Operation War Diary

[johndavidswarbrick]

I was alerted to this project by an article in my old College [Goldsmiths] alumni magazine. It looks like a worthwhile and interesting enterprise.

 

See: https://www.operationwardiary.org/#/

 

Dave Swarbrick

[sajackr]

Hi Dave,

I thought so too, until it kept giving me the same two or three to do and it got very tedious. I may be wrong but it appears to be an automatic checker and when a number have been done that match they are then classed as done. If you complete one and select another you'd expect the completed count to rise but it doesn't.

Gave it up as a bad job

Sajackr

[David_Underdown]

the completed tag only rises when a diary's been done right through with five (from memory) different taggers per page.

 

I'm not quite sure what you mean by the first couple of sentences? it shouldn't be possible for anyone to get the same diary again once they've already tagged it.  At one time recently the overall number of diaries still open for tagging within the system had got quite low, but there should have been a fresh batch put in recently.

[sajackr]

David,

 

Could it have been I never "Signed Up". I used to follow the link select a diary and start tagging hence the reason I kept getting the same pages?

 

Sajackr 

[David_Underdown]

Can't remember exactly how it works then - you may even just have been getting the tutorial pages

[jonbem]

Can you pick a regiment/unit or whatever to work through?

Could be helpful in family tracing?

 

Jon

[John(txic)]

Not really, Jonbem - you get a pick-list of at least 20 Diaries to work on, so it's pot-luck!

[Keith_history_buff]

As March 2019 plods on, we soon come to the end of the financial year of the centenary.

I do recall a flurry of publicity about Operation War Diary at its launch, but have not heard a peep since. 

Is this ongoing? Has it completed?

[David_Underdown]

Still going and has processed quite a good percentage of the Western Front diaries.  There's an issue at the moment in that Zooniverse has moved most projects to a new platform an the old one will be shutting down at some point.  Dealing with the output data has sometimes been harder than anticipated, but there's also research ongoing with academic partners on that side of things eg https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/blog/data-visualisation-first-world-war-diaries/

[charlie962]

David, you indicated previously on another thread that an early view of some of the raw data (as at a couple of years ago ?) was available but didn't know if and when an update may follow; do you have any further news on this specific item, please?

 

I don't pretend to understand all that is on your link to the discovery blog but presume it is something that is going to take a while to develope and in the meantime the ability to know that a name appears in a diary on a specific date is already going to be an incredibly useful tool to us GWF members of the public. Like other users of genealogy sites we are well used to the problems of omissions and transcription errors, inevitably part of the trade-off.

 

This from the blog:

"Our aim is to provide an intriguing and engaging experience for users, whether they are members of the public or researchers from the humanities, digital humanities or data science. "

 

Thanks,

Charlie

[David_Underdown]

There's some early name lists here https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BxfXwWCjrmUMamZ5RTVyQVpXcWM - but these haven't been updated since 2016.

 

You can get at the raw tag data here too http://wd3.herokuapp.com/public - again I'm not sure if this is completely up-to-date, but you can see which individual diaries are included on this version.