My project’s source is an unpublished journal in Arabic written by Alexander Svoboda, a young Baghdadi from an originally European family who traveled from Baghdad to Europe in 1897.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.

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a generally aggressive blood cancer with poor prognosis for which the fundamental treatment approach has not changed substantially. The need for new therapies is thus unquestioned. One therapy currently under phase I/II investigation at UW/SCCA for patients with newly diagnosed AML and those with relapsed or refractory disease, is G-CLAM (Granulocyte-colony stimulating factor, Cladribine, cytArabine, and Mitoxantrone). The phase I portion of the clinical trial involved evaluating the regimen for safety and escalating the dosage of mitoxantrone to determine the maximally tolerated dose. The main purpose of phase II, which is now ongoing, is to evaluate the effectiveness of the regimen, measured by the rates of complete remission and overall survival. Patients are accepted into the trial after having their medical history, laboratory, pathology and radiology results thoroughly reviewed to ensure all of the eligibility criteria have been met. As in all clinical trials the eligibility criteria are designed to help minimize risks to patients and homogenize the study population. However, the use of a set of criteria to define trial eligibility introduces a potential bias in the study and raises the question as to the degree to which findings can ultimately be extrapolated to the AML population at large. Studying the latter question is facilitated by the fact that a larger number of patients have received the same treatment off-protocol, e.g. because they were too sick to be eligible or did not have insurance coverage for study participation. We are collecting data on these off-study patients to compare their characteristics and treatment outcomes with those treated on-study. Findings are anticipated to answer whether the promising treatment results we have seen in the on-protocol patients carries over to those treated off-protocol as well and thus whether our results can be validly applied to the general AML population.