The diaries kept by Emma B. Andrews are an undervalued resource for learning about Egyptian culture, history and many turn of the century discoveries. Andrews (1837-1922) was the mistress of Theodore Davis, an archeologist responsible for the excavations in the Valley of the Kings. Andrews accompanied Davis on his trips and kept records of her life in Egypt. Her diaries provide readers with valuable insights into the social, cultural and scientific climate during her years in Egypt. However, these first-hand accounts have gone virtually unnoticed for years. Now, at the University of Washington, undergraduate students have the unique opportunity of working with the Andrews diaries to prepare them for online publication through the Newbook Digital Texts Project. The project allows for inexpensive publication of materials with less difficulty than traditional publication methods. Students work to translate, transcribe, edit and tag large amounts of texts in order to make them universally available on the web. Students researching the diaries have a variety of tasks to complete before the diaries will be ready for publication. During our presentation, we will focus on the process by which we are compiling these writings, which include: transcribing the diaries to an electronic textual format which must be completed and edited twice for accuracy; running the transcriptions through an auto-tagging program to create an online format for the texts; converting the auto-tagged version into XML format and adding new content, including historical research on people mentioned in the diaries; as well as how we hope this will change research in this area in the future. Undergraduates working on The Emma B. Andrews Diary Project are passionate about and committed to making this valuable resource available to the world with the hope that it will become a more widely recognized in the world of academia.

 The JMS Diaries is a collection of 16 original diaries and 30 transcriptions of Joseph Mathia Svoboda's original diaries. As an employee of the Lynch Brothers’ Tigris and Euphrates Steam Navigation Company, Svoboda wrote daily accounts of life on the Euphrates River between 1862 and 1908. These diaries give us insight into valuable cultural and social perspectives about Iraq during the late 19th Century. The NEH-funded Newbook Digital Texts in the Humanities project works to transform such valuable primary source documents into digital texts, making them easily accessible to scholars and the general public. As undergraduate researchers, we work with these primary texts to gain both research and digital archiving skills. Our editorial team works through a five phase process consisting of transcribing, editing, analyzing, encoding and formatting each text. First, we transcribe the texts from the original handwritten documents to plain text digital form, editing and proofreading them. We format the transcriptions in a standardized way for our work-flow manager to then apply a program, written by our technology team, which converts this format into XML-TEI markup (tags). XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a human and machine readable markup language used for encoding documents, which we use in a form standardized by TEI, the Text Encoding Initiative. We convert these to HTML (HyperText Markup Language) for web display and to LaTeX typesetting language for printing. Our history team extracts information from the texts thus produced to write our project "wiki" (the Svobodapedia. Svobodapedia serves as the basic annotation source for the final text, which is made available to readers on our website and as a print-on-demand book. Since beginning the project in September 2012, we have completed two diaries consisting of 400 pages each, and continue to work toward advancing this evolving, ongoing repository of primary source documents.

With the fifth largest proven crude oil reserves in the world and a government dependent on oil for 90% of its annual revenue, it is difficult for the 21st century individual to imagine what Iraq’s economy looked like before petroleum was discovered in 1923. In fact, relatively little is known about Iraq’s pre-oil economy, including the methods that were used to transport and trade commodities, what commodities were traded, and the prevalence of commercial travel. My research project focuses on the historical role of steamships in Iraqi commerce and travel, and how the Joseph M. Svoboda Diaries can illuminate the patterns of 19th century commercial trade and travel along the Tigris River in the part of the Ottoman Empire that is present-day Iraq. By examining Diaries 47 and 48 and cataloguing Svoboda’s descriptions of the commercial river voyages he takes as part of his job as a clerk on British steamships, my research seeks to illuminate what goods were traded, what kind of people used steamships as a mode of travel, and what places along the Tigris River functioned as commercial hubs. I plan to create a visual map of Svoboda’s river journeys, and to identify which river ports were significant and which ports typically provided what commodities. (Example: Coot as a hub for coal.) By superimposing Svoboda’s steamship routes on a map of present-day Iraq, I hope to investigate what impact, if any, this 19th century steamship traffic had on the modern-day river ports mentioned in the text and explore whether these commercial hubs retained their historical economic significance into the 20th and 21st centuries.

Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) is a particularly aggressive hematologic malignancy. While highly curable in children and adolescents, treatment outcomes for adults are poor and novel therapies are needed. Increased evidence suggests that antibody-based therapeutics may be effective and relatively well tolerated in patients that failed to respond to conventional chemotherapeutics or experience disease relapse. Promising early clinical trials were obtained with inotuzumab ozogamicin (IO), an immunoconjugate consisting of an anti-CD22 antibody and a toxic calicheamicin moiety. IO specifically targets the CD22 receptor, a cell surface protein that is expressed by the lymphoid cells responsible for ALL. Nevertheless, despite the presence of these receptors on the majority of malignant cells, IO is not effective in many ALL patients. It is thought that IO exerts its anti-ALL effect through calicheamicin-induced DNA damage and subsequent apoptosis, but the exact molecular mechanisms remain poorly understood. I performed a series of phenotyping assays (n=3) using flow cytometry and chemical labelling to quantify the amount of CD22 receptors expressed on a panel of 8 well-characterized human ALL cell lines. I then executed IO and calicheamicin cytotoxicity assays (2 cycles of n=3) on these cell lines to identify which of these appeared to be IO- and/or calicheamicin-resistant. Future studies will be aimed at using these cell lines - and at a later stage - primary ALL specimens, to better understand the mechanism of action of IO and identify clinically relevant mechanisms of resistance. The longer-term goal is to develop strategies to improve the anti-ALL activity of IO to optimize treatment outcomes for ALL patients receiving IO-based therapies.