Why tag instead of transcribe?
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by ral104 moderator, scientist
Great answer to this question posted in an older thread by @eatyourgreens (who developed the Operation War Diary site):
Hi, we're running this to feed into Lives of the First World War at
the IWM http://www.livesofthefirstworldwar.org/ and also to gather
data about the day-to-day operation of the British Army on the Western
Front on a scale that has never been attempted before. For example, I
think Richard Grayson said that a figure of 25% is often quoted for
time spent in the trenches, but that figure is anecdotal. That's why
we're interested in asking you to look for named people in the
diaries, and identify when & where they were mentioned, what their
unit was doing at the time etc.The National Archives is also hoping that we can generate index
information that makes the 1.5 million pages of WO 95 much easier to
search in their catalogue system. A pure text transcription wouldn't
give the kind of structured information that Operation War Diary can
generate eg. that 'Sgt Byrne' is a person or that '9 KRR' is a named
unit.Posted