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m.loy@bsa.ac.uk
INTRODUCTION
The Aegean Sea was well-travelled between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries. A number of diaries, encyclopaedias and travelogues were written during this early modern period, and they document in great detail some of the journeys taken. Furthermore, the names of some of those who travelled are well known to scholars of antiquity – George Wheler (1682, with Spon), William Martin Leake (1830 and 1835), J. Theodore Bent (1885) – as their diaries are useful sources on the pre-modern topography and ethnography of Greece (Bennet, Davis and Zarinebaf-Shahr 2000; Sutton 2001; Wagstaff 2001). Some of these early travellers made for Greece seeking out ancient monuments or antiquities, motivated by dreams of a Grand Tour or of classical-mania.1 Others, however, merely passed through on more extended travels further east, for pilgrimage, as diplomatic envoys, for trade, or for scientific business.2 Yet what all of these travelogues have in common is that they contain a wealth of valuable information on how routes were plotted between coasts and islands: they can be read to tell us about how different places within the Aegean basin were accessed (cf. Bennet and Voutsaki 1991; Broodbank, Bennet and Davis 2004). Many of these travellers moved around by boat, and the routes they chose constitute a well documented matrix of maritime connectivity.
‘Connectivity’ of this sort has been on the agenda of Mediterranean scholars for almost a century now (Braudel 1949;3 Horden and Purcell 2000; and Broodbank 2013 for the ancient Mediterranean). That regions and micro-regions are linked by the ways people move between them is now well understood, and the importance of mobility and connection in and around the Aegean Sea has now been well treated.4 Movement through and experience of a landscape connects both people and places (Tilley 1994; Ingold 2000; Gibson 2007), and the sea provides people with a means of communicating with one another (cf. Broodbank 2000, 18). Connections are made visible through various datasets, and travel is a good proxy for shedding light on how processes of interconnection change over time.
Computational techniques have been used frequently over recent years to investigate issues of connection, route-making, and travel on land-based areas (Bevan 2013). However, few methodologies pioneered are appropriate for specifically seascape...