Web-Accessible Database and Travel Map for Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Rebecca West was one of the 20th century’s most brilliant and forceful writers. In the mid-nineteen thirties she made several trips to the Balkans to gather materials for her 1941 masterpiece Black Lamb and Grey Falcon – A Journey Through Yugoslavia. West’s book provides insightful observations about the people and places of a lesser-known region of the world just a few short years before the region was devastated by World War Two and subsequent violence. Beyond this snapshot in time and place, the book includes detailed historical background reaching back hundreds of years for a region that gave rise to the term balkanization, and at over 1,000 pages in two volumes, the reader can become overwhelmed by the depth and breadth of the material. The purpose of the project covered in this presentation was to create a web-accessible database and travel map tracing West’s route that can aid in navigating these threads. This presentation provides descriptions of the project materials generation process, the data repository where project materials can be accessed, and the on-line web map where the places and travel routes cited in the book can be viewed . The presentation concludes with a brief discussion of the means whereby ambiguities regarding places and routes described in West’s book were resolved.