Sven Hedin (1865-1952) was a Swedish geographer, author, and explorer.
During his life he was part of the Swedish Academy and did several
expeditions to central and east Asia. He published his travels in multiple books
and geographical course books. Bagdad, Babylon, Ninive was published 1917
as a travelogue about his observations from the area. It contains 806 pages and
a foldable map. The book includes a lot of the author’s drawings and photos.
According to the Sven Hedin Foundation, Hedin donated the
copyright to his works to the Royal Swedish Academy of Science. As of 2022, the copyright
of his works will expire and are therefore available to digitize and publish.
There have been violations of the copyright, and they have not permitted any digitalizations of
Hedin’s work.
This project aims to digitize fragments from the book Bagdad, Babylon, Ninive from 1917. This was done by scanning, optical character recognition, OCR, and mark-up according to the Text Encoding Initiative, TEI. The fragments consist of 30 pages from the chapter 10, Sommardagar i Dar es-Salam (translation: Summerdays in Dar es-Salam). The pages include both text, photos and drawings. The book was borrowed at Södertälje Library, south of Stockholm, Sweden and was kept available through the whole process.