Francis Asbury’s Journeys, 1771–1815
From the journal of Francis Asbury (Clark, Potts, and Payton ed., 1958, as digitized by Wesley Center Online, for 1771–1790; 1852 ed. for the years not digitized there: 1775, 1779, 1788, and 1791–1815), geocoded against the USGS GNIS gazetteer with route-continuity constraints. Lines connect located stops and show corridors, not surveyed roads. State lines are modern.
Maps
All maps →Francis Asbury’s Journeys, Day By Day
Choose a year and press Ride to follow the journal entry by entry. Click a stop for the journal's words and the basis of its location.
For 1771–1790, about a quarter of the stops follow place identifications in the footnotes of the 1958 Journal and Letters, as digitized by Wesley Center Online at Northwest Nazarene University; 1775, 1779, 1788, and 1791–1815, which are not digitized there, come from the 1852 edition, which has no editorial notes, so a larger share of those stops is approximate. The journal thins with Asbury's health after 1810 and ends 7 December 1815. Pilot dataset: unreviewed points remain.
About
Historians, theologians, and scholars of religion tend to be skeptical of generative AI (for good reason). LLMs create massive headaches for those of us invested in teaching academic research and writing. But the power of the neural networks that undergird LLMs such as Claude can be used to address new research questions and create new teaching tools.
The projects on this website showcase projects that in the past would have required some combination of major research grants, teams of research assistants transcribing documents for weeks or months, and extensive coding in R or Python.
The pipeline from OCR and transcription to visualization using Claude can rapidly produce prototype visualizations with accuracy that (in my experience) compares favorably to human research assistants. This work can be used in the classroom, prompt additional directions in research, or become a basis for quantitative analysis.
If you find an error in one of the visualizations, or are interested in collaborating, please email me at [email protected].
Citation
If you use this project, please cite it:
Visual Christianity: Mapping Christian History, ed. Tom Whittaker (2026–): https://visualchristianity.com.
Director
Tom Whittaker, Associate Professor of Church History, Fuller Theological Seminary.