WHAT: a collection of travel writings – non-fictional narratives (reports, diaries, letters) and guidebooks – about Italy written by English native authors and published between the country unification and the beginning of the 30’s;

WHY: travel writings can support historical, social, ethnographic, and architectural research but they are also a source of curious information about life in Italy in the past;

HOW: texts have been collected from Project Gutenberg, TEI was automatically generated by GutenTag v0.1.4 and then manually checked and integrated.

Browse and download the corpus from the dedicated website: https://sites.google.com/view/travelwritingsonitaly/

Application cases

  • Sprugnoli, Rachele. “Two days we have passed with the ancients…: a Digital Resource of Historical Travel Writings on Italy”. In the book of abstract of AIUCD 2018. Bari, Italy (Abstract, Poster)
  • Sprugnoli, Rachele, Tommaso Caselli, Sara Tonelli, and Giovanni Moretti. “The Content Types Dataset: a New Resource to Explore Semantic and Functional Characteristics of Texts.” In Proceedings of EACL 2017 (2017): 260. (Paper, Poster)
  • Sprugnoli, Rachele, Sara Tonelli, Giovanni Moretti and Stefano Menini. “A little bit of bella pianura: Detecting Code-Mixing in Historical English Travel Writing”. In Proceedings of the Fourth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2017). Rome, Italy, December 11-13, 2017. (Paper, Slides)