Crowdsourced-based mapping of historical west-to-east routes from the textual accounts of European Travelers

Through the centuries, numerous travellers and orientalists visited Persia (Iran) and described the country and its inhabitants in their travel writings. These travel accounts comprise valuable historical information about the people and their traditions. A literature on travel writings indicate that surprisingly, despite the importance of these recordings, the studies related to the different aspects of these travels, such as the travel routes and the varieties of the possible application of them on the modern time are relatively scarce. The current research deals with the travel routes of nine the most famous early modern European explorers. Accordingly, in addition to digitalizing and mapping the taken routes, the dynamics of their itineraries are analysed. AGILE 2014 – Castellón, June 3-6, 2014 The main objective of this study is to crowdsource the travel routes of some travelers based on their explanation of the itineraries in order to map these routes. The most famous European explorers in the early-modern time were chosen for this study, namely Pietro Della Valle (1586-1652), Heinrich von Poser (15991661), Adam Olearius (1603-1671), Sir Thomas Herbert (1606-1682), Jean de Thévenot (1633-1667), and Sir Jean Chardin (1643-1713), Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716), Moritz von Kotzebue (1789-1861), and Heinrich Brugsch (1827-1894). To achieve this, their documented itineraries were manually read and the textual accounts were interpreted to delineate their chosen routes. Considering the history of travels of European indicates that from ancient time, Persia was very much part of this general trend and was a coveted destination for European travelers in search of adventure or trade. 2 Materials and methods From the perspective of tourism studies, the historical routes that were taken by these travelers, not only were one of the important elements and facilitators of these travels, but also are the cultural and historical evidences of these movements. Accordingly, these routes together with the attractive descriptions about tangible and intangible cultural heritages along them (“tourist icons”) are assumed as the most important “cultural tourism routes”. The textual accounts of the nine abovementioned traveleres were studied and intepreated. The name of known places, regions, and routes were then marked and digitalized on a map.