Cymru1914.org nominated for a Digital Humanities 2014 Award: “Best Use of DH for Public Engagement”

The Welsh Experience of the First World War, or cymru1914.org, a digital archive of material relating to the First World War from the archives and special collections of Wales, has been nominated for a Digital Humanities award 2014, in the category “Best Use of DH for Public Engagement”. Voting closes on February 28th, 2015!

Hurrah! This is very exciting, and also very rewarding for the large number of people who put a lot of hard work into the delivery of the project (most of whom are acknowledged in a blog post I wrote when the project launched).

I was the PI on this Jisc funded project, and led its development at the National Library of Wales from January 2012-November 2013. I consider it one of my better DH achievements, as Cymru1914,org, as the resource exemplifies many of my personal beliefs about digital resources in the humanities.

First of all, it’s all free and easily accessible. The content isn’t behind a paywall, subscription service, or tucked away in an institutional repository. The material is free for use and re-use using an open license, in this case a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Sharealike license (BY-NC-SA). We were able to do this as the National Library of Wales policy is for copyright and intellectual rights to be cleared as a managed part of the digitization process. This is because of a belief that free access is the key to realizing the potential community, social, research and economic benefits of digitized resources: the value of making content freely accessible for use and re-use is far greater than any economic value to be released by licensing (which has been shown to be minimal, anyway, in a number of studies, including one by Simon Tanner of King’s College London, based on licensing Museum images).

Secondly, every aspect of the development of cymru1914.org has been collaborative: developed under the umbrella of the Welsh Higher Education Libraries Forum, cymru1914.org brings together content from NLW, Welsh University archives and special collections, and local records offices. It’s a much stronger resource for integrating (and in some cases, digitally re-unifying) content from so many physical archives, and stands as a cohesive, national collection. Putting the project was a collaborative effort of partners and many departments at NLW: Collections, IT, Systems and other units all worked together on delivering the project.

And finally, the project had public engagement at the very core of its development. We put together a very inclusive advisory group to advise on content selection, interface development, and use cases throughout form the start (even at the grant writing stage). Representatives from academia, the arts and creative industries, cultural heritage, teaching, government, the military and other commemorative organisations provided input throughout the development, and have also helped with its promotion and interpretation since it was launched. We were very fortunate to also have the support of Wales Remembers, the Welsh Government Programme Board for the Commemoration of the First World War, which has meant that it’s been a central focus of centenary events in Wales.

Because of these three themes: freely accessible content, collaboration, and community engagement, the digital content resource has been widely used (and re-used) since its launch, living up to William Noel’s assertion that for owners of cultural heritage, the task “is not to get your stuff up on your website. It is to get it up on other peoples, freely and fully”. The whole point of digitization is to get content out there for re-use for new, innovative, and unforeseen purposes by many different communities for research, teaching, and public engagement. Here are two examples:

- Data from Cymru1914.org formed part of the 14-18-NOW project to create public artworks in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England as part of the LIGHTS OUT event on 4 August 2014. In Wales, Bedwyr Williams created the sound and video installation Traw, integrating images of unknown recruits and conscripts from Wales that he found in Cymru1914.org into an integrated artwork that was projected onto the North Wales Memorial Arch, Bangor. I'm very grateful to Bedwyr for allowing me to include an image of the installation below.

(image credit www.1418now.org.uk). 

The images in Traw are from the D.C. Harries collection of glass plate negatives held by the National Library of Wales. The Library digitized around 200 images from this collection, thought to be First World War recruits or conscripts from Llandeilo and Ammanford (Rhydaman), where D. C. Harries operated photographic studios. The images in Cymru1914 are a very small sample of over 2,000 First World War portraits in the D. C. Harries archive. Next year, NLW will digitise more and launch a crowdsourcing experiment, inviting digital community engagement to help identify people in the images.

- Cymru1914.org is also the basis of the Wales at War project, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Armed Forces Covenant Fund, and the Welsh Government Department of Education and Skills. Wales at War helping schoolchildren in Wales to develop digital skills and literacy by using the digital archive via an app to help them develop biographies of the names on local War memorials in Wales.

We also ran community content workshops with the People’s Collection Wales, with a focus on what we called ‘targeted crowdsourcing’, asking people to bring materials (like chapel records) that would compliment official materials held by archives and records’ offices. This was a very successful approach, uncovering lots of new material that belonged to members of the communities we visited, including a fascinating lost propaganda archive with a link to A.A. Milne.

This project was possible because of funding from Jisc and the partner organisations, but it was successful because it built on an existing strong digital infrastructure in Wales. The National Library has been digitizing content since 1998, and has built up a tremendous amount of internal experience in all aspects of the entire digital lifecycle (selection, conservation, capture, management and preservation), building digital expertise and skills into staff development at the institution. Because of this, all digitization could be supported in house, satisfying conservation and collections care requirements.

The technical infrastructure for the project built on the robust FEDORA-based digital architecture at the National Library of Wales, which is open and extensible, and has supported the re-use and repurposing of the content. The technical architecture for the project enabled integrating content from all partner organisations into a trusted digital repository at NLW. This approach also enabled the integration of content from four local archive and record offices in Wales: None of these archives currently have access to a digital platform, so integrating their content to Cymru1914.org has opened the material to a much wider audience.

The extensible nature of the digital platform, and the integration of the project into existing workflows, also means that NLW will be able to add resources to this archive throughout the commemoration period, including additional newspapers; the Cardiganshire Great War Tribunal (Appeals) Records; Saunders Lewis Letters; the Welsh Horse Lancers Research Papers Archive; as well as books (including novels), periodicals, diaries and letters. We hope to also add materials from other organisations based on the availability of additional funding.

All in all, cymru1914.org is an institutional asset that will be sustained over the long term because of its importance to a wider range of communities. This was always the intention in developing the resource as a freely accessible, collaborative project, with community engagement as its primary motivation.

On REF 2014: Why nobody wins unless everybody wins.

As a slightly obsessive[1] Bruce Springsteen fan, I’m familiar with the phrase “nobody wins unless everybody wins”. It was used by Mr. Springsteen at the conclusion of many of his concerts in the 70’s and 80’s, and from time to time he still uses it as a valediction (there is almost certainly a web site that cross-references all instances of his use of the phrase in concert with performances of ‘Prove it all night’ with the 78 intro the phrase, and if not there should be). What it means is that we really are all in this together, and that winning (financially, professionally) is only truly meaningful if it also brings about good for others: if a company makes lots of money, it should pay its workers better, rather than giving the CEO a bonus, sort of thing. For a good analysis of its use in a business context, see Bill Taylor’s article in the Harvard Business Review on Dec 7^th 2010.

So what has this to do with the Research Excellence Framework (REF)? First of all, I don’t believe that research is about ‘winning’. Setting aside the comparative impossibility of that concept - the idea that researching the origins of cancer can be compared to researching the end of the Roman Empire - it’s incredibly difficult to adequately compare research within the same area of study, let alone the same discipline. Yet this is what the REF has set out to do. Much has been written about the sheer scale of the task of the REF research panels (and I unconditionally applaud these panels, who have worked tirelessly to peer-review submitted work in their panels, for a small stipend that works out at about 2p an hour). It must be extremely difficult to assess 4938 outputs (the total for the sub-panel which my work went into this time) and grade them on a scale of 1-4. It’s harder when also being asked to assess impact and environment: without adequate background information, how can this be really scored?

There were problems with the process: reports of manipulation of the rules, including Premiership-level moves of key researchers in the final REF transfer window of September 2014, and even more controversially the exclusion of researchers from the whole process.  The criteria meant that smaller units or departments were vulnerable without developing strategic alignments (for an excellent overview of the whole REF process, see the LSE Impact blog piece by Tony Murphy and Daniel Sage)

These issues made the REF a complicated process, but are essentially a distraction from the main problem, which is that the UK’s Higher Education sector is a functioning and effective ecosystem of a huge range of skills and strengths, and that a ranking system of assessment like the REF fails to acknowledge the fact that research is part of a wider educational system with mutual dependencies. Researchers also teach, supervise students, engage with the public, and create new knowledge in partnerships with with other public or private sector organisations: a successful ‘unit of assessment’ does all these things in a balance that works for their host organization and the communities they serve, whether undergraduates, postgraduates, colleagues in their own discipline, or researchers and students in other disciplines, the creative industries, the heritage sector... To single out research publications as the primary means of evaluating worth is to fail to understand the nature of scholarship and higher education generally. Some departments (or centres) are simply more effective at teaching, or interdisciplinary research, or experimental research that is hard to assess. Other departments benefit from this, whether in the form of receiving students that have received an excellent undergraduate education as postgraduates, or integrating outputs of research into new work, or in in benefiting from policy developed as a result of service on committees and related activities. Similarly, many academics liaise with museums, libraries and archives in two-way collaborations that create new knowledge around cultural heritage: these outputs, and their tangible and intangible benefits are hard to define, let alone evaluate. And these dependencies are more necessary now that we all have to do more with less: in higher education, we really are all in it together.

I should have this said at the start that of course, I offer warmest congratulations to those who did well in the REF. To have one’s research recognized in this way is gratifying, and I hope that the departments and universities who achieved success in the REF will be rewarded for their achievements. But that there is a finite pot of resources, and rewarding the highest rated outputs will be to the detriment the many.

There is already concern that the strong showing of the sciences will be at the expense of the humanities. Again, the ecosystem is important: the study of the humanities is strong in the UK, and expertise in the humanities brings benefits to business, medicine, and other disciplines. Science and medicine also benefit from collaborative work with humanists. Rewarding the sciences at the expense of the humanities will disrupt this balance.

Another concern is the widening of the gap in research outputs between South East and the rest of England. The balance of funding going to Those Who Have Done Well will exacerbate this divide. I’m not going to have a political rant, but this does reflect a general condition of the post-credit crunch UK economy.

The UK has a fantastic Higher Education sector, which routinely punches above its weight internationally, despite a lack of investment compared to its global competitors, especially the US Ivy League.  The rankings that really matter are where we compete internationally: seeing UK Universities in the world top 10 is far more meaningful than saying that History at University X ranks higher than history at University Y. 

Concerns are now being voiced that REF ‘winners’ will be rewarded at the expense of the losers. To me, this reflects a wider malaise where all the gains in society seem to be going to a smaller segment of the population, with the rest of us struggling to hold ground. We need to defend Higher Education as a sector, and to help it flourish by recognising that . Let’s hope that faith will be rewarded.

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[1] Fanatical and deranged.

Thoughts on public libraries

Just before Christmas, my Twitter stream was dominated by two themes.  The first was the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF), which had finally concluded a process of evaluating the research outputs of the UK’s Higher Education institutions, and announced its rankings of the winners and losers in this curious 6-yearly academic beauty contest. The euphoria, disappointment and schadenfreude were palpable through the ether. Fortunately, the passive aggressive swiping reached its nadir just at the point where everyone decided it was time to shut up shop for the holidays. It’s almost as though they planned it that way.

The second was the announcement of cuts to local libraries, as the tail end of the credit crunch began to really kick public services in England and Wales. Cardiff announced a series of significant cuts to Library services, including budget cuts for the wonderful Central Library, and the loss of seven branch libraries; Birmingham announced a consultation on cuts to public services that included worrying developments for the City’s libraries, including the magnificent Library of Birmingham (which the City recently invested £188 million in developing ). For a wonderful eulogy to Birmingham’s Libraries, see this passionate lament by Robert McNichol.

The stories are, of course, linked. How many REF superstars got their start in their local library? How many people who went on the research the arts, sciences, or medicine passed their O-level exams because they were able to work in their local library after school or on weekends? I’m no academic star, but the local library was an absolutely central part of my education. I was the first in my family to go to University, and the library was where I went when I needed to do to work on homework or projects. When I was at primary school, I was enormously fortunate to have a decent public library near our house in Essex – I could even go there myself on the bus. I also used the magnificent Mitchell Library on holidays in Glasgow, and the Hamburg central library for High School research. This experience enabled me to develop what we now call information literacy: the understanding that no matter how daunting the task at hand, there was a starting point. This could be in the form of a book with references to other books; a cataloguing system that enabled you to find them; or when all else failed (ok, let’s be honest, quite often the starting point), asking a librarian for help. There was also peace and quiet, a space to think and work, and the idea that there was a physical and intellectual place for work, and study, and thought. There was also the idea that working, reading, and studying was a good thing to do: Taking the bus to the Hamburg Central Library and spending a rainy Saturday researching Acid Rain (yes, I am that old) for a school project, was, well, kind of cool. And so I discovered what Betty Smith called 'the magic of learning things.' 

Those of us who owe a lot to public libraries need to defend them. The best way to do this is to use them – take your kids to the local library. Borrow books rather than buying them. And while you are at it, meet your neighbors and find out what’s going on locally. We need to defend libraries, but the best way to do this is to develop a better understanding of how they serve users: they provide services that you may not even know about, like electronic resources (subscription-only genealogy services, and electronic resources, are available in public libraries in Wales, for example) and journals. They are still training people in information literacy, but now they are also many people’s best opportunity for developing digital literacy and navigating online sources. This matters when information is increasingly digital by default. 

But we need also to develop better evidence about the deeper impact of public libraries. Again, think of all the world-class research internationally carried out by scholars who got started in their local library. Multiply this over time. One of my PhD students, Calista Williams (@Ca7ista), is working on an AHRC-funded collaborative doctoral award with the Open University and the National Library of Wales. Her project includes analysis of the early readers of the National Library of Wales, and their subsequent publications and research. Historical Network Analysis of these library patrons, their publications, and their connections and influence, is showing some interesting patterns. Adopting a similar approach to assess the global impact of the research by those who started out as readers of public libraries would start to create an insight into incredible value of these institutions, and their services. This would also make a fascinating research project, and provide concrete evidence of the risk we will face as a society if we lose our public libraries.

Finding Belgian refugees in cymru1914.org: Keynote at 'Responses to Belgian refugees in Britain during the First World War: a Symposium'.

I was really pleased to be asked to give a keynote at the Stirling Symposium on Belgian Refugees in the British Isles in the First World War, which took place on September 2nd 2014. The event was organized by my old friend Jacqueline Jenkinson. Jacqueline has had a long interest in the history of refugees in Britain, and is the author of an excellent book on the topic of the 1919 riots. The Symposium on Belgian Refugees was funded through a larger research grant from the Leverhume, and the proceedings will be prepared as a special issue of ‘Immigrants and Minorities’ called Soon Gone, Long Forgotten – uncovering British responses to Belgian refugees during the First World War.

The title of my paper was ‘Finding the Belgian Refugees in Cymru1914.org’, and the slides are available online. I’ve been asked to prepare a full version of the talk for the proceedings, which I will do sometime in early 2014. However, I wanted to highlight some of the key points from my talk here, as they are issues I want to give a lot more thought to over the coming months.

The starting point of my paper was searching through the the NLW digital Archive, The Welsh Experience of the First World War, cymru1914.org, looking for references to the Belgian Refugees in Wales in the archives, manuscripts and newspapers of 1914-19. This was an opportunity to have a really good hunt for material about Belgian refugees in Wales, their experience, the official response to their presence, and even their own voices. It was an opportunity to combine material from disparate sources and differing formats, and to properly test the archive as a resource for examining a specific historical topic. 

The issue of Belgian Refugees in Wales is surrounded by commonly received myths: of a hearty welcome, of refugees who were artists and writers, of a philanthropic response, but there has been little research. From a preliminary examination of the evidence in cymru1914.org I was able to uncover some of the history, and also identify limitations and next steps in working with, and developing digital archives.

The first place I looked was the newspapers. Because they have been through a process of optical character recognition, it’s easy to do fast and accurate keyword searching of the 70,000 newspapers from 1914-19 in the archive. The OCR is generally of a pretty good quality (certainly compared to Google Books and other newspaper archives) but could still be enhanced (and we are investigating crowdsourcing methods to do this to enhance the archive).


Shortly after the start of the War, there were a lot of accounts of Belgian refugees coming to Wales, and the newspapers support the perception of an initially enthusiastic welcome in rural and urban areas. This account, of the arrival of a small group of refugees to Aberystwyth in 1914, is fairly typical. It was reported on 9th October in the Cambrian News and Merionethshire Standard.

Digitised Newspapers are a great resource, and incredibly convenient for scholars, they present issues of scale – it’s difficult to meaningfully engage with keyword searches of 70,000 pages, let alone the two million that will eventually be in Welsh Newspapers Online.  You can’t search and browse. We’ve been exploring new ways to visualize the newspaper dataset through time and space, using tools based on Google’s NGram. 

Using this, it’s possible to find clusters and patterns in the whole corpus of newspaper data, and to track their use over time. Subsequent analysis, which we are working on at the moment, will enable better visulisation of this data in a more spatial and temporal form, enabling better pattern searching in the data. This graph shows the use of the term "Belgian Refugees" in the Welsh Newspapers in Cymru1914.org from 1914-19. 

I have to admit that when I showed this graph at the Symposium, there was a gratifying murmur of recognition from those present, who had found almost exactly the same spike in newspaper reports from other parts of the UK during the period. unfortunately, none of them had had the benefit of digitised newspapers to work from doing this work manually represented a significant amount of effort! 

There are of course qualifications to using tools like N-Gram: the results are just a snapshot, and any results are only meaningful as the underlying data. But as a starting point for evidence gathering on a large scale, they are helpful. 

These tools are no substitute for a close reading of the archives. At the local level, the most obvious record of the impact of Belgian refugees were the records of local Belgian Refugee Committees. Cymru1914.org contains papers in Welsh and English from the library of William David Roberts, Rector of Llanfair, Harlech in North Wales, NLW MS 9982E (and I'm very grateful to my colleague at NLW Rhys Davies, for working through the Welsh with me). 

Working through this material the story unfolds of the formation in Llanfair of  “A Committee.. in the parish to help the Belgian refugees…”, and local activity to prepare for them. In December, they arrive: “a party of six Belgian refugees": Joanne Lienknecht 45, her children  Julia Gubel, 21 Charles Gubel, 17 and Caroline Lienknecht (6). There are a number of items relating to the Belgians, and even a charming "thank you" card, dated June 9th 1915:

“To the Llanfair Belgian refugees Committee: I beg to write to you on the behalf of us Belgians at Frondirion. We all thank you and all the inhabitants of Llanfair for your great kindness towards us all these months. We shall never forget Llanfair nor the people for what they have done for us". – signed “From Lienknecht for all the Belgians”. 

However, subsequent reading shows that  the refugees became more of a burden on the local community as the war continued. Roberts’ collection gathers many official demands on the agricultural produce of the area, especially the urgent need for “farm produce for his Majesty’s forces”. The war effort squeezed the local community, and subsequent returns issued from the parish, included in the archive, show that there wasn’t a great deal of produce to spare.

By April 13^th 1916, the local Committee funds were exhausted. Correspondence with the War Refugees Committee about their support ultimately leads to arrangements for the six Belgians to leave Llanfair on the Cambrian Railway, on May 4th, 1916. 

The story of the Belgians of Llanfair is an example of the value of  two kinds of digital engagement: macro analysis and pattern matching within large text archives like newspapers, and close reading of archives for detailed analysis of individual records. The impact that six Belgians had on an agricultural Welsh-speaking community in North Wales is a way to understand the 'spike' and tailing off, of interest in Belgian refugees in the seen in the N-gram: of initial interest that fades as the War does not end quickly, and the refugees become a burden on a population dealing with shortages and other stresses of a long conflict that affected all sections of society. An initial enthusiasm soon was replaced by indifference and a realisation that there was a long-term cost to hosting refugees. 

But this process of discovery also highlights the drawbacks of digital archives. The story of Charles Wens and his five Belgian compatriots becomes invisible as soon as he leaves Llanfair on the Cambrian line to London on May 4^th 1916. The data in Cymru1914.org is currently a digital silo – while open, and freely accessible, it is not currently linked to related archives from elsewhere. Ideally, we want to connect this data with other official archives and records from elsewhere, and develop new ways of tracking digital identities of historical figures.

Nonetheless, this piece of research has been an interesting opportunity to test the effectiveness of Cymru1914.og for testing First World War myths against reality, integrating sources from disparate collections, working with materials in variety of formats, and therefore giving a voice to those on the margins of the past. 

The Welsh Experience of the First World War (Cymru1914.org) launched!

I’m really delighted to announce the launch of Cymru1914.org. This digital archive is an integrated collection of materials relating to the impact of the First world War on all aspects of Welsh life, from the archives and special collections of Wales. The project was funded by the Jisc e-content programme as a mass digitization initiative.

Lots of wonderful people said nice things about the project at its launch (you can read their remarks here), and we were especially please that John Griffiths, the Welsh Minister of Culture, was able to attend, but here are the key things that I think are really important about this project:

• Although the project was led by NLW,  this was an important partnership, fostered by the Welsh Higher Education Libraries Forum. Our partners were the special collections of Bangor University; Cardiff University; Aberystwyth University; Swansea University; University of Wales Trinity Saint David, the National Library of Wales, and BBC Cymru Wales, as well as 5 archives and local records offices: Conway, Flintshire, Glamorgan, and Gwent.
• Most of the funding (£500k) came from Jisc, but the balance came from the partners in the form of in-kind contributions. This shows how the project was regarded by those involved
• Cymru1914.org is NLW’s first mass digitization of archives, making accessible some of the most significant and iconic archives in Wales. NLW was able to develop a workflow for digitisation or archival content that built on its existing expertise and investment in digitisation of print, photographic, and audio-visual materials. 
• Although the project was led by memory institutions, it had scholarly collaboration at its core. We had an academic advisory group of some of the foremost researchers working on topics related to the First World War and its impact on Wales, and their advice and input at all stages of the project (especially selection of content and user design) was invaluable
• The People’s Collection Wales led a series of community generated content workshops around Wales, which followed a principle of “targeted crowdsourcing” of content, enabling us to ask for specific types of content. 
• The project has uncovered a lot of ‘hidden histories’: material that was either to fragile to consult, too vast to work through without visiting the archives, or in private hands but of significance to scholarship. This will allow greater exploration of a number of research themes.
• The project has followed principles of user led design, and brought digital humanities principles to the creation of a digital archive. I’ve written elsewhere about how this will increase the impact of the resource. 
• The potential for re-use of the content is enormous. The project has already been used to develop a resource: Paul O’Leary at Aberystwyth University has used the content to develop an Omeka-based digital exhibition on the Great War and the Valleys, exploring the impact on civilians of “Total War”.

The most important thing is that the material is all freely accessible under a creative commons licence enabling use and re-use. We hope that it will become a major resource for scholars, educators, and the public as we start the centenary commemorations of the First Worlds War. On a personal note, given that my own research relates to the use of digital resources, I am really pleased to have led the development of a resource that I hope to revisit often as new uses of the content become possible. 

Oh yes, and there are lots and lots of people to thank, and I tried to list them all here.