In gathering data to present through Palladio, I didn’t encounter any direct issues. I found that finding a timeline of my humanist’s travels was fairly easy as he often returned to the same locations multiple times, and remained in the same general geographic area throughout his life.

Within the Palladio platform, I think it would have been beneficial to have a page with all of the raw data, so that the descriptions for each travel point could be seen more clearly. While this data was accessible using the timeline, timespan, and facet tools at the bottom of the map, it was only once you used certain variable combinations and hovered over the points that you could read this data. I thought these descriptions of the humanist travels were interesting as they recounted what they did during that time or why they traveled to that particular spot, so for our purposes, I think that aspect could have been emphasized more on the map. If I had more time, I would want to create a point to point map so I could see the direction of my humanist’s (and other humanists’) travels. I think Palladio does a really good job at visualizing the data, but once this data is placed on the map, there are only options to play with variables, as opposed to reflecting back the information we entered (like the descriptions). I think it would have been interesting to have pages for each of our humanists which included information about them in a more clear and direct format. For example, Holbein’s page could have a list of all the places he went, with descriptions of why he went, the dates, what he did there, and who he met, and if you clicked on or hovered over any of these factors you could see what other people also travelled to those places at that time, with an option to click on another humanist’s name to visit their page. This goes somewhat beyond what I think Palladio is intended to do since it is so specific to this project. While I think the mapping itself is a great visual tool, many of the features are a bit hard to grasp. When playing around with the facets, timeline, and timespan, it was difficult for me to understand what I was seeing, and I was always unsure if it was representing the data we submitted, or morphing it in some new way.

Overall, I think it was a great idea for a project to map out the travels of humanists and note on a map which areas were most popular sites for humanists with different occupations, and it allowed me to see some very interesting trends. For this project specifically, there were a few features that I think could have added to the detail of this project, but considering Palladio’s main function is mapping, it worked perfectly.