Of war, cartoons, eggs, and more…
Cartoons are a very effective medium not only to comment on the social, political and historical events of our times but also for their power to stay in people’s hearts forever, thus recalling a particular event.
One of the many contributors to the Great War Archive, part of the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, which launches today, submitted a Punch cartoon to the site with the comment:
My interest in the First World War originated from chatting to my two grandfathers […] However, my early reading about the war centred around old copies of Punch magazine, especially the cartoons. This is my favourite.
The same anxiety about eggs, diet and culinary habits during the First World War is also immortalised by Carl Giles in a cartoon published in the Sunday Express on Armistice Day on 11 Nov 1984 and now part of the recently launched British Cartoon Archive.
The caption reads: “We didn’t have all this Cordon Bleu when I was your batman in the last lot - I used to boil your eggs in our ‘ot tea.”
Both the First World War Poetry Digital Archive and the British Cartoons Archive are projects funded under the JISC Digitisation programme and make freely accessible thousands of digital images, texts, and audio-visual material for use in teaching, learning, and research.
The First World War Poetry Digital Archive focuses on resources on the major poets of the period and also includes the Great War Archive, a collections of digital objects relating to the First World War submitted by the general public.
The British Cartoons Archive web site is dedicated to the history of British cartooning over the last two hundred years. It holds more than 130,000 original editorial, socio-political, and pocket cartoons, supported by large collections of comic strips, newspaper cuttings, books and magazines.
Early usage of the John Johnson Collection
The second release of the JISC-funded John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera, a collaboration between the Bodleian Library and ProQuest, is now available at http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.co.uk and http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.com.
The project reported that “usage Statistics for the John Johnson Collection resource during the first two months since the launch (March 2008) have been extremely encouraging […] The number of sessions in this period is roughly a quarter (23%) that of the total number of sessions within UK institutions of one of ProQuest’s leading humanities databases during the same period.”
The new release includes additional content in the five categories of material represented in the collection - Entertainment, the Booktrade, Popular Prints, Crimes, Murders and Executions and Advertising - as well as improved search screens.
For example, the new Crimes, Murders and Executions category-specific search screen includes additional fields for Criminal, Victim and Crime, as well as a set of checkboxes that allow the user to restrict searches according to the sentence passed. This makes it easy to find ephemera relating to a particular crime, for example highway robbery or sedition, or particular forms of punishment, such as the death penalty.
In this podcast interview, David Tomkins, Project Manager at the Bodleian and Peter White, Project Manager at ProQuest, talk about what ephemera is, what makes the John Johnson Collection special, their partnership and the challenges around digitising ephemera.
Communities and online collections
The Great War Archive web site, part of the JISC-funded First World War Poetry Digital Archive project, is a powerful example of how communities can be galvanised in the creation of a unique and poignant online resource for the benefit of the wider public.
An article on the Times Higher Education Supplement “From no man’s land to a people’s memorial” reported on how thousands of people contributed their “digital memories” of WW1 to the web site by uploading their own scans of items such as diary extracts, images and even matchboxes.
Although the submission period has now closed, people can still upload their material on the project’s Flickr group, details of which are on the Great War Archive web site.
In a podcast recorded earlier this year, before the launch of the Great War Archive, Kate Lindsay, Project Manager for the First World War Poetry Digital Archive discusses this exciting development, along with the other unique features of the collection.
Is academia ready for Web 2.0?
As part of its development, the Pre-Raphaelite Resource digitisation project recently commissioned an audience research study to consult users about whether the inclusion of Web 2.0 features on a resource of this type would be useful or important to the education community. The report indicated that:
“there is some readiness among the education community for Web 2.0 technologies but only in the context of academia as a status-conscious, competitive environment. Whilst there are clear benefits to be achieved from providing teachers and students with the opportunity to share ideas in the context of stimulus artefacts, many hold reservations about ‘giving away’ their intellectual property.”
Some interesting points to note:
• Social networking features are perceived by both HE students and lecturers as primarily for pleasure rather than for work, although for younger students, the boundaries between work and life are increasingly blurred
• Content is still king: to be a truly useful research tool, students and lecturers need to know that a resource has been created for them and has scholarly merit, and reliable and relevant content
• Wikipedia was singled out by both FE and HE interviewees as being particularly unreliable, and yet highly popular;
• The features most associated with a Web 2.0 approach (rate, comment, upload, blog and send to friend) were commonly described with reference to social networking or e-commerce sites and were largely considered non-academic and therefore inappropriate for the Pre-Raphaelite online resource.
The study was carried out by Illumina Digital.
Read the Pre-Raphaelite Resource project: Audience Research Report;
Appendix 1; Appendix 2; Appendix 3; Appendix 4; Appendix 5
“Did Bob’s Pills cure gout?”
If we make it, they might come… but it is a fact that any newly launched digital collection has to compete for attention with a huge amount of material already available on the web. Resource creators, therefore, have the challenging task of devising ways in which to interest and engage potential users.
Projects within the JISC digitisation programme recently attended a workshop which focused on how best to engage users with digital resources, the challenges this poses but also the many possibilities offered by online collections to be exploited in an interdisciplinary way.
Workshop leaders presented a framework for e-learning engagement, the Digital Artefacts for Learner engagement (DiAL-e Framework), that provides guidance on different approaches, or learning designs, that one can adopt to engage users with the resources.
Part of the workshop also explored, through group work, the value of working across collections in an interdisciplinary way. Groups made up of representatives of different digitisation projects were assigned the task to devise a question for students that would allow them to research a topic by consulting material available from their different collections.
One group, made up by staff from the John Johnson collection of Electronic Ephemera, British Newspapers and 19th Century Pamphlets projects, came up with the fictitious question, “Did Bob’s Pills cure gout?”.
As the group spokesperson explained, “only by searching to and fro between all three of the resources represented by our group, could a user discover the real story of ‘Bob’s Pills’ - the early promise (advertising testimonials - ‘Miraculous!’), the scandal (newspaper reports of nasty side effects) and the dodgy methods employed by its powerful parent company ‘Robert’s Medicines’ to try and retain its credibility (using editorial clout to influence debate in medical pamphlets).”
Finding the right answer was not the primary aim of the exercise, but far more important was the interesting journey of discovery that this process led to.
The Murder of Jean Alexander (Kilmarnock, 1807)
One of the great things about digitising multiple collections is it allows you to build connections between different resources. Here’s a straightforward example
The John Johnson Collection of Electronic Ephemera has a news-sheet (dated 14 Nov 1807) recounting the murder of two women in the town of Kilmarnock, on the west coast of Scotland. It calls this a “shocking murder and robbery” a “deed of darkness“.
By 19th November 1807, the news had wound its way to London, where it found itself in the Morning Chronicle (part of the British Library newspaper digitisation)
The editor of Morning Chronicle had probably been sent the Edinburgh news-sheet. Several of the phrases that appear in the earlier news-sheet (e.g “every possible exertion used to discover and apprehend them“) appear almost replicated in the newspaper)
Public-private partnership delivers thousands of images for free
Thanks to a public-private partnership between the Bodleian Library and ProQuest, thousands of images from one of the world’s most important collections of printed ephemera are being made freely available to all UK universities, further education institutions, schools and public libraries.
The John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera, part of the JISC Phase Two Digitisation Programme, is now available at http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.co.uk and http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.com.
This first release comprises more than 6,300 images, drawn from the five key areas that will eventually be covered in the final collection for a total of about 150,000 images, including theatrical ephemera from the 19th Century Entertainment category, the Booktrade, Popular Prints, Advertising and material on Crimes, Murders and Executions.
The web site provides information on how to access the collection through your institution or public library.
Podcast: How digitisation can bring a nation’s heritage to the desktops of all
One of the projects in JISC’s digitisation programme, Welsh Journals Online, led by the National Library of Wales, will be adding to a growing body of online materials dedicated to Welsh culture, history and language.
In this podcast, director of the project Arwel Jones talks about how digitisation can promote wider efforts to make a nation’s culture and heritage available to all.
The National Library of Wales is playing a leading role in this process through its “Theatre of memory” strategy, which aims to digitise the whole printed output of the Welsh nation, an ambition that can one day become a reality in the context of a small nation.
Contribute your digital memories of WW1
As part of the JISC funded First World War Poetry Digital Archive project, the University of Oxford has launched a web site to allow members of the public to submit digital photographs or transcripts of items they personally hold which are related to the First World War.
The ‘Great War Archive’ site will run for three months (March-May 2008) and aims to collect together artefacts, letters, diaries, poems, stories that have been passed down from generation to generation reflecting the true experience of the First World War but which are now in danger of being lost.
This resource will subsequently be made available free of charge from Armistice Day (11 November 2008) as part of the First World War Poetry Digital Archive web site, which will feature a multimedia collection of primary material from major British poets of the First World War.
For more information on how to submit your digital items, visit the Great War Archive web site.
The above image is taken from a sketch book belonging to Percy Matthews. Matthews trained at the Ramsgate School of Art and during World War I he served on the Western Front as a Private in the Kentish Buffs, and later in Salonika as a Lieutenant in the Middlesex Regiment. It was in Salonika that he produced his remarkable sketches of scenes and characters from military and civilian life. The image was submitted to the Great War Archive by Elizabeth Masterman on behalf of Peter, his son. This, and other sketches, have now been donated to the Imperial War Museum, where they are currently undergoing conservation.
The challenges of “useful” OCR
The National Archive’s digitisation project, British Governance in the 20th century – Cabinet Papers, 1914-1975, has been grappling with issues of “useful” OCR. It might be stating the obvious, but accurate OCR is as useful as the search results it produces.
If OCRd text consistently misspells particularly relevant key words for retrieving certain documents, than the search results against these key words will not always bring up appropriate documents, and will lack in accuracy.
For the National Archives, it was not enough to establish a range of acceptable OCR performance levels purely from a quantitative point of view, eg OCR performance accuracy should not be below 88%. This is because if the remaining 12% of text that is not accurate includes particularly relevant key words for retrieving a certain document that users are likely to search by, the discovery of that document is impeded or made less likely. Eg, if the word “submarine” is particularly relevant to the subject of a document, and it’s consistently misspelt by the OCR software, the likelihood of discovering that document is less than if another, less relevant, word, had been misspelled. So, even matching an established minimum percentage of performance (eg 88%), does not necessarily mean that search results will be accurate or useful.
The National Archives are also adopting a more qualitative approach to run alongside the quantitative one described above. They are concentrating on identifying the most relevant and frequently misspelt “key” words across all of the OCRd documents. They are then planning to run a global “search and replace” to reinstate the correctly spelt words.
Although this will have marginal effect on the overall accuracy ratings, this will increase the usefulness of OCR to the end user.
