A super-quick update from my CENDARI Fellowship this week. I set up the wiki for In their own words: linking lived experiences of the First World War a week ago but only got stuck into populating it with lists of various national battalions this week. My current task list, copied from the front page is to:
- Populate list of military units: Australian battalions in World War I, British battalions and regiments in World War I), Canadian battalions in World War I, Indian battalions in World War I, Italian battalions in World War I, New Zealand battalions in World War I. A list of battalions is needed to form the basis for the collecting process. (I'm starting with a list of divisions because I can get it from Wikipedia, but I know this is problematic)
- Collate lists of personal diaries, letters, memoirs that can be linked to units through their authors
- Collate lists of official unit diaries and histories
- Collate resources on researching World War One records to help researchers know where to start
- Create a sample battalion page as a demonstrator to show how personal accounts can be linked
- Collate information about private letters, diaries and memoirs
If you can help with any of that, let me know! Or just get stuck in and edit the site.
I've started another Google Doc with very sketchy Notes towards modelling information about World War One Battalions. I need to test it with more battalion histories and update it iteratively. At this stage my thinking is to turn it into an InfoBox format to create structured data via the wiki. It's all very lo-fi and much less designed than my usual projects, but I'm hoping people will be able to help regardless.
So, 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?
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