Enhanced Reading of Travel Accounts with the SIMILE Exhibit Widget

A popular form of literature throughout the North American colonial experience, travel accounts fascinate readers to this day. Republished to this day for both academics and the general public, travel accounts remain a frequently used source in literature, ethnology and certainly in history. While this source can provide anecdotal evidence for environmental history, we propose to aggregate the data from several travel accounts to facilitate spatial and temporal analysis. After using XML to markup documents from the 17th and 18th centuries according to TEI guidelines, we have used the Exhibit platform to provide a visual display of information related to the fauna and the flora mentioned by the authors. The combination of timeline and map points linked to the transcribed text provides the user with enhanced tools to analyse or simply read the travel accounts.