service in public office and political appointments, how they funded their tours of Italy, what their education was, and what their affiliations with societies and academies were. We have also recorded when our sources label an architect as an ‘amateur’.

Person ID: (Numeric/Unique) A unique identifier generated to distinguish individual travelers, this number matches across with the Person ID in the Travels table.

Name: (Text string) Name of the traveler in the format: last name, first name.

Amateur: (Numeric/Binary) 1=yes, 0=no. This number distinguishes architects defined as ‘amateur’ architects in our sources. We stayed close to the sources in the attribution of this important characteristic, precisely to test its meaning and attribution within the context of the rich travel and biographical information of our architects’ data set. The architects marked as ‘amateurs’ in our sources are distinguished in our data set by the number 1.

Employments and Appointments: (Nominal-string) This attribute is populated with four possible values per record, concerning occupations of the architects in our data set. Each record may contain multiple values.

  1. Military: this attribute is given when an architect in our data set held a military appointment, whether we have record of a single instance or a full career.
  2. Knight: this attribute is given when an architect in our data set was appointed into knighthood.
  3. MP: this attribute is given when an architect in our data set was elected Member of Parliament, whether British or Irish.
  4. Official Architectural: this attribute is given when an architect in our data set held an appointment in an architectural public office, ranging from a position within the H.M. Office of Works to that of surveyor to a hospital.

Funding sources: (Nominal-string) This field is populated with five possible values per record, concerning how architects in our data set financed their tours of Italy. Each record may contain multiple values.

  1. Commissioned Work: this attribute is given when an architect in our data set financed the tour of Italy by, once in Italy, collecting and dealing on behalf of British patrons, acting as a tour guide, or designing and producing architectural objects (such as chimneypieces) or plans, for British Grand Tourists.
  2. Architectural Family Business: this attribute is given when an architect in our data set financed the tour of Italy with family wealth deriving from an architectural business, whether this was a transgenerational investment (such as a father sending a son on the Grand Tour to garner expertise and recognition for the family firm), or the case of an established architect undertaking the Tour financing it with wealth accumulated during years of active practice.
  3. Independent Wealth: this attribute is given when an architect in our data set financed the tour of Italy with money derived from established wealth, whether, as in most cases, this was inherited family wealth (be this derived by privilege of land or commerce), or newly accumulated in successful professional enterprises (such as a military career or commercial venture).
  4. Private Sponsorship: this attribute is given when an architect in our data set financed travel to Italy thanks to the support of an individual, or group of individuals, who intended to benefit from the skills acquired by the architect in Italy, whether the sponsor was the King or a nobleman investing in future service, or an established architect seeking to foster specific skills, expertise or assistance, in an employee.
  5. Scholarship: this attribute is given when the travel to Italy of an architect in our data was financed by the emerging institutional travel scholarships for architects.

“Educational background” and “Educational Institutions”: (Nominal-string) These two linked attributes provide information about the education of architects in our data set. There are 17 values for “Educational Institutions”. Those 17 are grouped into 4 values in “Educational background”. Each person record may have more than one value for “Educational background” and more than one value for “Educational Institutions”:

  1. Art School: a number of the institutions for the teaching and training in the arts that begin to emerge in eighteenth-century Britain and in which architects in our data set were educated are here represented, as well as the school of architecture that J.-F. Blondel established in Paris, France.

    a. St. Martin’s Lane Academy
    b. Trustees Academy Edinburgh
    c. Royal Academy Schools
    d. École des Arts

  2. Oxbridge and Inns of Court: a number of Oxford and Cambridge colleges are here represented, together with one of London’s Inns of Court for the teaching of the law, in which architects in our data were educated.

    a. Christ College Cambridge
    b. Trinity College Cambridge
    c. Queen’s College Cambridge
    d. University College Oxford
    e. Christ Church Oxford
    f. Oxford
    g. Middle Temple London

  3. Other Universities and Colleges: a number of educational institutions beyond Oxford and Cambridge, whether on the continent, in North America or in Scotland are here represented, in which architects in our dataset were educated.
    a. Harvard College
    b. University of Geneva
    c. Leiden University
    d. Edinburgh University
    e. Scots College
    f. Marischal College

  4. Training with an individual: we have recorded here those of the architects in our data set whom we know to have trained or apprenticed with specific individuals, most often older famous architects

“Societies and Academies by type” and “Societies and Academies by name”: (Nominal-string) These two attributes provide information about affiliations and membership of architects in our data set to societies and academies. Each person may have more than one association and may belong to more than one association group.

  1. British Artists Societies: here are represented a number of the associations formed in the eighteenth century to promote and support the work of artists, whether the affiliation of architects in our data set to these associations was based on submission of work to be exhibited on their premises (such as in the case of the Society of Artists), or on competitive membership (as in the case of the prestigious and closed-number Royal Academy).

    a. Society of Artists
    b. Society of Arts
    c. Architects’ Club
    b. Free Society of Artists
    c. Royal Academy
    d. Society of Engineers
    e.Royal Society of Arts

  2. British Learned Societies: here are represented some of the associations that promoted knowledge and research in eighteenth-century Britain to which architects in our data set were affiliated.
    a. Dilettanti
    b. Royal Society
    c. Society of Antiquaries
    d. Society of Virtuosi

  3. Other national societies: here are represented some of the associations that promoted knowledge and research in eighteenth-century Europe outside of Britain to which architects in our data set were associated.

    a. French Academy of Architecture
    b. Swedish Academy of Sciences
    c. Royal Society of Berlin

  4. Italian Societies: here are represented the most prestigious associations of artists in eighteenth-century Italy with which architects in our data set became associated, whether by merely submitting drawings for competitions, or by being granted honorific membership, or by achieving full membership after winning competition prizes.

    a. Accademia Clementina Bologna
    b. Accademia del Disegno Florence
    c. Accademia di Belle Arti Parma
    d. Accademia di San Luca Rome

Places table

This table contains information about the places in the travel records of the architects in our data set. We have attributed geographic coordinates so as to establish locations on maps, and we have grouped locations in terms of political, historical or geographical territory so as to map locations geographically and order them in the timechart.

Place ID (Numeric/Unique) This is a unique identifier number generated to distinguish places; this number matches across with the Place ID in the Travels table. There are 128 places in our data set.

Place Name (Unique String) The name of each place. In general, we have preserved the spelling from the DBITI, which by and large is the normalized English spelling. We have, though, corrected spelling mistakes (for example, Olevano and Bisceglie), and added clarification for homonyms (for example, we have distinguished Reggio into Reggio Calabria and Reggio Emilia).

Coordinates Approximate point location for each place.

States (Nominal-string) (13 values). Mostly, these attributes organize places by recording the Italian states to which they belonged in the eighteenth century. There are a multitude of independent political territories into which pre-unification, eighteenth-century Italy was divided. Note though that we also have recorded among these attributes: ‘Sicily’ (for most of the eighteenth century this island was politically associated with the Kingdom of Naples, yet we have kept separated because travel to Sicily functioned quite differently at the time), ‘Italy’ (which usually appears for travelers for whom we do not have record of places visited that could be attributed to an individual Italian state) and ‘Beyond the Italian peninsula’ (for trips that the travelers took beyond peninsular Italy during their tours).

  1. Kingdom of Naples
  2. Papal States
  3. Republic of Venice
  4. Duchy of Milan and Duchy of Mantua
  5. Grand Duchy of Tuscany
  6. House of Savoy/Kingdom of Sardinia
  7. Genoa Republic
  8. Duchy of Lucca
  9. Duchy of Modena and Reggio
  10. Duchy of Parma
  11. Italy
  12. Sicily
  13. Beyond the Italian Peninsula

Vicinities (Nominal-string) (19 values). These attributes add to the States values the six most prominent Italian cities for the travels of the architects in our data set: Rome, Naples, Florence, Venice, Milan, Turin. This addition allows us to highlight how most of Grand Tour travel focused on cities, and by contrast, the cases in which we have detailed information for travel within the state beyond the principal city (for example, in the rare cases when travelers explored the Kingdom of Naples much further south than its capital and surrounding area).

  1. Kingdom of Naples
  2. Papal States
  3. Republic of Venice
  4. Naples
  5. Rome
  6. Duchy of Milan and Duchy of Mantua
  7. Beyond the Italian Peninsula
  8. Grand Duchy of Tuscany
  9. Genoa Republic
  10. Duchy of Parma
  11. Venice
  12. Duchy of Lucca
  13. Turin
  14. Sicily
  15. Duchy of Modena and Reggio
  16. Florence
  17. Italy
  18. House of Savoy/Kingdom of Sardinia
  19. Milan

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Cite as

Giovanna Ceserani. (2015). Schema for British Architects on the Grand Tour in Eighteenth-Century Italy: Travels, People, Places. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/zk774hr3012
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