Kate Lindsay has been
the project manager of the
First World War Poetry
Digital Archive since funding
was received in 2007.
Kate’s specialist interests
include humanities computing,
community-led digitisation,
Web 2.0 and social media
technology. She has published
on hypertext literature
and electronic publishing.
Dr Stuart D Lee is the Director
of Oxford University’s
Computing Systems and
Services and is also a member
of the English Faculty.
He teaches medieval literature,
poetry of WW1 and electronic
publishing. He has published
on e-learning, digital libraries,
medieval literature and the
works of Tolkien. He was project
director for the First World War
Poetry Digital Archive and,
in 2009, received a HEA
National Teaching Fellowship.
Launched to mark the 90th Anniversary of Armistice on 11 November 2008, The First World War Poetry Digital Archive promises to be one of the richest resources on the web to support the teaching and study of literature that emanated from the First World War. The story begins early. In 1996–1998 the University of Oxford led a pioneering digitisation project that photographed the manuscripts, letters and war records of the poet Wilfred Owen. These were then released freely onto the web with additional online tutorials and tools for researchers. An influential project that was cited regularly in print and online publications, it boasted the first web-based tutorial to teach English literature, centred on the poet Isaac Rosenberg and his poem ’Break of Day in the Trenches’. Building upon its success, in 2007 Oxford received further funding of £400,000 from the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to expand the archive’s content by adding collections of other poets and to embed these firmly within scholarly practices.
The expansion of the archive was not an easy task to address. Thousands of poems were written during the First World War. The historian Catherine Reilly has counted a total of 2,225 published poets between 1914 and 1918 in Britain alone (Todman, 2005: 153). When one takes into account retrospective verse written after the war then this is just the tip of the iceberg. To navigate this mass we have traditionally encountered First World War poetry through anthologies (Hibberd, 2008: 107), the most frequently found poets now constituting the canon of the genre. These ’greatest’, and most ’essential’ poets are now staple inclusions on literature syllabi across the educational landscape. In its selection of material, the archive did not seek to readdress the canon, nor did it consciously seek to define what was ’worth’ making available. Selection was primarily based on user demand and archival collections that were available for digitisation, with supporting literary estates. Collections exist for the soldier poets Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, Edmund Blunden and David Jones. A further category was also touched upon with the inclusion of Vera Brittain, that of poetry written by those who experienced the war not through combat, but from home, through auxiliary work (Brittain was a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse) and through the pain of losing loved ones. The inclusion of her fiancé Roland Leighton (who also wrote a small number of poems), provides a meaningful insight into combat versus non-combat experiences of war, and the challenges this posed within relationships.
The collections themselves consist of primary source material relating to the poets. This consists mainly of images of poetical manuscript variants written during the war, and occasionally retrospective verse where the poet had survived and attempted to communicate their experience. This is supported by a full-text corpora of the published versions of the poems. The archive is accessible to all, completely free of charge. All 12,000 items that are made available from its pages can be downloaded and used by researchers, lecturers, teachers and students to support teaching and expand learning in creative and innovative ways.
The value of viewing manuscripts is perhaps highlighted most vividly when browsing those of Isaac Rosenberg. As a private who lived for three years in the trenches on the Western Front among the carnage, his writing exists on scraps of YMCA paper that have become fragile with time, written in smudged pencil, torn and marred with water and mud. The manuscripts themselves are stained with a historical context that one simply cannot divorce from the verses it overlays.
Context is an ’inescapable impingement’ on the poetry of the First World War (Silken, 1972). Owen, in his handwritten preface to his planned first collected edition wrote – ’My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity’ – highlighting that one needs to understand the context that the poetry grew from to read it effectively and also that one can learn a little about the context through reading the poetry. Just like the mud stains on Rosenberg’s poetical works, literature and circumstance overlay each other and, recognising this, the online archive also supplies a rich array of additional contextual material.
Weaving among the poetry manuscripts and fragments are selections of letters, diary extracts, photographs and the service records of the poets. We can read the letters that Graves sent to Sassoon from a field hospital describing his experience of being reported dead in the Battle of the Somme. We can study the correspondences of Rosenberg to Gordon Bottomly on suggested edits to his poetry. There is Owen’s letter to his mother from the ’smoky cellar’, his last station before he was killed in battle. Poems were often sent home in letters, the correspondence a harrowing reminder of the conditions that they were written in. In a similar vein, we can see the concaved pages of Thomas’s war diary disfigured by the shell blast that took his life, Jones’s extensive notes for ’In Parenthesis’, the anguished diary entries of Brittain on the death of her fiancé and the annotated pages from the scrapbook Edmund Blunden compiled after the war to try and comprehend and formalise the experiences he underwent on the Western Front.
With the latter the family have said that the scrapbook was the beginnings of an annotated version of ’Undertones of War’, and it seems fit that in the online archive Blunden’s poetry, and selected extracts from the book, lie alongside items of history and memory he himself was collecting.
An extract from a early manuscript variant of 'Dulce et Decorum Est' (1917/1918)
by Wilfred Owen. © The British Library / The Wilfred Owen Literary Estate
Alongside the collections that relate specifically to the poets we have a rich array of contextual material drawn from the Imperial War Museum and Oxford’s John Johnson Collection, which further expands upon the key physical, emotional and mental experiences of the war that are the focus of many of the poems. Photographs, audio and video footage, as well as publications of war ,such as trench papers and journals, can be easily browsed and searched. There is also a collection of over 6,500 items originating from the war, submitted by the general public (The Great War Archive). This collection of letters, postcards, photographs, autograph books, poetry, memorabilia and much more provides alternative literatures and gives a stage to the ’silent voices’ of the war (Noakes: 2006). What might this add to the study of literature? Moving back to Owen’s ’Dulce et Decorum Est’, the student who is perhaps unfamiliar with the history of the First World War can easily explore the archive to discover a vast range of resources to provide a context to the poem. A simple search of ’gas’ reveals photographs taken on the Western Front, video footage of gas drills and audio clips of veterans describing the horrors of the introduction of chemical warfare. The Great War Archive reveals a multitude of stories of men who suffered gas attacks, their lives now remembered by a series of mementos that have been preserved by their families. The irony of Owen’s poem is illustrated with context, why ’guttering’ was chosen becomes clear.
Pencil draft with opening lines related to 'Daughters of War' by Isaac
Rosenberg (1916/1917). On printed Salvation Army paper, folded in 8 and torn
and stained with mud.
© The Imperial War Museum,
Department of Documents / The Isaac Rosenberg Literary Estate
The archival holdings provide a sea of material to capture minds, facilitate learning and provide new avenues of investigation. But, as with any archive, it can sometimes be a daunting task to navigate such a wealth of data. Working closely with lecturers and teachers of First World War Literature and related studies (e.g. history, women’s studies etc), the archive also provides a range of supporting educational materials for both higher and compulsory education. A series of online tutorials provide introductions to topics such as close reading (via Rosenberg’s ’Break of Day in the Trenches’), manuscript studies and concepts of remembrance. Each tutorial includes a degree of interactivity, either requiring the student to record their thoughts or engage in online quizzes to test knowledge or question prejudices. Downloadable resource packs are available for teachers, consisting of a selection of images, adaptable PowerPoints and teachers‘ notes revolving around a particular theme. In addition, a series of podcasts of interviews with key commentators on the First World War, recordings of relevant conferences and talks, short educational movies and audio tours can all be downloaded and played on any mobile device.
Moving away from the ’off the shelf’ resources, the site makes use of freely available web-based tools to explore relationships that were perhaps previously hidden or difficult to navigate. In a tutorial on text analysis, the student is introduced to simple tools that enable them to compare the language used by the poets. The corpora of each poet is made available as full text files that can be downloaded and uploaded to tools like ’Wordle’. This produces tag clouds which instantly reveal, for example, similarities in religious language and use of body imagery between the poets, providing a platform upon which students can begin to identify common themes and intertextualities. Likewise, the user can also plot the key events, letters and manuscripts for each poet onto an interactive timeline which overlays the key events of the First World War, again providing an interesting insight into the relationship of literature and context. Interactive mind maps on the relationships between the poets and other luminaries of the time can be launched in the freely available VUE software, which can also be used to graphically map relationships between concepts, ideas and digital content. The path creation tool gives users the means to create their own annotated trail through the archival resources. This allows you to add notes, pose questions and link to other resources on the Web and facilitates the creation of simple online tutorials, presentations and exhibitions which can then be made available to students or, alternatively, used by students themselves to create and share their own paths.
Online, the poetry becomes edgeless. No longer confined by the covers of the printed anthology, intermingled with alternative readings and historical context, and supported by carefully designed non-didactic educational materials, it comes alive. The archive has been designed to inspire both educators, researchers and students by offering rich, engaging content and the tools to interact with it.
Further Information
The First World War Poetry Digital Archive [Online] www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit
The JISC Digitisation Programme [Online] www.jisc.ac.uk/digitisation
The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) Mind-mapping software http://vue.tufts.edu/
Wordle [Online] www.wordle.net/
References
Hibberd, D. (2008) ’Anthologies of the Great War: Mirrors of Change’, in Howard, M. (ed.) A Part of History: Aspects of the British Experience of the First World War. London: Continuum.
Silken, J. (1972) Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War. London: Oxford University Press.
Todman, D. (2005) The Great War: Myth and Memory. London: Continuum.
