War Diaries Talk

Really interesting blog post on Operation War Diary and Social Machines

  • ral104 by ral104 moderator, scientist

    Check out this post from Robert Simpson, part of the Zooniverse team that built Operation War Diary: http://orbitingfrog.com/2014/06/17/crowdsourcing-the-first-world-war-a-lovely-social-machine/

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  • HeatherC by HeatherC moderator

    Interesting post and also interesting to look again at the maps Jim created. Looking at the one for casualties in 1916 it does show how pointless it was to make the entry "casualties nil" every time the diary said it, as all these now show up as a point on the map and skew the data.

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  • ral104 by ral104 moderator, scientist

    True, although I suppose that in itself is interesting for the project, as it allows us to refine how we do things. I've got some new map files now, which I hope I'm going to be able to use in a blog post next week - just need confirmation it's okay from the National Archives, who produced them.

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  • eatyourgreens by eatyourgreens moderator, admin

    This cartodb table has the numbers from the casualties tags for those diaries: https://the-zooniverse.cartodb.com/viz/316b1462-d767-11e3-8982-0e230854a1cb/table

    Here's a map based on the wounded column in that table. Larger circles = larger casualty figures and values of 0 have been ignored.
    https://the-zooniverse.cartodb.com/viz/316b1462-d767-11e3-8982-0e230854a1cb/map

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  • ral104 by ral104 moderator, scientist

    Thanks, Jim!

    I wonder whether at some point we could combine these graphic representations of the data with geo-rectified maps from the diaries themselves (overlaid onto google earth). I'll look into it.

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  • eatyourgreens by eatyourgreens moderator, admin in response to ral104's comment.

    Hi Rob, here's CartoDB's support section on exporting map data. They mention that they support KML, for displaying on Google Earth. http://developers.cartodb.com/documentation/using-cartodb.html#sec-7

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  • ral104 by ral104 moderator, scientist in response to eatyourgreens's comment.

    That's brilliant - thanks!

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  • eatyourgreens by eatyourgreens moderator, admin

    You can also grab the data files, as geojson, from github.
    https://github.com/ttfnrob/wd3/tree/master/public
    The casualty figures are in casualties.geojson

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  • ral104 by ral104 moderator, scientist

    Thanks - had a word with Steve Hirschorn at TNA about this, and he pointed out that because the data is granular to the nearest town, it wouldn't overlay on the maps of trench positions very well. But I think it would definitely work well with the larger scale sector maps.

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