Presentation
The website is composed of sections on the major cities of the Georgian period: Bath, London, Edinburgh, and the trading or industrial towns.
Each section contains pages on the cartography of the cities concerned, their architecture, descriptions in literature, the social and cultural life – painting, music, science. These topics are illustrated by numerous visual, textual and audio or video documents: maps and paintings, literary and musical extracts from the period, with comments and introductory texts by the contributors of the website – a team of 18th - century scholars with complementary areas of interest such as the history of architecture, music and social history.
In addition to the hierarchical chapter structure – i.e. Music/Musical societies/Musical instruments –, numerous hyperlinks bring to light interdisciplinary connections, for instance Maps/Architecture/Social life.
Animations created for our website, such as the interactive ’language of the fan’, or the animation projecting the literary circuit of Moll Flanders on to a map of London, are meant to reconstruct the social or technical practices of the time; they include exercises to be done by the visitor, among others the ’surveyor’s problem’ which sets a mathematical question on the uses of a geometrical instrument - the theodolite.
The documents included have been obtained from numerous institutions, notably the National Gallery, the National Trust, the Royal Collection, Goodwood House, the National Galleries of Scotland, the National Trust for Scotland, the Bath Preservation Trust, the Fashion Museum in Bath, the Department of Architecture of the University of Bath.
The website is in open access. It was authored by our research Centre at the Sorbonne, www.csti.paris-sorbonne.fr, and went live in late 2014 to mark the Georgian tercentenary.
Since September 2019 the website Georgian Cities has been the basis for an online course of the SIAL (Service d’Innovation pour l’Apprentissage des Langues), at level C1 of the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference). A Moodle platform offers blended learning for students in different subjects requiring a module in English at the BA and MA levels of their syllabus at Sorbonne University, such as history, history of arts, French literature, geography, linguistics, music, philosophy or other languages. The course is composed of two semesters with different topics, including written and oral exercises with comprehension and expression practice. Since September 2021, it has been offered to students of the partner universities in the “4EU+ European University” (Milan, Heidelberg, Copenhagen, Prague, Warsaw).
Visitors may add their comments on our blog: csti.hypotheses.org (section ’Digital Humanities and Arts/Georgian Cities’)
