Final Project Prospectus - Lady Mary's Travel Blog

Melanie and I are interested in working with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters. We thought of ways we could bring her experience “to life” for a 21^st century reader. Lady Mary recorded her experiences and later crafted these recordings into epistles. We decided we will have Lady Mary blog and tweet her experiences as if she was traveling in the 21st century. This is why we decided that our digital project would mostly consist of a travel blog and that we would experiment with various medias, like Twitter, YouTube, and Google maps, to track Lady Mary’s travels to and in Turkey. We will use a 21^st century “voice” while making sure that all the facts and details remain true to the letters.

In the travel blog, we will devote a small portion to blogging Lady Mary’s travels in Europe before she arrives in Turkey. The rest of the blogs will be detailed accounts of her adventures in Turkey. In these blogs, we will add links to any images, music samples, information, etc., that Lady Mary references so that readers can see and hear what Lady Mary would have experienced herself. The blogs will be “reflections” of Lady Mary’s trip, whereas Twitter will be more of an “in the moment” experience. We will be using the letters in the edition we’ve been reading for class.

We feel that this project is necessary because from a 21^st century reader’s perspective, it’s difficult to comprehend an 18^th century experience without understanding the references being made. We know that Lady Mary traveled around a lot, so we want to track where she traveled, which places she visits, the people she meets, the music she hears, the food she eats, the art she sees, etc., in order to visualize her travels. When we visualize Lady Mary’s travels within a 21^st century medium, we’re allowing her experiences to come to life in the way that we would understand traveling today. Our project then might bring light to an experience that has been only read in the past, and not “experienced” interactively. This is why we think this project is uniquely suited for an Internet environment. The English discipline is headed towards a very digital future, and the way we are reading today is different from how we have read in the past. We hope that by bringing Lady Mary’s experience to “life” in a way that 21^st century readers would understand it, we draw awareness to the fact that 18^th century novels were also forms of experience for contemporary readers. Lady Mary’s record of her travels is equivalent to the 21^st century travel blog.

We’ve done some research and we couldn’t find anything similar to our project. We couldn’t even find a Lady Mary literary profile on Twitter…except someone apparently named their cat after Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and created a Twitter account for her – and she is now following us on Twitter. We’re still angry at the cat for taking our username!

Please see Melanie’s blog post for more information on this project! :)