http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit
“Blood, dirt and sucked sugar stick”
The First World War Poetry Digital Archive
Electric Connections Conference, Edinburgh, 11th March 2008
Kate Lindsay, Project ManagerOxford University
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit
Overview
• Background
• The Goals of the First World War Digital Poetry
Archive
• The Collections
• Added Value for Education and Research
• Public Involvement “The Great War Archive”
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit
Background
• 1996: JISC funded the Virtual Seminars Project
• Drew together primary materials on Wilfred Owen scattered
across a range of archives and an array of contextual
resources (WOMDA)
• Web based tutorials to advance the possibilities of traditional
teaching
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/projects/jtap/
• One of the first multimedia collections designed specifically as
a teaching resource -more than 1 million hits.
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit
Goals of the First World War Poetry Digital Archive
1. To make primary source material available to researchers
and students which would otherwise be difficult to access
2. To place the material in context thus widening the site’s
appeal to include history, military history, women studies,
and media studies
3. To add value by providing tools for research and education
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit
The Archive Collections
• 2000+ digital images of primary source material (manuscripts,
letters, service records) from Edward Thomas, Robert Graves,
Isaac Rosenberg, Vera Brittain and Roland Leighton.
• Online corpora of the full-texts of
the poems
• Multimedia objects (photographs,
audio and video) from the IWM.
• Publications of War (recruitment
posters, trench papers etc.)
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit
Added Value: Research• Delivery system will allow browsing, advanced searching,
comparison, zooming and export of items.
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit
Added Value: Education• Workshops and events held with teachers and lecturers to
guide development of educational tools and resources
• http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/education
• Podcasts and audio tours
• Online tutorials and resource packs
• Discussion boards
• Path creation scheme for teachers to build their own online tutorials and resource packs
• Explore the use Web 2.0 to deliver these resources more widely?
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit
Public Involvement: The Great War Archive
www.thegreatwararchive.org
• What have you got in your attic?
• Tap into the Internet’s potential for amateur digitization Alternative literatures and silent voices of the First World War
• Scribal, oral, pictorial histories
Further Information
• Kate Lindsay, Project Manager
• http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit
• http://www.thegreatwararchive.org