"Wilfred and War on the World Wide Web."
The JTAP Virtual Seminars Project
" 'We rulers sitting in this ancient spot
Would wrong our very selves if we forgot
The greatest glory will be theirs who fought,
Who kept this nation in integrity'."
Wilfred Owen - "Smile, Smile, Smile."
Wilfred Owen's fictional excerpt from a newspaper of the time may have been written in a cynical frame-of-mind, but it emphasises the concern for public remembrance and memorial which the great wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries engendered. Recent advances in technology have facilitated the scholars' and the archivists' role in fulfilling this task of guarding the past. Fragmented manuscripts, storm-beaten sculptures, precious texts, and fading photographs can all be converted into digital form to ensure lasting copies of vital historical artefacts are created.
This concern for preservation has just been one of the many impulses to inspire the JTAP (JISC Application Technology Programme) Virtual Seminars Project. Devised primarily by Stuart Lee and Paul Groves of the University of Oxford, the JTAP Virtual Seminars Project has not only created a digital archive of some of the most indispensable evidence of the First World War, but presented it in such a way that it becomes a valuable teaching resource for students, lecturers and researchers of the Great War.
Figure 1 - The JTAP Virtual Seminars Home Page
The site (http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/projects/jtap/) is hosted, without charge, on the World Wide Web, and thus easily accessible to anyone with the requisite Internet connections. Amongst its numerous holdings users can access, for example, Wilfred Owen's original manuscripts, images of weary soldiers resting in muddy trenches, British pamphlet propaganda slating German atrocities, and audio clips of veterans recounting their military experiences.
Thus the JTAP Virtual Seminars Programme makes an enormous difference in terms of the primary source material available in the public domain. Documents once out of reach for reasons of either fragility or distance, and therefore only accessible to the travelling scholar, can now be accessed and used by university lecturers and students, A-Level candidates and an interested general public.
The philosophy of the JTAP programme concerns not only preservation, but the application of such digitised data in the seminar room. Therefore, to complement the large number of accumulated records in the project, there are four tutorials to guide lecturers and students through the evidence, introducing them both to the major themes of the First World War and the various scholarly techniques (both traditional and computer-based) used to interpret such evidence. During the creation of these tutorials Dr. Lee and Mr. Groves were at pains to ensure that they were not being developed to replace lecturers and teachers, but to act as an additional help to those teaching the subject. Technology has been viewed as a supplement rather than a substitute for traditional teaching methods.
With this in mind, each tutorial was designed to cater for a different facet of learning. Thus a traditional approach to the study of literature is still maintained whilst highlighting to students the possibilities that arrive with the application of computer technology. The first seminar, An Introduction to World War One Poetry, does as the title suggests. By creating hyperlinked pages on the major poets in question (Owen, Sassoon, Brooke etc. as well as women's poetry of the war) the students are not only offered an introduction to First World War poetry, but gain an understanding of the how to operate such web-based applications. Commencing from a biography, the relevant set of pages for each poet provide an array of related information; a chronology, a close textual criticism of one particular poem, and links to other poems. For Rupert Brooke, therefore, students can browse over pages on his privileged background, his romantic poetry and read a close study of one of his war sonnets, The Dead.
Having completed this introduction, students can proceed to a second tutorial, entitled Issac Rosenberg's Break of Day in the Trenches. As before, the tutorial was constructed not by allowing technology to supplant existing methods of teaching, but by enhancing them. On commencing, users are proffered Rosenberg's 25-line poem, and asked to comment upon it. Once this has been completed, complementary data is offered - on Rosenberg's life, his poetic influences, and some historical information on the war. Having read what they choose from this data, students can return to the poem and re-interpret the poem in the light of this new information. This time round the poem is also hypermarked; phrases and lines are linked to footnotes to give further information of the phrase in question.
The third and fourth tutorials provide a more obvious demonstration of the use of computers in teaching, bringing students some of the analytical tools not available to the non-specialist beforehand.
Figure 2 - An example of the manuscript studies in Tutorial III
(Wilfred Owen Manuscripts reproduced by permission of The British Library)
Wilfred Owen's famous Dulce et Decorum Est had, as many poems do, a confused creative background. Four separate versions are extant; Owen's death precluded the possibility of one being considered a definitive version. Thus the traditional editor is faced with the choice of choosing a base manuscript, incorporating modifications and presenting an edition which is considered to be as close as possible to the author's intention. Tutorial III on the website replicates this process, thereby introducing students to manuscript studies.
As the website indicates, such a tutorial greatly expands on the traditional student's understanding of the creative process. Instead of being presented with a pristine printed copy, students see the hesitations, ambiguities and modifications that are integral to the creation of any work of art. It also introduces them to the importance of the interpretative process, emphasising the mediation that is necessary between poet and reader.
The final tutorial in the project is another facilitated by computer technology. TACT is a piece of software that allows the swift analysis of word usage within a chosen text or texts. In this case, students can use a web-based version of TACT to apply searches to the entire electronic œuvre of Wilfred Owen. The seminar itself suggests several possible applications. Some critics, for instance, have highlighted Owen's application of musical metaphors. The user in Tutorial IV can insert drum, bugle, chord or sing, for example, and discover the frequent use Owen made of such terms. Truncation searching allows the users to insert prefixes to discover a family of words - drums, drummer, drummed etc.
Although the tutorials are sophisticated and useful teaching tools, Dr. Lee and Mr. Groves realised that the teaching possibilities of the site would be enhanced if visitors were able to create their own tutorials. Thus a second, broader teaching tool, a path creation scheme, has been established by a colleague, Chris Stephens. This allows teachers to sift through the thousands of pieces of evidence available from the archive and create a slide show, similar to a PowerPoint presentation. The creator can insert text in a margin to accompany the evidence portrayed in the main window. The created paths can then be saved at the website, allowing visitors to access them at will.
While many of the paths already developed focus on the poetry of Wilfred Owen, another path, featured below, demonstrates the extraordinary breadth of the evidence. Entitled 'Narratives of War' this path focuses on the wide variety of memorial inscriptions the war produced - secular, sacred, imperial, humanist. In each of the commentaries, the path offers contextual information on the inscriptions, and poses larger questions about the reasons for their creation.
Figure 3 - One slide from the 'Narratives of War' path
Additional branches on the site extend the educational possibilities. A bulletin board allows for conversation on any topic germane to the website. Unlike a traditional tutorial room, this can draw together discussion from all over the world. Those corresponding have time to consider and edit their responses allowing a higher standard of debate. Equally, simple factual demands can be answered quickly. Other information can also be forwarded onto the bulletin board - reading lists or snippets of relevant news, for example.
Indeed the international discussion promoted by the bulletin board concept is present throughout the website. For instance, for the second tutorial (on Rosenberg's Break of Day in the Trenches), new users can read the comments that students made on the poem, both before and after they were given the information on Rosenberg's background. Similarly, paths created and stored on the site can be accessed by interested parties all over the world.
To complete the project, the website provides a full set of lecturer's notes. These expand on the necessary technological requirements, the possibilities for developing the tutorials as lecture room aids and other suggestions on how the website's material can be developed to enhance teaching and learning. This final point homes in on the main strength of the JTAP Virtual Seminars Project - the sheer breadth of the material ensures that lecturers can mould the evidence to suit their own particular teaching needs. Technology here is truly a tool and not a master.
Readers may be well be interested on an evaluation report on the Virtual Seminars,
giving an indication of how lecturers have made use of the resource,
and their thoughts on its incorporation into their teaching.
Thanks go to Stuart Lee and Paul Groves for
providing information about the project.
