Global Sea Routes (GSR): An Historical Geodatabase of Global Navigations in the Modern Age (16th-19th Centuries)

The aim of this presentation is to outline GSR, an innovative project straddling global history, digital history and cartography, and digital data visualization. Based on the premise that the history of navigation can provide effective evidence of modern globalization processes, GSR aims to apply ground-breaking JT technologies in order to answer the question: how can we represent the historical evolution over time of different types of early-modern and modern European transoceanic sea voyages on a synoptic and comparative scale? We plan to achieve this through the most advanced online IT representation techniques and drawing inspiration from important digital history projects of a similar kind.