THE JOSEPH MATHIA SVOBODA DIARIES:

Series Introduction

Kearby Chess

(Walter G. Andrews, edit and revision)

Project History

The Svoboda Diaries Project began as one of the projects of the umbrella Ottoman Texts Archive Project (OTAP) located at the University of Washington. Since 1993, OTAP has had as its goal creating resources and techniques for the employment of digital technologies in the study, archiving, and dissemination of Ottoman era texts. Its broad general mission is described as follows:

• To create resources that will enable scholars, researchers, decision-makers, and the general public to understand better a critical area of the world and one of the last great multi-ethnic empires.

• To effect radical positive change in the way in which primary resources from the Ottoman Empire are made available to a world-wide public.

• To contribute to a healthier, safer, and more secure world by providing the groundwork for better informed and more thoughtful interactions among nations and peoples.

The Svoboda Diaries Project has been one of OTAP’s most active and productive projects and has since 2013 developed into one of the founding partners in the Newbook Digital Texts in the Humanities (NDTH) collaborative digital publications initiative. The Svoboda project began with a 2006 email to Prof. Walter G. Andrews from Baghdad architect Nowf Allawi, who had for years been working with the director of the Iraqi Architectural Consultancies, Prof. Henry Svoboda, on a project to compile a history of 19thcentury Iraq based on diaries written by members of his extended family. Prof. Svoboda’s participation in the project had ended with his tragic death in 2005 but Ms. Allawi determined to continue his work as a debt of honor. At the time of this first message, Nowf was working on the translation of the Arabic language Travel Journal kept by 19 year-old Alexander Richard Svoboda during a journey with his mother and father overland from Baghdad to Cairo and thence by ship and train to Italy and Paris. Initially, she was looking for some help with Ottoman Turkish but as time went on and it became clear that the situation in Iraq would prevent her from accessing the resources she needed to complete her project, the OTAP staff offered to assist her in publishing the Journal. Beginning from Ms. Allawi’s transcription and translation of Alexander Svoboda’s Travel Journal, the project has grown to include a programmatically generated Text Encoding Initiative compatible XML text, an annotated side-by-side web display of the translation and an Arabic script transcription of the Journal with links to the original text, a project wiki in which we are compiling information about the Journal, the Svoboda family, and 19thcentury Iraq, as well as a 2012 print-on-demand publication and e-book version.

Over the past nine years we have watched with intense anxiety as Nowf lived through the violent aftermath of the U. S. invasion of Iraq. To date Nowf and Prof. Andrews have exchanged more than three thousand email messages as we struggled to complete a complex research and publication project over a long distance, through the chaos of war and civil disruption, which at times made such simple things as a visit to the library unbelievably hazardous for residents of Baghdad. In the course of this adventure, experiment, learning process, research and development project, intercultural communications effort… many wonderful and initially unexpected things emerged. We came into contact with the descendants of the Svoboda family, who now have been scattered to the four corners of the globe where they appear to remain the same interesting, active, talented, and intelligent people that we encounter in their ancestors as recorded in the Svoboda diaries. They have been a joy to work with and unfailingly supportive of our project and have contributed invaluable family lore to our storehouse of background information. We say “Svoboda diaries” because, as we began to work with Nowf, we learned that Alexander’s father was an avid keeper of diaries and compiled as many as 61, covering the years from about 1862 to 1908. A large number of these diaries are now in the National Manuscript Center in Baghdad, but they have not recently been inventoried and we are unsure how many remain there in what condition. However, thanks to Kanan Makiya and the Makiya family, we now have in our hands 14 digital copies of original Svoboda Diaries and copies of transcriptions from 31 of the Joseph Mathia Svoboda diaries made in the 1970s by Kanan’s mother, Margaret Makiya, a Baghdad researcher from a family of long-time Svoboda friends. From this material and other of her publications, we have been able extract copious information about the life of the Svobodas in Baghdad.

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