Visualizing Travel: Panel at ASECS (Orlando, FL; March 2018)
In recent decades, scholars have become increasingly interested in analyzing and recovering eighteenth-century travel writing, but the visual side of travel texts is often ignored. By the time the word “scrapbook” entered the English lexicon in the 1820s, personal, visual travel records had long existed and circulated in other forms, including the album, the illustrated journal, and the commonplace book. These forms typically contained less of a chronological narrative than written travelogues, but they presented a highly curated, interactive, and, in some cases, tactile experience for their viewers.