Joseph Mathia Svoboda, a European residing in Baghdad and working as a steamship officer, kept a detailed daily diary from 1861 to 1908, in which he recorded his trips on the Tigris, family events, and his medical and financial concerns, as well as each day’s weather. Working with the UW Svoboda Diaries Project, part of the Newbook Digital Texts Collective, I transcribe these diaries and help develop resources for their analysis and the promotion of digital humanities. Digital humanities work changes not only the literal, physical forms of texts but their literary forms as well, and digitizing a text such as a diary and opening it to public scholarship presents new questions about how we think about private writings. Literary scholarship on diaries addresses the unique psychological and philosophical aspects of keeping a diary and attempts to analyze its own position in relation to its object of study, as what is personal to a diarist is placed in plain view. Svoboda himself wrote in a largely impersonal, factual style, with little personal commentary, for instance, but scholars mine social and political sentiments from his choice of language or attention. In this project, I will consider the Svoboda diaries (focusing on three diaries written between 1897 and 1899) as textual objects and describe the transformations they have undergone since their writing, with a special focus on the transformation of the private nature of a diary. What do the diaries become as we study them? While digital humanities seeks faithfulness to the original contents of a text, drastic transformation of forms such as “making the private public” naturally opens those same contents to new uses, and understanding these changes is crucial to understanding the full extent of digital humanities scholarship.