Source and Vocabulary Authority

Above all else, trust your source.

Primary Sources

Travel journals: e.g., Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Turkish Embassy Letters; travel journals are primary documents that give first-hand information, though this information may not be entirely reliable. There may be spelling mistakes in the case of cities and people, though these may be amended in the footnotes. The information the traveller gives may also be false, misguided, second-hand, etc., despite an editor’s intervention. In these cases as well as in traditional scholarship, it is best to take the narrator at their word, while investigating discrepancies and noting them. Judging on direct and indirect characterization (e.g., the agent is a prankster or a romantic), this may skew their reliability. It is always up to the person managing Itinera to be aware of the agents they’re working on and conduct their research accordingly.

Secondary Sources

Travel dictionaries, encyclopedia: e.g., John Ingamells’ A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701 – 1800; the structure of the information will be well normalized. This secondary source will be researched, vetted, reviewed, edited, and then published. One would treat these secondary sources in digital scholarship as one would in traditional scholarship.

International Vocabulary Authorities

This is always the authority on site and city vocabulary. Some authority files are: