GPSing Historical Travelers: Dynamic Spatiotemporal Mapping and 3D Trajectory Visualization of Sadegh Hedayat’s Isfahan Travel Account
Overview
Isfahan—half the world (Isfahān nisf-i jahān) is Sadegh Hedayat’s travel account of his brief visit to Isfahan in May 1932. A pioneer of the modern Persian novel, Hedayat documents each step of a journey through a country in transition—from tradition to modernity—offering a perspective uniquely his own.
This ongoing project draws on the logistical data embedded in Hedayat’s account to reconstruct the dynamics of intercity travel in the early 20th century. I focus on the route, stops, timing, pace, and landscapes described in the text, integrating them into a temporally dynamic map and a 3D scene to offer a spatial and experiential understanding of the journey—especially for readers unfamiliar with the geography and historical context.
I extracted the times and locations from Hedayat’s account, tracing his path from Rayy (south of Tehran) to Isfahan. I then georeferenced a 1954 historical map of the region that includes the roads he likely traveled. From this, I digitized the relevant road segments, created a point layer along each stretch between his stops, and interpolated travel times based on his reported departure and arrival—producing a dataset that resembles GPS tracking.
To visualize this movement, I animated the temporal point layer using an SVG icon of a car appropriate to Hedayat’s era. I also constructed a 3D scene using a digital terrain model (DTM) to convey the topography and landscape features that shaped the journey—elements that remain invisible on a 2D map but are essential to understanding the physical and perceptual dimensions of travel in that period.
Software
QGIS 3.4
Parallel simulation of travel times on Sadegh Hedayat’s twelve-hour road trip from Rayy to Delijan (May 12–13, 1932), visualized on a historical map and satellite image
A 3D scene built in QGIS using a digital terrain model (DTM) to convey the topography and landscape features that shaped Sadegh Hedayat’s trip from Rayy to Delijan (Iran)
Data
- Temporal point data in CSV format extracted from a travel account
- Raster data of digitized print maps
- Temporal line data extracted from georeferenced raster
- Digital Terrain Model: Hawker, Luke, et al. FABDEM V1-2: Forest and Buildings Removed Copernicus DEM. University of Bristol, 2022. https://gee-community-catalog.org/projects/fabdem/.
Skills used
Textual geolocation parsing (Data extraction from unstructured sources), temporal data modeling, georeferencing historical maps, digitizing analog road networks, feature extraction, point layer creation from CSV, time interpolation, trajectory modeling, temporal animation, SVG icon integration, symbolization, digital terrain model (DTM) integration, 3D scene construction, perspective design, multimodal integration, audience adaptation, metadata and captioning