Investigations of a Dog

I’ve just been playing around with the new “My Maps” feature on Google Maps. There are lots of other things I should be doing, but when I saw this post at Mercurius Politicus I just had to try it for myself. So I got out a trench map and came up with this map showing where my great-grandfather was captured by the Germans in December 1916 (I wrote about that in more detail here and here). We’re lucky that the incident was recorded in enough detail to reconstruct it reasonably well. It’s impossible to say exactly where the fight took place, but from the battalion war diary we can narrow it down to a relatively small area (the stretch of road highlighted in green on the map).

My Maps is obviously a very exciting development. It means that anyone can create custom maps with a few clicks rather than having to learn the Google Maps API. It took me less than an hour to make the map. The interface is so intuitive I didn’t need any instructions, I just got on with it. Most of the time was spent trying to trace the trench lines more or less correctly. It was easy for the Germans because their front line is still visible on the satellite photo, and the Z redoubt is a nice distinctive feature. The British trenches were more difficult because they don’t seem to coincide with any visible features. The lines I’ve drawn are only approximate and don’t capture all the twists and turns of the trenches but they give a reasonably good impression of the position.

One improvement that I’d like to see is the ability to place a grid over the map, move it, and change the size of the squares. That would help with tracing lines which don’t follow present day features visible on the map. It’s possible to do this with the line drawing tool but it’s a bit tricky. An automatic grid would make life much easier. Also a tool for measuring distances would be very useful – I found myself holding a ruler up to the screen! – and more fine control over scaling so that it’s easier to get the scale to coincide with a paper map. What would be really good is if someone made a map which overlaid the entire trench map grid onto France and Flanders…

I’m trying to get some “proper” English Civil War related work done this week, but at the weekend I did some more First World War stuff. In April I posted about World War I on Flickr, when I uploaded my great-grandfather’s photos from Cottbus PoW camp. Now I’ve added his letters, and another photo which I got from ebay. Although he isn’t on it, it was taken in the theatre at Cottbus and one of the men has the same “Bing Bong Boys” navy outfit:

I’ve now put each letter/postcard in its own set to make the link between the front and back of the same document more explicit. The sets are then arranged into collections. Some people on the Great War Forum were able to help me locate Cottbus Camp No. I, so now most of the photos have been placed on the map.

I also discovered that another Wenham brother might have died in the Great War. I don’t know why I hadn’t ever looked for Wenhams on CWGC before, but I found a Charles Wenham who could well be one of William’s brothers. Some of the evidence is circumstantial and I need to do more digging to be sure, but the epistemic probabilities are quite high. So far it looks like he joined 10th Lincolnshire Regt (Grimsby Chums), served overseas, was wounded and sent back to England but died of his wounds. Unlike the soldiers who died overseas, his body was brought home and buried in Cleethorpes cemetery. Again the Great War Forum has been a great help, and you can see more details on this thread.

And with regard to the other World War, I played some more of Brothers In Arms: Earned In Blood. I was still a bit curious about the post-Hill 30 storyline, but so far it’s been quite boring, and I gave up when I got into a silly tank level that’s suspiciously similar to the silly tank level in Road To Hill 30 that I complained about before. But there are more trees this time…

It’s been a long time since I wrote anything about my First World War digitization projects, but I now have some progress to report: today I published an interim version of Sandall’s History of 5th Lincolnshire Regiment. It’s still a work in progress, and there’s a lot more to be done, but you can see it here. It’s just a plain HTML version (and not strictly valid HTML), and the whole text is on one page (at least it makes it easy to search the whole text with your browser’s Find feature!), there’s no name linkage yet, no page images online, and no mechanism for submitting corrections. However, even in this form it should be useful to people who are researching the battalion and can’t get hold of the original book. More details on what I’ve done and how I’ve done it below.

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Last night I went to see Stewart Lee, who was recently voted the 41st best stand-up comedian ever. Little did he know that in the audience was the 3rd most popular military history blogger, but anyway. The gig was in Lincoln Drill Hall, now an arts venue but once the home of 4th Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment. 4th Battalion was the Territorial Battalion recruited in the city of Lincoln and the south of the county, and during the First World War it formed part of 138th Brigade along with 5th Battalion (my great-grandfather’s battalion, recruited in the north of the county) and the two territorial battalions of the Leicestershire Regiment.

Although I connected drill halls with the Territorial Force, I wasn’t sure before whether this was the hall that 4th Lincs used during the First World War. But in what’s now the bar of the venue I saw a large stone memorial to the glorious dead of 4th Battalion. It’s described on the National Inventory of War Memorials but I can’t find a photo of it online. The thing that most struck me was the carving of the regimental cap badge on the top of the plaque: a sphinx sitting on a plinth bearing the word “EGYPT”, over a scroll bearing the name of the regiment. It was the “EGYPT” that I found surprising in this context. But why? Isn’t that exactly what you’d expect to find on a Lincolnshire Regiment badge?

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I nearly called this post “the Great War on Flickr” but that could easily have been misunderstood…

It’s really about using the photo hosting site Flickr for photos and other documents from the First World War. I’ve uploaded some photos of my great-grandfather here as an experiment in digital history. Flickr is much more than just an image hosting service. I’ve been trying out some of its advanced features to see how useful they can be to digital historians, and what the limitations might be.

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Having proofread and corrected the digital text captured from Sandall’s history of 1/5th Lincolnshire (corrected to an adequate standard anyway — I can’t claim that it’s perfect), I was ready to start inserting XML tags. The first phase of markup involves the use of TEI XML tags to describe the basic structure of the text. There was nothing too difficult here, and a lot of it could be done automatically rather than reading through the text and manually inserting tags at every feature. Before I started I had to decide which tags to use and where to use them, then make sure I applied them consistently. This post gives more details of the tags I used, what I used them for, and how I got them into the text with minimal effort.

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In my last project update I described how I used FineReader to OCR the text of Sandall’s History of 5th Lincolnshire Regiment. Since then I’ve manually proofread the text and inserted some basic XML markup. Proofing and basic tagging have given me a more detailed understanding of the text and the features in it, and I’ve been noting potential issues as I go. I’ll post more about how I’m using XML later, but this post is a more detailed description of the process of proofreading.

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Another project update. Things have been slightly delayed because I have an article to rewrite (which means I’m slightly closer to getting published) but I’ve still been making some progress. This weekend I’ll be proofreading Sandall’s book. When that’s done I’ll be able to export the text and start tagging it with XML. But first I’ve been looking through the TEI guidelines, picking out the tags I think I’ll need, and working out how I think I’m going to use them. This is crucial because there are often different ways to mark up the same text and it’s important to be consistent. It’s also important to only apply tags which will actually be useful to users, because there’s an awful lot of potential to waste time marking up text in microscopic detail that no-one has any use for. As I do the proofreading I’ll also be looking at the structure of the text and the features in it that will need marking up, and revising the provisional tagging guidelines if necessary. Once I’m happy with the tag set and the guidelines for using them I’ll post it all (but be warned: it won’t be very interesting!). Even then I’m expecting to find some unexpected situations once I start trying to insert the tags.

Now that I’ve got all the theoretical agonising out of the way, I can actually do something about digitizing the text. This week I’m carrying out OCR and proofreading on the text of Sandall’s History of 5th Battalion the Lincolnshire Regiment. As soon as I got to work I encountered issues that I hadn’t thought of, and found that subjective decisions had to be made even earlier than I’d anticipated. This just shows that the only way to learn how to do something is to do it.

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This is a progress report on the First World War digitization projects I outlined previously in my post on planning.

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