Joseph Mathia Svoboda, a European residing in Baghdad and working as a steamship purser, kept a series of daily diaries from 1861 to 1908, in which he recorded his trips on the Tigris as well as local news and personal concerns, providing a remarkable insight into life in late-Ottoman Iraq. Since 2006, the University of Washington Svoboda Diaries Project, part of the Newbook Digital Texts publishing house, has been digitizing, transcribing and studying these diaries and making them available to the public in web and print formats. Digital humanities work, such as ours, changes not only the literal, physical forms of texts but their literary forms as well. Digitizing a diary and opening it to public scholarship presents new questions about how we think about private writings. When what is personal to the diarist is made widely visible, incidental details become matters of scholarly importance and discussion. At the same time, macro factors such as twentieth and twenty-first-century world and Iraqi history, war, colonialism, global trade, and epidemic disease shape their use and study. In my project, I consider the history of the diaries as text-objects by considering the significance of the material, contextual, and theoretical transformations they have undergone since their writing. 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 possibilities and impacts of digital scholarship.