My project’s source is an unpublished journal in Arabic written by Alexander Svoboda, a young Baghdadi from an originally European family who traveled from Baghdad to Europe in 1897. Svoboda describes his visits to historical sites in Iraq and Syria, many of which are now threatened with partial or complete destruction. Threats to these sites include assaults and theft by parties such as ISIS. Through such activities, the group strives to obliterate the cultural genome of their alleged enemies. My project highlights the urgency of protecting and preserving the cultural heritage of this region. My research employs three open source digital tools: StoryMap JS, StoryMap Gigapixel, and Simile Widget. StoryMap JS displays an interactive map that tracks and visualizes Svoboda’s journey in chronological order. This tool is supplemented by contextual information about each city taken from the original diary with images of the cultural artifacts in each location. The tool contains own user interface and functionality, but I will customize the appearance of my work by adapting elements of the source code. Images are displayed using StoryMap Gigapixel, which lends visual depth and encourages user engagement with stories created in StoryMap JS. By comparing 19th-century images of cultural centers with modern photographs, the tool enables a virtual tour of an object or place—then and now, with details of the minutest features. This comparison of varying perspectives and details reveals patterns of attrition and loss. I supplement these maps and images using an interactive timeline tool, Simile Widget which displays dates of creation and destruction of culturally significant sites and visualizes the duration of endangerment. The display is explorable by site or date and contains brief historical summaries with links to relevant articles and videos. This kind of hands-on engagement with history can be a significant awareness-raising tool.

The Joseph Mathia Diaries Project, part of the Newbook Digital Text Project, is a research initiative started in 2012 and dedicated to the application of innovative digital technologies towards the multi-media publication of 16 original diaries and 30 transcriptions of Joseph Mathia Svoboda's original diaries. The transformation of these primary sources into physical or digital media consists of five phases: transcribing, editing, analyzing, encoding and formatting each text; with each and every one of them characterized as needing of extensive human resources. These resources come in form of undergraduate and graduate student interns; the undergraduate community being the most represented. The project almost entirely depends on this segment of the student body due to reduced funding but most importantly because we strongly believe that, by empowering our interns to assume positions of responsibility in lower and mid-level management and to participate in cross-function collaboration within the five phases of the project, we provide our students with invaluable experiences that prepare them for future successful professional and academic endeavors. Through interviews, surveys and other internal forms of evaluation, this research project aims to understand the process through which students get involved with the Newbook Digital Text Project, the nature of their work, the relation and relevance of this work to their area of study or interests and the outcome of this research internship in terms of skills and experience gained from becoming involved with undergraduate research. Consequently, this research project aims to demonstrate to the university community the high level of innovation, impact and collaboration the undergraduate student community can bring into traditional scholarly research.

 As millionaire art collector turned excavator Theodore M. Davis’s mistress, Emma B. Andrews documented significant archaeological excavations during the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Egyptian archaeology at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Within her journals, Emma detailed annual voyages along the Nile for more than two decades, providing important contemporary insights into Egyptian society.  The goals of our Diary Project include the digitization and publication of diary content along with wide-ranging biographical and historical research. To date, student interns have transcribed all 19 volumes of the original diaries. This year we have focused on completing structural markup to prepare the texts for online publication.  Our historical research has been wide-ranging, bringing to light many contemporary images of family, friends, fellow travelers, archaeological sites and Nile travel. However, we have not yet discovered a clear photograph of Emma herself.  Although she was the daughter of a prominent Ohio family, and a nexus of archaeological and social activity in Egypt, her controversial affair with Theodore Davis may have caused her family to destroy documents and photographs after her death in 1922. Using digital tools and methodologies, our intention is to use the information we have gathered programmatically from the diaries as the basis for creating an artist’s sketch of Emma Andrews.  We have customized a generic Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) tagset to create a new ‘trait’ tag enabling us to document physical characteristics and automatically compile them in a database.  We will be incorporating similar details mined from related contemporary diaries and correspondence that reference Emma. We are completing a pictorial analysis of close family members along with further written descriptions we have identified to facilitate the recreation of our ‘invisible diarist’. Our proposal melds digital technology, traditional humanities research and an imaginative recreation of the past.

In creating the first interactive digital chronology of the history of a little-known painting once fêted as the work of Leonardo Da Vinci, we follow a tale of smuggling and intrigue as the piece moves from the hands of famed Italian art collectors, to Roman dignitaries, American connoisseurs and 'Robber Barons'. Our research has shed light on the fate of this work which had disappeared into apparent obscurity for almost a century.  The narrative has been developed using the open source online platform StoryMap JS, and seeks to visually guide the user through an exploration of the history and significance of this artwork, allowing users both a focused and customized experience.  The ‘Leonardo Project’ derives from work completed by interns on the Emma B. Andrews Diary Project.  The interns have been digitizing and researching the late 19th/early 20th century diaries of the mistress of millionaire art collector turned archaeological excavator Theodore Davis. The 5th volume details the acquisition of the “Portrait of a Girl” and its stealthy exit from Italy, across Europe, and eventually to Davis and Andrews’ home in Newport, R.I.  Intern work has focused on sourcing and analyzing related contemporary material including correspondence, images and other original documents, along with published scholarly articles, to create a detailed digital timeline narrative available to the public. We have uncovered the sometimes difficult interpersonal relationships that influenced the movement of the painting, the story behind its mistaken authentication, and how it has ended up hanging in the cozy hallway of a private home in the US. Our unique digital exhibit gives an unparalleled glimpse into the early twentieth century world of art, politics and acquisition.