Project Bibliography

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  • Ainsley, Margaret, Kayhan Nejad, and Ariella Fish. “Newbook: The Iraq Diaries and Publishing Original Sources in a Digital World.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 18 May 2012.

    This project describes a stage within the digitization of the Alexander Svoboda Journal involving the collection of images and genealogical material to identify family members and companions of Alexander Svoboda. The authors suggest that this supporting material creates a more comprehensive and visually interactive digital publication.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, Biographical

  • Arias, Erika. “Traveling the Tigris: Impacts and Effects of Foreign Involvement in Late Ottoman Iraq.” Middle Eastern Studies Association Undergraduate Workshop, 15 November 2018.

    This paper compares Joseph Svoboda’s travel route to the modern geography of the Tigris. It emphasizes the role of foreign, and especially British, imperial interest involvement in the travel and commerce of Late Ottoman Iraq.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, GIS/ Mapping, Travel

  • Arias, Erika. “Travels of Joseph Mathia Svoboda: 1893 Compared to 2018.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 18 May 2018.

    This project tracks major changes in the Tigris River between modern geography of Iraq and Joseph Svoboda’s described routes. The project contends that political and economic motives produced the major changes in the river, and it seeks to correlate current and 19th century maps with information about dam and irrigation projects and the peoples that such developments displaced.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, GIS/ Mapping

  • Bansal, Shubhangi and Chen, Annie. “Studying Information Behavior in Historical Corpus.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 15 May 2020.

    This research aims to create a better understanding of information behavior among the users engaging with content in digital humanities (DH). The study is performed by conducting interviews with past content users who used a DH website for their own purposes. The researchers employ an iterative interview process to formulate user engagement with scholars, professors, and students who come from a variety of disciplines and engage with the DH content for different purposes. The broader goal is to understand and showcase the diverse uses of DH in discrete fields of academia to promote the field.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, UX/ UI Research, Information Behavior

  • Barrett, Elizabeth Page. “Law and society in Ottoman Iraq : the case of the buried treasure (1856).” Master’s Thesis, University of Washington, 2015.

    This thesis presents the case of Svoboda v. Pachachi (1856), a contract dispute that became a public sensation in “Victorian Baghdad” due to its association with a story of buried treasure. The author uses the case to provide insight into provincial culture and legal practices during the Tanzimat and contemporary contestation between European colonial interests and Ottoman pushes for sovereignty.

    Tags: Graduate Research, Theses, Biographical, Political History

  • Chen, Annie, Marium Raza, Yogasai Gazula, Darren Huang, Julianne Mendoza, and Walter G. Andrews. “Grounding Users in Interpretive Acts: Lessons Learned in the Iterative Design of a Digital Collection.” 4th Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities, co-located with IEEE VIS 2019, October 20, 2019.

    This project presented interview research with potential users of the Svoboda site and outlayed how this research is used in site design. Findings of the study emphasize the need to not only facilitate understanding but to build trust with new users, and the paper illustrates the varying needs of different user groups.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Faculty Research, Conference Presentations, UX/ UI Research

  • Chen, Annie T. and Camille L. Cole. “Reflexivity in issues of scale and representation in a digital humanities project.” Presentation at Visualization for the Digital Humanities workshop, co-located with IEEE VIS in 2021.

    This paper reflects on the complexities and challenges of conducting historical research that combines natural language processing with data analysis and visualization techniques. The characteristics of the corpus present both conceptual challenges in terms of issues of representation, and affordances as a source for historical research.

    Tags: Faculty Research, Conference Presentations, Textual Studies

  • Chen, Annie T., Camille Cole, Sam Fields, Addie Perkins, Catherine Oei, and Selim S. Kuru “Introduction to network analysis for literary and historical research.” Tutorial presented at Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/société canadienne des humanités numériques (CSDH/SCHN) on May 30 – June 3, 2021.

    Network analysis is widely used in many disciplines and in digital humanities research. This tutorial presents a practical introduction, focusing on how it might be employed to explore historical and literary corpora, while also fostering an interactive discussion among attendees on its broader potential uses, and especially in pandemic circumstances.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentation, Textual Studies, Pedagogy

  • Chess, Kearby Matthew. “Commerce and Quarantine in Baghdad: Contending Visions of Ottoman and British Imperialism in Iraq, 1862-1908.” Master’s Thesis, University of Washington, 2014.

    This thesis uses Svoboda Diaries Project sources and Lynch Brothers records documenting shipping and quarantine disputes to analyze political contestation between the Ottoman and British empires in late-nineteenth-century Iraq. The author argues that neither empire achieved dominance in the region.

    Tags: Graduate Research, Theses

  • Chess, Kearby Matthew. ““The Svoboda Diaries: Sources on European Life in Ottoman Baghdad,” 5th Western Ottomanists Workshop, University of Washington, Seattle, April 2014.

    Graduate student Kearby Chess presented the Svoboda Diaries Project at the 5th Western Ottomanists Workshop.

    Tags: Graduate Research, Conference Presentations, General Project Overviews

  • Du, Jesse, Chris Yuen, Micah Slaughter, and Annie T. Chen. “Perceived Usability and Experience with Digital Tools in the Context of Digital Humanities Research.” Annual meeting at the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) on Oct. 29 – Nov. 3, 2021.

    This paper examines differences in the feedback of scholars with different levels of experience with digital tools, on the features of a historical digital collection. By conducting interviews with different user groups, the authors provide recommendations for the usability evaluation of historical digital collections.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, UX/ UI Research

  • Du, Jesse, Renee Lin, and Micah Slaughter. “Svoboda Diaries Project User Experience Study.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 15 May 2020.

    This user experience (UX) study identified potential users and tested website usability through a 30 minute live interview. UX interviewees reported that the Svoboda Diaries Project demonstrated promising educational potential in a variety of fields and disciplines. Interviewees also identified website features in need of improvement. Feedback from these studies is used to guide website and content development.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, UX/ UI Research, Pedagogy

  • Gazula, Yogasai. “Case Study of Social Networks in Ottoman Iraq.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 15 May 2020.

    This project uses the diary corpus to explore named entity recognition models and social network analysis. The author used NLP methods to extract the names of the people Joseph interacted with, and to characterize their relationships, so that the relationships could be visualized. This is significant because Joseph interacted with many different political and social groups, thus it could lead to further questions about social structure in Ottoman Iraq.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, Textual Studies

  • Gazula, Yogasai, Cheryl Wu, Simon Talusan, Darren Huang, Daniel Kim, Jennifer Wang, Chuangzuo Liu, Corina Geier, and Nicholas Verghese. “Presenting Digitized Historical Manuscripts: A User-Centered Approach.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 17 May 2019.

    This project presents the methods and results of the user-centered research involved in the Svoboda Diaries Project website redesign. The research included user interviews with domain experts, prototypes, and pilot usability sessions, finding that primary concerns for the redesign were the adoption of a storytelling approach for site design and greater focus on the diaries themselves in the website.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, UX/ UI Research

  • Geier, Corina, Hannah Jolibois, and Erika Arias. “Mapping Cholera Data in Nineteenth-Century Baghdad.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 17 May 2019.

    This project presents an attempt to use GIS mapping software to visualize cholera data from the Svoboda Diaries Project sources. It emphasized the creation of accurate visual maps for the 19th century Tigris and the close reading of time- and geo-coded cholera events of transcribed diary materials, while building toward an interactive choropleth and dot map.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, GIS/ Mapping, Epidemiology

  • Haakenson, Kelsie, Kai Stern, and Natasha Dietzler. “Undergraduate Humanities and Technologies Majors Working Together: Researching and Publishing the Svoboda Diaries.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 15 May 2015.

    This project seeks to illustrate the bi-directional benefits of the merging of humanities and technology training through the Svoboda Diaries Project lab model. It surveyed the tools used by the project, including scripts and programs to convert transcriptions into TEI-XML documents and then to other formats for presentation, as well as these tools’ use within the editorial and historical work of the project.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, Pedagogy

  • Hallahan, Kelsey. “Full Steam Ahead: A Preliminary Study of the Joseph M. Svoboda Diaries and the Role of Steamship Commerce on the 19th Century Iraqi Economy.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 16 May 2014.

    This project investigates Iraq’s pre-oil economy through a study of the role of steamships in Iraqi commerce. Using Diaries 47 and 48, the author catalogues what goods were traded, who traveled by steamship, and which stops along the Tigris functioned as commercial hubs, with an ultimate goal of creating a map of the Svoboda’s river journeys linking ports with specific commodities traded there and comparing the results against 20th and 21st century ports on the Tigris.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, GIS/ Mapping, Travel

  • Hallahan, Kelsey, Rachel Brown, Tessa Carter, Dana Talant, Ariella Fish, and Sophia Welti. “The Newbook Project: Digital Texts in the Humanities of the Joseph Mathia Svoboda Diaries.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 17 May 2013.

    This project presents an overview of the five-stage model of the Newbook process: transcribing, editing, analyzing, encoding, and formatting the texts. It addresses successes and challenges that emerged in the completion of the first two diaries, and highlights how the licensing of the project with the Library of Congress as an independent publishing house made the Newbook process a less expensive and more expedited mode of academic resource development.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, Textual Studies, Preservation

  • Jolibois, Hannah. “Exploring Patent Medicine and Homeopathy in Ottoman Iraq in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 18 May 2018.

    This project studies nineteenth-century medical practices and medications through Joseph Svoboda’s documentation of his chronic gastrointestinal illness. The author uses data mining to extract references to medicines and their doses, and compares these to contemporary European medical journals to identify their origins and ingredients, as well as to modern research in order to evaluate the effect these medicines had on the body. However, the author also found that some ingredients were non-European, indicating a broader relationship between medicine and global trade in the nineteenth-century Middle East.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, Epidemiology

  • Jolibois, Hannah. “Exploring Patent Medicine and Homeopathy in Ottoman Iraq 18??-1908.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 19 May 2017.

    This project studies nineteenth-century medical practices and medications through Joseph Svoboda’s documentation of his chronic gastrointestinal illness. The author uses data mining to extract references to medicines and their doses, and compares these to contemporary European medical journals to identify their origins and ingredients, as well as to modern research in order to evaluate the effect these medicines had on the body. However, the author also found that some ingredients were non-European, indicating a broader relationship between medicine and global trade in the nineteenth-century Middle East.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, Epidemiology

  • Mahmoud, Sara, Margaret Kathleen Ainsley, and Seunghae Jane Kim. “Svoboda Diary Project: A Journey Through the Ottoman Empire.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 20 May 2011.

    This project presented developments in the digitization process of the Alexander Svoboda Diary, emphasizing translation work and the creation of a map of the journey. It also described the Svobodapedia project, a compilation of resources to provide in-depth historical context about the project and its key figures.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, General Project Overviews, Textual Studies, Preservation

  • Perleberg, Ellen. “Private Papers in Public Scholarship: The Transformation of a Text.” Middle Eastern Studies Association Undergraduate Workshop, 13 November 2019.

    This paper surveys issues that arise in the transcription, digitization, and publicization of private texts such as letters and diaries, with an emphasis on how the text-object history of the Svoboda Diaries and the history of the Svoboda Diaries project itself have influenced and transformed the texts’ function. The project discusses the opportunities and challenges of understanding a digitization and promotion process of private documents as a series of transformations into new text forms.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, Preservation, Political History

  • Perleberg, Ellen. “Private Papers in Public Scholarship: The Transformation of a Text.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 17 May 2019.

    This paper surveys issues that arise in the transcription, digitization, and publicization of private texts such as letters and diaries, with an emphasis on how the text-object history of the Svoboda Diaries and the history of the Svoboda Diaries project itself have influenced and transformed the texts’ function. The project discusses the opportunities and challenges of understanding a digitization and promotion process of private documents as a series of transformations into new text forms. Along the guidelines of the UW Symposium, this presentation provides a high level overview of the project and its findings.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, Textual Studies, Preservation, General Project Overviews, Political History

  • Raza, Marium. “Exploring Quarantine Practices in 19th Century Ottoman Iraq.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 17 May 2019.

    This project uses the Joseph Svoboda diaries to reconstruct quarantine practices during cholera outbreaks and epidemics in the 19th century Ottoman Empire. The author then compares the Ottoman practices to contemporary European practices described in newspapers and medical journals, and examines the comparative efficacy of practices to expand public health history beyond a Eurocentric frame.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, Epidemiology

  • Robinson, Anna, Khadija Gulam Qader, Matthew James Wright, Jessica Reine Tarabay, Sara Mahmoud, and Evan Thomas Wyse. “The Svoboda Diary: A Journey through the Ottoman Empire and Europe.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 21 May 2010.

    This project described the digitization and scanning process of the Alexander Svoboda Travel Journal, especially Svoboda Diaries Project’s digital collaboration with Dr. Nowf Allawi. The project further emphasized the necessity of rich historical, geographic, demographic, and linguistic knowledge required for work on the Svoboda Diaries Project.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, Preservation, General Project Overviews, Travel

  • Rodriguez, Domenica and Victoria Leavitt. “Impact and Undergraduate Involvement in Digital Humanities: The Joseph Mathia Diaries Project.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 20 May 2016.

    This project evaluates the motivations and work of undergraduate interns in a digital humanities laboratory. It uses internal evaluations such as interviews and surveys to identify why undergraduates get involved with Newbook, and their work and collaboration across the five-stage model of the project: transcribing, editing, analyzing, encoding, and formatting the text. While it acknowledges that the use of undergraduate interns functions in part as a means to reduce costs, it also highlights that it enables undergraduates to assume positions of responsibility and leadership and to innovate new modes of collaborating.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, Pedagogy

  • Shi, Linli and Harper Zhu. “Creating a Digital Map of the Tigris River in the 19th Century.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 15 May 2020.

    The project illustrates how a digital map will be created based on Joseph’s diaries. The authors examine the method of data collection from the diaries and conclude with the technological steps of digital map formation and the build-up of an accurate base map in QGIS and georeferencing.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, GIS/ Mapping

  • Sparr, Cameron, Rukia Fahim, and Emily Cimber. “Ottoman Text Archive Project: Svoboda Diary.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 15 May 2009.

    As the first Svoboda Project presentation at the UW URS, this project introduced the Ottoman Text Archive Project and the Svoboda Diaries Project and emphasized the challenges of studying Ottoman texts compared to contemporary early modern texts from Europe. It also introduces the work of Dr. Nowf Allawi and the early translation process of the Alexander Travel Journal.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, General Project Overviews

  • Van Burkleo, Sierra, Aaron Gupta, Rachel Schlotfeldt,and Tessa Carter. “The Newbook Project: Digital Texts in the Humanities of the Joseph Mathia Svoboda Diaries.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 16 May 2014.

    This project describes the workflow of the Newbook Project, highlighting the transcription process and the conversion of plain text to TEI-XML and then to HTML and LaTeX formats. It demonstrates how these formats facilitate historical research, especially by interns working on the Svobodapedia project, by making data extractable from the diaries.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, Research, Preservation, General Project Overviews

  • Wang, Yadi, Camille L. Cole, Sam Fields, Daniel P. Saelid, and Annie T. Chen. “Using automated textual analysis to study concepts of identity and difference in first-person narrative.” Poster presented at Digital Humanities 2022 on Jul. 25 – Jul. 29, 2022.

    This research employs automated textual analysis and visualization methods to facilitate exploration of the identity and difference in first-person writing. It uses two source texts which both appear in the format of a diary and yet are fundamentally different – the diary novel and the historical diary.

    Tags: Graduate Research, Conference Presentations, Textual Studies

  • Yi, Jion, Michael Joseph Manca, Arthur Karl Walker, Erika Arias, and Drew Shiels. “Newbook Digital Texts: Understanding and Developing a New Model of Undergraduate Research.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 19 May 2017.

    This project presents the undergraduate digital humanities lab model of the Newbook Digital Texts collective, particularly its undergraduate leadership structure. It highlights how the undergrad team leads allow students to get feedback, not just leadership, from research professors, the development of interdisciplinary communication, and the opportunities for outreach created by the project. The researchers surveyed current and former interns to demonstrate the positive impact of skills learned at Newbook on students’ success and job placement. The researchers conclude that these results suggest that this model could be applied to other fields of study.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, Pedagogy

  • Yi, Jion. “Newbook Digital Texts: The Alexander Svoboda Diaries and the Digital Revival of Middle Eastern Cultural Heritages.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 20 May 2016.

    This project uses StoryMap tools and Simile Widget to create a virtual exhibit showcasing the historical sites visited by Alexander Svoboda, focusing on those sites at present risk of destruction in Iraq and Syria. The author proposes that an exhibit like the StoryMap and Simile Widget timeline raises awareness about the endangerment of these sites and provides a call to action.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, GIS/ Mapping, Preservation, Travel

  • Zhu, Tianwei and Minsoo Jeon. “Comparative Studies in Alexander Svoboda’s Journal.” UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, 19 May 2017.

    This project uses ArcGis and storymapping to compare Alexander Svoboda’s journal with the contemporaneous novel The Saint’s Lamp by Egyptian writer Yahya Haqqi. Both Svoboda and the protagonist of Haqqi’s novel struggled with a sense of cultural deprivation or inferiority after returning to their homelands after living in Europe. The project creates a visualization of the complicated nature of Middle Eastern identity at the turn of the 19th century amid rising European influence in the region.

    Tags: Undergraduate Research, Conference Presentations, GIS/ Mapping, Travel, Biographical