Exploring new ways of visualising The National Archives' First World War diaries

• by David_Underdown moderator

  That's the title of today's post on The National Archives' blog https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/blog/data-visualisation-first-world-war-diaries/ looking at some of the experimentation with ways of using the data output from this project

  Posted July 3, 2018 8:33 AM

• by marie.eklidvirginmedia.com

  Interesting Article.

  Posted July 3, 2018 1:42 PM

• by cyngast moderator

  Thanks for posting this, David. It's great to see what's happening with all this data we're all generating.

  I find it interesting that they chose to use post-war movement through Belgium as their prototype. From my point of view, those movements are the most difficult to tag accurately because so many places as recorded in the diaries don't match up to Google maps. I wonder if they were deliberately working with the most difficult data.

  Posted July 3, 2018 2:55 PM

• by sdorman120

  As with any data gathering or data coding exercise it is a pointless activity unless the information that comes out can be accessed and studied by as wide an audience as possible. Hopefully, this type of visualisation (perhaps as well as tabular formatted datasets) for different elements of the OWD exercise will be made available sooner rather than later via the NA or IWM websites.

  Posted July 3, 2018 3:49 PM

• by eatyourgreens moderator, admin

  CSV files containing the tag data for completed diaries can be downloaded, if those are of any use.
  http://wd3.herokuapp.com/public

  Posted July 11, 2018 11:23 AM

• by cyngast moderator in response to eatyourgreens's comment.

  Really amazing to see our work all organized!

  I do have a question: Why do some of the dates appear as just a row of hashtags? For instance, if you open the second unit on the list, it seems the dates for each month appear up to about the 9th and after that they are just hashtags until the next month starts.

  Posted July 11, 2018 8:55 PM

• by ral104 moderator, scientist

  I haven't got the file open, but I imagine you just need to adjust the size of the column (if you've opened it in a spreadsheet programme).

  Posted July 11, 2018 9:39 PM

• by David_Underdown moderator

  Yes, that's the standard way Excel indicates it can't show a whole date or number. Just double-click on the column boundary (where it says A, B, C etc as column headings) and it should aoutmatically expand to an appropriate width and show all the dates.

  Posted July 12, 2018 12:53 PM

• by cyngast moderator

  Thanks, David. I don't use Excel very often.

  Posted July 12, 2018 1:22 PM

• by sdorman120 in response to eatyourgreens's comment.

  Thanks for that info, I didn't realise that these sets of data were available.

  Posted July 15, 2018 1:53 PM