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

katharine.lindsay@oucs.ox.ac.uk

• http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit

• http://www.thegreatwararchive.org