War Diaries Talk

Why tag instead of transcribe?

  • ral104 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