Created by Brianna A. Reisbeck
18th Century Scotland, as observed by Daniel Defoe focuses solely on “That Part of Great Britain Called Scotland,” the first letter in Defoe’s fourth volume of A Tour of Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, and, more specifically on changes to the ecology and to the physical and built landscape of Scotland. This is done by highlighting both select passages and the finer details that Defoe labored to record regarding fisheries (including pearls) and rivers. The backbone of this project is a dataset which organizes the information provided in Defoe’s letter; it is available to download for the use of other scholars (or any one interested). It is with the dataset that the visualizations on this page were created. The creator of this project chose to focus on the locations Defoe describes, but the same data could be used differently such as in analysis of the text itself, or, really, of any change over time.
