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From Text to Space and Vice Versa The travel accounts of Sir William Gell and Edward Dodwell in Phocis and Boeotia Zafeirios Avgeris Department of ALM Theses within Digital Humanities Master's thesis (two years), 30 credits, 2021, no.8 Author Zafeirios Avgeris Title From Text to Space and Vice Versa. The travel accounts of Sir William Gell and Edward Dodwell in Phocis and Boeotia. Supervisor Anna Foka Abstract This thesis examines and compares two travel accounts in the regions of Phocis and Boeotia in Greece, as they appear in the book of Sir William Gell “The Itinerary of Greece: With a Commentary on Pausanias and Strabo and an Account of the Monuments of Antiquity at Present Existing in that Country (1819) and on the two volumed book of Edward Dodwell A Classical and Topographical Tour Through Greece: During the Years 1801, 1805, and 1806, Volume 1 & 11 (1819). More specifically, the thesis explores the extent of the area that these travelers managed to cover during their routes, the places with historical and archaeological interest that they mentioned at least, their moves among the various chronotopes, and the use of their predecessors’ texts for on their routes. With the use of digital platforms such as Recogito, their travel accounts have been annotated, tagged, aligned with ToposText gazetteer and Wikidata, exported as .csv files, and further processed using OpenRefine. By having as a ground theory approach the social construction of space, as Lefebvre has defined it, the thesis, with the assistance of ArcGIS and Python and the necessary manual steps, explored the topics as mentioned above. The analysis of these topics provided interesting results to the thesis. It showed the differences in the area coverage of the two travelers in Phocis and Boeotia. It also highlighted their accuracy in the discovering of ancient places and buildings. Moreover, it delineated their moves through the different chronotopes and the vital role of the physical environment as a bridge for these moves. Ultimately, this thesis revealed the crucial role of their predecessors’ travel accounts for their navigation on the respecting. Mainly, it made clear the vitality of the travel accounts of Strabo and Pausanias. These results were clearly connected with the social construction of space and time from the two British travelers based on their cultural background. Key words Digital Humanities, Spatial Humanities, Grand Tour, British Travel Literature, Sir William Gell, Edward Dodwell. 2 Table of contents Introduction ...................................................................................... 7 The books of Gell and Dodwell ...................................................................... 10 Thesis Purpose and Research Questions .......................................................... 12 Delimitations .................................................................................................. 13 Thesis Outline................................................................................................. 14 Previous Research ...........................................................................15 Theoretical Resources .....................................................................19 Material and Method ......................................................................22 How the travel accounts of Gell and Dodwell became annotated .csv files?..... 22 The spatial analysis on ArcGIS ....................................................................... 26 ArcGIS and Database Tools ............................................................................ 29 Using Python to extract the Time Periods and the References to their predecessors ................................................................................................ 31 Study and Analysis ................................................................................ 33 The covered by the Travelers Area .................................................................. 33 The Places with a Historical or/and Archaeological Interest ............................ 39 Traveling through Time and Space .................................................................. 43 The role of their predecessors ......................................................................... 50 Discussion ........................................................................................55 Bibliography and list of references .................................................62 Sources ........................................................................................................... 62 Corpus .................................................................................................................. 62 Platforms and Tools .............................................................................................. 62 Wikimedia Images ................................................................................................ 62 In the thesis author’s possession ............................................................................ 63 Literature ........................................................................................................ 63 3 Table of Figures Figure 1. Dodwell’s panoramic drawing. Banks of Kephissos in Boeotia and the southern side of the Acropolis of Orchomenos. The image is retrieved from Wikimedia Commons, Edward Dodwell, 1821. .................................................. 17 Figure 2. The buffer zones and the paths of the two travelers. With the light green color, the buffer zone of Gell with its path on top of it. With the pink color, the buffer zone of Dodwell with its path on top of it. .......................................... 26 Figure 3. Dodwell’s Viewshed analysis. With green color, the visible sited during his routes and with pink color the non-visible .......................................... 27 Figure 4. Gell’s viewshed analysis. With green color, the visible sited during his routes and with pink color the non-visible ..................................................... 28 Figure 5. The Places of Gell & ToposText in Gell’s Buffer Zone. With blue color, the places that Gell has at least mentioned. With red color, the TopoText places inside the Gell’s (light green) Buffer Zone ............................................... 30 Figure 6. The Places of Dodwell & ToposText in Dodwell's Buffer Zone. With blue color, the places that Dodwell has at least mentioned. With red color, the TopoText places inside the Dodwell’s (light green) Buffer Zone ........................ 30 Figure 7. Map of Boeotia. Published from Jean Jacques Barthélemy in 1832. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons................................................................. 35 Figure 8. Map of Phocis, Doris and Locris. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons, Jean Jacques Barthélemy, 1832. ........................................................ 36 Figure 9. Dodwell’s drawing of Thebes. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons, Edward Dodwell, 1819. ...................................................................................... 37 Figure 10. Dodwell’s references to settlements and buildings of the different time periods........................................................................................................ 45 Figure 11. The references on the various time periods on Gell's and Dodwell's travel accounts.................................................................................................... 49 Figure 12. The references of Gell on various of his predecessors, as sources of information on his travel. .................................................................................... 51 Figure 13. The references of Dodwell on various of his predecessors, as sources of information on his travel ................................................................................ 53 4 Table of Tables Table 1. The area that each of the travelers was able to observe inside the buffer zone of 6.880 meters around their routes ............................................................ 34 Table 2. The travelers' mentioned areas on their buffer zone areas in comparison with the places on ToposText for the same areas ................................................ 40 5 6 Introduction “Of Dardan tours let Dilettanti tell, I leave topography to classic Gell;” (Byron, 1811, p.80) Between the 16th and the 18th century, antiquarianism had risen in Europe. At the turn of the 18th century, the interest shifted from ancient Rome to ancient Greece. Ancient Greece was considered the most familiar stranger and a fundamental part of British and European identity (Duesterberg, 2015). Shelley’s lyrics from the same time period highlight the admiration that the British intellectual had for the ancient Greek civilization and the shift from ancient Rome to Greece at the begin- ning of the 19th century: “We are all Greeks, our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece. But for Greece - Rome, the instructor, the con- queror, or the metropolis of our ancestors, would have spread no illumination with her arms, and we might still have been savages and idolaters;” (Shelley, 1822, pub- lished 1886, p. viii-ix). Inspired by the lyrics of Lord Byron, this thesis will examine the de- scriptions of two 19th century English travelers in Ottoman Greece. These travels happened in an era when classical studies were associated with nobility and power and the British noble class of the time was obsessed with Greece and Rome