The Itinerary of King John project was originally designed to be simply a more convenient way to access the scanned pages and indexes of the Rotuli Litterarum Patentium on the internet. The project soon incorporated a dynamic timeline using software from the “Simile” project at MIT. This chronological visualization drew its data from Thomas D. Hardy’s “Itinerary of John” which appeared along with his “Introduction to the Patent Rolls” in the 1835 edition of the Rot. Lit. Pat. The timeline links each stop on John’s itinerary with the relevant pages of the Patent Rolls.
The original geographical component for this online resource was crude because the itinerary locations were automatically geocoded using Google’s API which knew nothing of medieval British place names or sources. As a result, only about 60% of the sites listed in Hardy’s itinerary were plotted on the map, and a goodly proportion of them were wildly inaccurate. This resource has now been updated. Thanks to Janet Gillespie’s generous gift of data, geographical coordinates and reference data for all of the sites appearing in Hardy’s “Itinerary” are now accessible from the dynamic timeline and map.
The project is available at: http://neolography.com/timelines/JohnItinerary.html
Digital Medievalist 