During the 19th Century, the Tigris River in the Ottoman Empire province of Iraq was an essential conduit for trade and travel between the East and the West. European, Ottoman, and Persian steamships plied the river from Baghdad to Basra and back, transporting goods and passengers. At present, there exists no detailed digital historical map of this significant waterway. Our project began with the Joseph Mathia Svoboda diaries. Joseph Svoboda, a European resident of Baghdad, worked as a purser on British Lynch Company steamships running between Baghdad and Basra. For about 50 years, he kept diaries recording his journeys, stopping places, cargos, passengers, weather, and events on the river. Our research project began by creating a schematic map based on Joseph’s accounts listing a number of stops the steamers made going up and downstream. Our next step is to identify the locations of the steamers’ stopping places on the river. We are exploring two options: the first, referencing 18th and 19th century maps of the river found in online map collections such as the David Rumsey Map Collection and the Library of Congress. The second option is using ArcGIS, a geographic information system with an extensive map database, to identify the places Svoboda mentioned. We expect to develop the map, either by manually plugging in the names in an empty, historically accurate terrain map, or by using the historical map database from ArcGIS to set up an interactive map. The finished digitalized map will be the first of its kind. It will help our project’s other research move forward. For example, the developed map will offer a clear visualization of Svoboda’s journey that could help our transcription team as they work with new diaries. It will also build a more comprehensive guide for scholars who study the history, economy, and geography of the Tigris and Ottoman Iraq in the 19th Century.

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.