JISC

This collection is now live at http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit

Building on the success of Oxford's Wilfred Owen archive, this multimedia digital archive will contain images, text, audio and video of primary material from five other major British poets of the First World War.

The collection will bring together highly valued material, currently dispersed across the UK and the US, on the poets Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Roland Leighton.

Among the 2,000 digital images and 200 multimedia objects to be opened up to the public are drafts of Robert Graves's poems for Over the Brazier and Fairies and Fusiliers, as well as an important extract from Goodbye to All That and drafts of Edward Thomas's war poems and diary.

The project

There can be no doubt about the widespread popularity of war poetry, and first world war poetry in particular, in literature and history courses across the country. It is taught in most universities, FE colleges and, of course, at school level. It also continues to attract considerable public attention due to the cultural importance of the period for modern day Britain, and the way it shaped attitudes to warfare. The original Wilfred Owen archive has attracted over 1.2 million hits and is referenced by teachers and researchers worldwide. This project will open up access to five other British poets of the first world war to build on that interest.

The multimedia online database of primary source material (manuscripts of poems, letters, diaries, etc) plus contextual information (images, audio and film material from the ImperialWarMuseum) will be browseable and searchable, and freely available online. The archive will also include instructional material for students to train them in editorial and research skills using primary source material. Users will be able to create their own annotated trails through the archive for others to use, and to submit new digital material to the Great War Archive. 

This project has been awarded more funding by JISC to further develop the collections through the Enriching the First World War Poetry Digital Archive project, as part of the Enriching Digital Resources strand of the Digitisation programme. 

The content

The collection will consist of around 2,000 digital images (mainly of rare primary source material for the study of literature, plus 200 multimedia objects for contextual information), in its initial phase prior to the launch of the Great War Archive. Included are:

Edward Thomas: drafts of all his war poems and war diary, and a selection of letters and prose articles.

Roland Leighton: war poems and letters, plus his war diary. Leighton’s material is very hard to obtain in printed form. c. 100 items, all digital images.

Isaac Rosenberg: drafts of his poems and letters written during active service. c. 800 items, all digital images.

Robert Graves: drafts of his poems for Over the Brazier and Fairies and Fusiliers, as well as an important extract from Goodbye to All That. c. 100 items, all digital images.

Contextual material: photographs, audio, and film material from the ImperialWarMuseum with particular emphasis on Women in War, AHDS Visual Arts, military hospitals, to supplement existing collections. Trench newspapers containing soldier poetry (relatively unknown) will also be included. c. 400 items. c. 200 digital images, 100 audio clips, 100 video clips.

Full text of poems: an online corpora of the full-texts of the poems contained in the collection.

The process

Images will be captured wherever possible at 24-bit colour 600dpi resolution (for archiving only), and stored as uncompressed TIFFs. For video and audio we will be using the Quicktime Codec for delivery, but stored as MPEG4. For the audio we will be using Quicktime again, but storing as MP3 files (and possibly FLAC). Audio and video will be offered for download. We will provide transcripts of the audio material and text descriptions of the video (all silent) to assist accessibility. Due to the fact that we are dealing with only 2,000 images each file will be checked on a one-to-one resolution to ensure completeness of collection, legibility, correct cropping and rotation.

The future

The development of the Community Collection will allow remote contributions of digital objects to the collection, thus releasing material which up to now has been stored by individuals inaccessible to scholars. Because of the chronological proximity of the first world war, many people hold personal items to do with the war that they would be interested in sharing via a straightforward Creative Commons licence. The focus will be primarily on the poetry from the war (eg poems written by soldiers hitherto unpublished), and all submissions will require basic metadata, copyright clearance, be limited in file size, and will be vetted before release. We will also invite users to submit digital objects to increase the contextual information (eg photographs from the period, postcards, letters; and typed memoirs). We see this as a powerful means of building the archive and making use of the Internet’s ability to tap into amateur digitisation and bring together unknown collections.

The Final Report

Download the Final Report (pdf)

The Project Plan

Download the project plan to find out more about the detail of the project.

Lead site: University of Oxford