Mia Ridge (Trinity College Dublin) has written an update on the project, “In their own words: linking lived experiences of the First World War,” as part of her CENDARI Visiting Research Fellowship. In addition to discussing the potential of crowdsourcing transcriptions, Ridge post helps to “figure out the issues researchers face and the variations in available resources.”
If there aren’t already any structured data sources for military hierarchies in WWI, do I have to make one? And if so, how? The idea would be to turn prose descriptions like this Australian War Memorial history of the 27th AIF Battalion, this order of battle of the 2nd Australian Division and any other suitable sources into structured data. I can see some ways it might be possible to crowdsource the task, but it’s a big task. But it’s worth it – providing a service that lets people look up which higher military units, places. activities and campaigns a particular battalion/regiment/ship was linked to at a given time would be a good legacy for my research.
Towards this end, Ridge calls for input and feedback on the project, pointing potential advisors to a shared GoogleDoc.
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