Document Structures: Journeys, Marginal Material, Notes, Divisions, and Other Features

Although the content of the diaries is not consistently structured, the majority of the original diaries we have studied appear to feature divisions by journeys up and down the Tigris. In some cases, Joseph includes header-like formatting (underlining, for example) to indicate a "journey section", in other cases he does not and the "header" is formally indistinguishable from the rest of the text. In our transcriptions we have formatted all journey headers in a standard manner and have given each one a unique identifier code containing the direction of the journey (N or S), the start date, the voyage number, and, where relevant, continuation from the previous diary.

In the margins of the original diaries we have digitized and transcribed there are several kinds of notes by Joseph including: the dates of entries, notes about the content of entries, and the above-mentioned tabular material, written vertically in the left margin, usually listing numbers of passengers, weight of cargo, the amount of specie carried, and the draft of the ship. This tabular material we have formatted as horizontal tables and included immediately following the journey headers.

Other structures in the diaries include telegrams, newspaper clippings pasted inside the covers, loose materials in pockets pasted inside the covers, and tables of accounts written on the end papers.

In addition, for some of the diaries there are marginal notes in Arabic written in a modern hand. We believe these to have been made by the Baghdad scholar Yaqqub (Yaʿqūb) Sarkis while they were in his possession (after 1929). In our publication of the diaries we have marked the position of these notes with unique identifiers and included the actual notes and their translations in an appendix. Our own non-textual editorial notes including, but not limited to, the standard and variant names of people, places, objects, companies, and ships, as well as informational notes about some vocabulary, are contained in another appendix. Both of these appendices will be electronically linked to the text in some future iteration of the on-line publication.

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