World War I soldiers dug into trenches in Europe are among the most powerful and pervasive images of the 1914-18 war, but a major crowdsourcing project has revealed that most soldiers actually spent less than half their time at the front.
Operation War Diary is being organized by Goldsmiths, University of London and currently involves the contributions of some 27,000 volunteers who have been ploughing through soldiers’ war diaries to plug in historical gaps.
The diaries were digitized and are available online so people can study them at their leisure whenever they have a spare few moments. There are approximately 1.5 million pages of material.
Valuable Information
To help reveal more information about how the war was fought on the front line, volunteers are asked to tag any data they find among the diary pages, such as person, place or activity. This will allow historians to glean such information as what happened to a particular unit, the number of casualties they suffered and what conditions were within a specific location.
Among the key findings so far of the crowdsourcing research are:
You Can Participate Too!
There are still a lot of pages to go through, and volunteers who wish to take part in Operation War Diary can do so by visiting the project’s website at www.operationwardiary.org.