Scholars have provided various perspectives on how Europe historically perceived the Orient, such as Said (1978) with his ground-breaking work Orientalism, as well as Ballaster (2005) and Osterhammel (2018). Moreover, despite this enormous literature on Orientalism, most studies remain limited to specific, well-known texts such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Baktır 2014; Lowe 1991). Additionally, while these studies analyzed what British perception of the Orient in the eighteenth-century British travel writing via qualitative and discursive approaches, they lack computational and large-scale analysis using data-driven methods on in which locations British understanding of the Orient was shaped. This paper addresses that gap by applying computational techniques such as automatically detecting the locations in the text and visualizing hundreds of locations on a map. Thus, it scales the analysis to detect geographical macro-patterns in the travel narratives.
Editors’ Choice: Mapping Eighteenth-Century British Travel Writing on the Orient
