collaborative histories and community contributed collections: reappraising world war i

Collaborative histories and community contributed collections:

reappraising World War I

Kate Lindsay, Manager for Engagement and DiscoveryLearning Technologies Group, University of Oxford

@ktdigital | @ww1c | @ww1lit

1. The Memory of World War I2. Engaging communities to transform learning 3. Exploring knowledge in new and open ways4. New directions in learning and blurring of

‘Academic’

Images Copyright: Imperial War Museum, licensed to the First World War Poetry Digital Archive under the JISC Model Licence.

Images: National Library of Scotland (CC BY-NC-SA), Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain), Wellcome Images (CC BY-NC-SA), Library of Congress (Public Domain).

The commemoration provides the opportunity for museums, galleries, archives, libraries, the creative industries, universities, colleges and schools to work together to provide a user experience made possible through innovative digital technologies that is as personal, rich and vivid as it is focused; an experience that offers the user the ability to contextualise their own understanding and customise resources in line with their own learning and research priorities. – Statement of Intent.JISC WW1 Commemoration Programme.

The Great War Archive

In 2008 the University of Oxford used the general public to build on a freely-available, online archive of the manuscripts of many of the British poets from the First World War They contributed to a community collection

The Great War Archive

In 2008 the University of Oxford used the general public to build on a freely-available, online archive of the manuscripts of many of the British poets from the First World War They contributed to a community collection

Simple online submissions process

Contributors asked to agree to basic terms & conditions of the license Contributors enter basic metadata Offered a large open ‘notes’ field for further information or anecdotes

An admin system allowed reviewers to: check items for their validity; correct or add to the metadata; flag items of particular interest/value

Flickr: No formal submission/metadata

A future project might enhance metadata?Comments can be facile or funny and can sometimes be incredibly informative

Resource Library

• Links to existing high quality OER on the World Wide Web

• Images, Video, Audio, E-Books, Web Sites, Blogs etc.

• Global OER Widgets• Surface ‘Popular’ resources• Links to the ‘big’ WW1 OER

collections

Image: Library of Congress, WW1 Poster Archive. Public Domain.

Scholarly Blog

• Experts from across a range of disciplines.

• New ideas, unrefined thoughts, reviews, republish previous work.

• Surface existing open materials.• No style guide and requires no

specific referencing format.

Image: Library of Congress, WW1 Poster Archive. Public Domain.

Cooking up OER and the open ‘problem’.

• Lack of relevant digitised material under an open-license.

• Time-consuming rights negotiations.

• Increase in open-literacy.• Encourage institutions to openly

license their content.

Image: Library of Congress, WW1 Poster Archive. Public Domain.

Academic writing or writing by an Academic?

• Who holds the knowledge?• Does technology blur the

boundaries between the academic author and the knowledgeable amateur?

Image: Library of Congress, WW1 Poster Archive. Public Domain.

@Arras95: Contribute, Collaborate, Commemorate

• Twitter campaign between 9th April and 16th May 2012.

• Surface a key, but lesser taught, turning point of the War.

• Increase the visibility of existing open content around this one focal point

• Crowdsource an archive of knowledge about the event.

an example of new digital storytelling…

temporally structured archival blogging…

moving us forward in the way we look at our particular corner of history…

Oxford’s precursor to tweeting the WW1 Centenary…

It is now cluttered and confused, not helped by tweets commemorating the fallen; not I feel the purpose of the exercise.

One possible advantage of the brevity imposed by the 140 char limit, and the disjointed nature of things that some people have mentioned: is that it gives some impression of the fragmentary, and sometimes incorrect, nature of the reports being received on the way up the chain of command.

A knitted Battle of Arras Collection

• 2545 Tweets• 9 new articles• 132 OERs

Image: Library of Congress, WW1 Poster Archive. Public Domain.

@patlockley

Transforming learning via new digital content, open licences, and critical commentary from within and outside the academy is fundamental to more extensive engagement with World War I.

Digitaltechnology can exploit popular enthusiasm to encourage thought, rather than to enforce the “correct” opinion.

But will this really move us beyond the trenches?

www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1litwww.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwawww.europeana1914-1918.euww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk

@WW1C | @WW1Lit@KTDigital