Secondary scholarship on life in Iraq during the period of direct rule by the Ottoman Empire from the mid-19th century to World War I is minimal. A few primary historical texts have survived - these “forgotten texts” are largely individual accounts of daily life and business, which illuminate the events of a period of which little has been written. A study of such texts can prove valuable, allowing us to get to know individuals dwelling in Iraq and their lives. In this project, I explore the social networks of Joseph Mathia Svoboda, a British steamship purser living in Baghdad, through a collection of his diaries written between 1865-1908. Due to his family ties, profession, and vibrant social life, Joseph interacts with a wide variety of groups, from family, friends, religious and political leaders, to individuals of diverse backgrounds who he encounters throughout his travels; thus, his writings provide a fascinating viewpoint from which to study the Ottoman Empire. I conduct text and social network analyses of Joseph’s diaries, which involve visually mapping ties between people and analyzing the dynamics of the resulting structures. In my presentation, I will review the use of network analysis and entity detection methods in various contexts, such as literature, history, and the social sciences, and explore how these techniques can be applied to automate the extraction of persons mentioned from the diaries, and then subsequently visualize this information. In particular, I focus on Diary 47 of Joseph Svoboda’s diaries as a case study. In the future, the insights gained from this could be applied to the rest of the collection. As the diaries were written from Joseph’s young adulthood to old age, his narratives provide a unique opportunity to study societal relations in Ottoman Iraq.