World War One:About
In their own words: linking lived experiences of the First World War
The Centenary of the outbreak of the First World War has lead to an increased interest in the lives of soldiers and others in WWI. However, it can be difficult for novice researchers to find their way through military jargon and structures and to get a sense of what life in the Great War was like for a particular person. Sometimes rich personal accounts have survived, but in many cases, there's only a name, and perhaps a service number or regiment or battalion name.
There are lots of personal accounts of the war online, whether on large sites like Europeana 1914-1918, national libraries and archives, or individual diaries transcribed and posted online through small local projects.
This project aims to bridge the gap and provide context for an individual's experience of WWI by linking to narratives written by people in the same situation. At the end of this project, someone who wants to research a soldier in WWI but doesn't know a thing about how armies were structured should be able to find a personal account from someone who was in the same place at the same time that gives a sense of their lived experiences of WWI.
The challenge is to link these personal accounts by creating links from the individual who wrote them to their military unit. To populate this dataset, personal accounts (diaries, letters, etc) need to be linked to specific soldiers, who can then be linked to specific units. Linking published accounts such as official unit histories to pages would also help. Once these personal accounts are linked to particular military units, they can be linked to higher units - from the battalion, ship or regiment to brigade, corps, etc - and to particular places, activities, events and campaigns.
In this phase of the project, the aim is find a personal narrative - a diary, letters, memoirs or images - for each military unit in the British Army. Can you help?
Further background on this project
This project came out of a research proposal and subsequent visiting Transnational Research Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin with the CENDARI project. For reference, my proposal was [CENDARI Visiting Research Fellowship: 'Bridging collections with a participatory Commons: a pilot with World War One archives'].
CENDARI is a 'research infrastructure project aimed at integrating digital archives for the medieval and World War One eras' which 'aims to leverage innovative technologies to provide historians with the tools by which to contextualise, customise and share their research'.
As the definition of the overall project is still subject to change, it might be best to link to previous writing/thinking:
- my first update was 'Defining the scope: week one as a CENDARI Fellow' (September 26);
- my second was 'Linking lived experiences of WWI through battalions?' and the related post 'Private Albert Henry Bailey, service number 13/970a' (October 10).
- I've also posted 'Linking lived experiences of the First World War': possible goals and a bunch of technical questions' (October 15).
