"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!" —Lord Byron

Welcome to Digital Archives and Pacific Cultures. We are a team of faculty and students at the University of Pittsburgh engaged in an ongoing project to investigate the voyage narratives of eighteenth-century European expeditions to the Pacific, together with the English poetry and print media that responded to newly available accounts of first contact with Polynesian cultures. We are making early and rare texts on Pacific encounters openly available for study, together with graphical visualizations and experiments with digital text analysis.

We have placed a special emphasis on mapping for this project, since Cook's voyages tested new methods for calculating longitude, and Cook's maps altered people's imagined view of "the globe." We are charting the geographical coordinates recorded during these voyages, with a long-range goal to consider how closely the recorded coordinates coincide with geospatial references in our day. To view the maps on our site, please install the Google Earth plugin for your web browser.

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