War Diaries Talk

Use of decorations after surname

  • 01dgobbo by 01dgobbo

    Personnel, who have been awarded certain medals, are subsequently recorded in the diary such as Lt Smith MC. The award is useful for distinguishing two officers with the same surname but different awards. Hitherto I have not included awards after the surname in the "Person" tag but I think it will help if I do show these where the diary attaches them to the surname. Thus if Lt Smith MC went on leave I should record . Is this OK?

    Posted

  • HeatherC by HeatherC moderator

    The problem is that the way the system works it looks at the tags placed by 5 different people and produces a "best fit" from that. Thus if you do something like this you will be the only one of the 5 who does and your tag (or that part of it anyway) will not get counted I believe. I'm not certain exactly how the algorithm works, but I would not recommend you do this. Officers are usually not that hard to track anyway as they tend to get a lot of mentions in a diary compared to the average OR and some of those will have first names or initials..

    Posted

  • ral104 by ral104 moderator, scientist

    Well, you tag would probably get counted, but it would make the system less certain of the information. So instead of a situation where there was clear consensus that here was Lt. Smith, we'd end up with a tag which looked more like 'Lt. Smith, Lt. Smith MC'. It's not the end of the world, but it makes later analysis more difficult.

    So, to cut a long story short, I wouldn't include the decorations after the name.

    Posted

  • 01dgobbo by 01dgobbo

    I am still unsure. The case I noticed concerned a Col Blackham RAMC. A quick search revealed two Col Blackhams RAMC. The diary said No 4 Cavalry Field Ambulance was "visited by Col Blackham CIE and only one of the Col Blackhams that I found was a Companion of the Indian Empire. This is useful information for separating two otherwise similar men. If the decoration is not recorded in the tag the information is still available in the diary text for a researcher, who is able to access the text but it will mean a little research time and perhaps a cost for displaying a diary page. I can see that the Zooniverse analysis might be more difficult but the addition of the decoration should make the history research a little easier and there will be a lot of historian users of the database once it isreleased.

    Posted

  • eatyourgreens by eatyourgreens moderator, admin

    http://wd3.herokuapp.com/public takes the majority opinion for any given tag. If 4 people tag 'Col Blackham' and 1 person tags 'Col Blackham CIE' then the name gets recorded as Col Blackham. I think the tagging guidance is to record only the surname in the surname field.

    Here are some examples of people who've been tagged in one of the completed diaries, if that helps. https://wd3.herokuapp.com/diaries/GWD0000002/export?filter=person

    I imagine Lives of the First World War must have this problem disambiguating individuals who share the same name and rank. They may have found a way to solve the problem, or work around it.

    Jim

    Posted

  • HeatherC by HeatherC moderator

    Thanks Jim - I was hoping you'd comment on this as you know more about the interface than any of us! The examples are very interesting and you can see with the one for Captain Vidal / Videl RAMC what chaos is caused when someone adds in post-nominals as well as the name! So the answer does seem to be don't do it, however good the intention.

    Just out of interest, looking at the first one on the list, it looks as if 4 different people tagged the same man 4 different ways (Markham, etc). What does the system do then?

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  • eatyourgreens by eatyourgreens moderator, admin in response to HeatherC's comment.

    Hi Heather,

    If there's no clear winner eg. four different spellings of the name, then my code keeps all the variations in a list, as shown in that example. If there is one clear winner, then it is kept and all other variations are ignored.

    Steve Hirschorn at the the National Archives has been looking at the data in order to index the diaries by people's names too. I think he uses a similar method, but I'm not sure.

    Jim

    Posted

  • eatyourgreens by eatyourgreens moderator, admin in response to HeatherC's comment.

    Oh, and yes, Capt Vidal is recorded as a different person from Capt Vidal RAMC because they have different surnames 😃

    Posted

  • ral104 by ral104 moderator, scientist

    Steve's method is similar, but he strips out post-nominals prior to making the comparison between individual tags. It doesn't always work, though. I think his code will recognise and remove DSM, for example, but not D.S.M.

    At the end of the day, it's next to impossible to account for all variations in input, I suppose.

    Lives of the First World War has many problems disambiguating individuals with common names/ranks. In that case, though, they rely on users doing detective work with the other contextual records provided to build up a fuller set of data which allows those individuals to be unambiguously identified.

    Sometimes the issue is not that there are two people with the same name and rank, but that there are two (or more) records for the same person. Going back to @01dgobbo's example, I'd imagine that this would also be an issue there. What if Col. Blackham was mentioned twice - once before the award of the CIE and once after. The challenge there would be not in establishing which Col. Blackham was which, but in allowing for the fact that they might be the same person.

    Posted

  • eatyourgreens by eatyourgreens moderator, admin

    Interesting discussion here about disambiguating individuals for Lives of the FWW http://support.livesofthefirstworldwar.org/forums/246136-feedback-and-discussion/suggestions/5824287-disambiguating-individuals-from-medal-card-info

    Posted

  • ral104 by ral104 moderator, scientist

    Thanks for the link. I guess the main issue there is who puts in the effort required to do it 😄

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  • marie.eklidvirginmedia.com by marie.eklidvirginmedia.com

    Query: If there is an entry for a person, e.g. Lt. A.N. Other MC, on the diary page. When tagging the person is it correct to put Lt. A. N. Other MC or should you just put. Lt. A. N. Other only, and not enter the MC after his name?

    Posted

  • HeatherC by HeatherC moderator

    This is what we've just discussed in this thread and the consensus is no do not use post nominals of any sort as they confuse the tag

    Posted