Using named entity recognition and network analysis to distinguish personal networks from the social milieu in nineteenth-century Ottoman–Iraqi personal diaries

Abstract

Abstract The diaries of Joseph Mathia Svoboda capture over 40 years of trade on the Tigris, describing his daily life and regular journeys as a steamboat purser during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, specifically between the cities of Basra and Baghdad. They offer a unique perspective on daily life, community structure, and social relations. However, with over 600 pages of transcribed material and many more diaries still in the process of being transcribed, it is difficult to track patterns and changes in Joseph Svoboda’s social relationships and daily life by way of reading and inference alone. This article employs natural language processing (NLP) and network analysis to facilitate study of Svoboda’s social interactions, as well as his observations of his broader social milieu. Inspection of the networks and accompanying visualizations showed that Svoboda’s close interactions were primarily with kin, but his position as a steamship purser gave him a unique vantage point to encounter a wide range of persons of diverse backgrounds. Additionally, decomposing networks by time illustrated how significant life events facilitated change in social interactions.