The story of the Svoboda diaries is many faceted. In the early 19th century, a businessman named Anton Svoboda (1796-1878) traveled from Vienna to Baghdad via Istanbul where he received an imperial warrant allowing him to establish a business in imported crystal and other commodities in Baghdad. There he married an Armenian woman, Euphemie Muradjian, and founded a large family of 11 children who later married into French Catholic, British, Russian and Arab Christian families and became prominent in the Baghdad expatriate community. By the first quarter of the 19th century, Anton had become an important figure in the city, with ties to Davud Pasha, the Mamluk ruler of the province, and to the powerful British resident. When Western scholars and travelers came to Baghdad, they were often hosted by Anton and assisted by his local contacts. For example, when the great Tibetan linguist, Alexandre Csoma de Köros left his native Transylvania for the Himalayas in 1820 and ended up by chance in Baghdad, he was housed, fed, and subsidized financially by Anton Svoboda for 45 days. During this time, Svoboda also put him in contact with the British Resident, Claudius-James Rich, to whom Csoma applied for a subsidy to enable him to complete his journey. A year earlier, Anton Svoboda had invited the inveterate traveler, adventurer, and self-proclaimed "physician", the Fleming Johan-Martin Honigberger and his companion, a Transylvanian surgeon named de Tiurck, to enter the service of Davud Pasha. During their stay they too lived with Anton who also helped them resume their journeys.
Anton's middle son, Joseph Mathia Svoboda (b. Oct. 17, 1840 in Baghdad) lived for a number of years with his brother Alexander in India and particularly in Bombay, returning to Baghdad in 1857. In 1862, he started work with the Euphrates and Tigris Steam Navigation Company established in 1861 by the Lynch Brothers Trading Company and served as an officer on board the company's steamers making regular trips up and down the Tigris carrying cargo and passengers to different ports below Baghdad. In 1859 he was taught English by his sister's husband, Richard Rogers and ca 1861, he began writing, in English, the diaries that he kept until his death in 1908. In these diaries he documents the trips he made on the Lynch steamers, writing down the names of official passengers and others with details of cargo, noteworthy events for every trip, and charts of currencies and exchange rates. In addition, he recorded many details of his life and that of his family and friends in Baghdad including his relations with the Christian communities of Baghdad (Assyrian, Chaldean, Orthodox, Roman Catholic), the resident French, British, Russian, and Ottoman officials, and observations on people, entertainment, epidemic diseases, the Arab tribes and their relations with the Ottoman government, and more. The more than 40 years of diaries, constitute not only an invaluable source for the history of the Svoboda family but are a precious resource for glimpsing life, trade, and politics in Ottoman Baghdad and Iraq during the last half of the 19th century and into the early 20th.
Beginning in the early 1980s, a descendent of the Svoboda family, Professor Henry Louis Svoboda, a prominent Baghdad architect and department head of the Iraq National Center for Architectural and Engineering Consultancies, conceived of a project to use the Alexander Svoboda Travel Journal and JMS diaries as the basis of a book on the history of Iraq. His first step in this project was to be the publication of the Travel Journal kept in Arabic by 19 year-old Alexander Richard Svoboda, (the son of Joseph Mathia) in which he wrote extensive daily accounts of a journey he made in 1897 with his parents and the outgoing British Resident, first by caravan from Baghdad across the desert and through the Middle East to Cairo. From there the family group embarked on a ship for Brindisi and thence by train to Paris. For this project, Professor Svoboda recruited the assistance of Nowf Allawi, an architect working for the Consultancies who had done several translation projects over the years. She is fluent in Classical Arabic and Iraqi colloquial dialects including the Christian dialect of Baghdad, as well as in French and English. The project was just developing when twin disasters struck. The 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq left the areas around the National Manuscripts Center, the University of Baghdad, and the Baghdad Central Library unsafe. Research became impossible and access to the other diaries was lost. Then, in late 2005, Prof. Henry Svoboda fell ill and died. Following his death, Nowf Allawi determined to continue the transcription and translation in his honor. Untrained as an historian and unable to do research in person because of the situation in Baghdad, Ms. Allawi contacted Prof. Walter G. Andrews, a co-director of OTAP and a well-known Ottomanist for help with Ottoman Turkish vocabulary in the diary. After hearing of her project and her plight, Prof. Andrews offered the resources of OTAP to assist her in the translation and publication of the Travel Journal. Only as the work continued, did Nowf Allawi inform OTAP of the existence of the Joseph Mathia Svoboda diaries and send samples of copies made by Prof. Svoboda from microfilm which was apparently lost following his death.
Since the first contact with Ms. Allawi in (Nov. 2006), OTAP has developed a web-based system for displaying a facing page parallel version of a transcription (in Arabic) and English translation of the Travel Journal, both of which are marked up for structure and content (notes, glosses of vocabulary, names, places, and times) using TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) standards [Appendix 7]. We have solved the basic problems of adapting to marking up complex orthographies, which entail, for example, the problem of inserting left-to-right Latin-based script markup into a right-to-left Arabic document. We have navigated issues raised by the variety of existing encoding schemes on different text editors, email-clients, word-processors, and operating systems. We have developed a text-preparation and display model that creates a web-viewable document from a standard Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) conformant XML encoded source. The result is a side-by-side web-based version of the diary with accompanying translation and notes. We have also been in direct contact with living members of the Svoboda extended family and gathered images, genealogical information, and anecdotes about the ancestral Svobodas. We have been assisted by an amateur historian in London who has collected material on Alexander Richard and his later career as a photographer, and we have created an interactive map of Alexander's journey using Google Maps-all of these as examples of the kind of material that could be brought to bear on this single journal through web-based technologies. In addition, much of the work on the project has been done by undergraduate researchers as part of an OTAP program to train young scholars in the techniques and possibilities of digital humanities research. This kind of training is part of OTAP's commitment to educating the next generation of humanities scholars in digital technologies, and we consider it one of our most innovative and effective contributions to the future of digital scholarship in the humanities. Our undergraduate researchers on the Svoboda Project have included students from programs as diverse as Near Eastern Languages and Literatures, History, Anthropology, Linguistics, Art, Art History, and Engineering, totaling 22 from 2008-9 to 2010-11. The eventual influx of a substantial collection of original manuscripts focused on the life of a single family has raised significant issues, such as how best to integrate and publish such material in an optimal way in the shortest possible time. The problem with traditional print publication for this large single authored collection is that each individual diary contains unique information that illuminates and compliments information in the others. Accordingly, in the case of the Svoboda diaries, an adequate printed text of any single diary, produced by traditional methods, would need to wait upon the preparation of all the diaries-a process that following traditional printing schedules might take many decades. In the course of our work, we also have discovered that the complexity of material in the diaries-for one simple example, the representations of names which appear in the Arabic script, in several different transcriptions of the Arabic script, in an English version, and in a French version and their multiple links to references in several texts-represents huge problems for cross indexing in a static printed book. We have, by now, developed an application of open source wiki software to create a continuously expanding reference encyclopedia, the Svobodapedia, which allows our store of related information to grow as the project expands.. Much of the proof of concept work has been accomplished in the course of the Alexander Svoboda Travel Journal publication project. Our experience, as well as the experience of other projects have shown that it is possible, in a web-based digital environment, to create an ever-expanding and broadly accessible network of texts, based on standardized tags (mark-up codes), tagging procedures, and related materials such as images, secondary sources, maps, etc. This body grows and reshapes itself as new material is added by a collaborative coalition of scholars and other contributors (in our case to date, the Svoboda family, amateur historians and collectors). We have also developed direct integration of the web-based texts with print-on-demand resources, which allow for the economical production of digitally typeset hard-copy books at any stage in the process for those who need or want them. We have been supported by grants from the University of Washington Royalties Research Fund, the Simpson Center for the Humanities and the Office of the Divisional Dean for the Humanities and a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-up grant to fund the final stages of the Travel Journal Newbook Project for 2011-12. The Alexander Richard Svoboda Travel Journal, on which we have been working for more than 5 years, was a far more complex case than the JMS diaries because it involves large quantities of complex scripts (Arabic and English) in the same environment. However, it has allowed us to develop digital resources, technologies, and methods for doing precisely the kind of text preparation and dissemination that we propose for the JMS diaries materials, which do contain occasional passages in Arabic. As we move into the next stage of the Svoboda Diaries Project, we are also expanding our scope to include a collaborative effort called "Digital Texts in the Humanities", which will involve the application of our techniques and tools to the multi-media publication of other original source materials.
