Double Deuce | April 1917| Woodhouse discharged | That's a lot of scalps

January 14, 2014 11:05 AM

Operation War Diary is the newest crowdsourced science effort from Zooniverse, cataloging WWI British soldiers' war diaries from the Western Front. Participants can help tag dates, locations, people, and events from 1.5 million pages of war diaries from the Western Front. Entries range from the uneventful (October 24 | PONT DU HEM | 5:30 am | Occupied same position. Did not fire all day) to the eventful (A & B cleared the village and the regiment eventually captured the convoy in the wood about a mile on after it had been headed back by a returning movement of 12th Lancers. In all 200 prisoners).

Operation War Diary follows many other citizen science projects from Zooniverse, including, previously, on MetaFilter:

Snapshot Serengeti, which crowdsources identification of African fauna

Seafloor Explorer, where you can classify sea stars, scallops, sea stars, fish, rocks, sea stars, sea stars, sea stars, and whatever else is on the ocean bottom (sea stars)

Old Weather, transcribing WWI Royal Navy weather logs

Ancient Lives, transcribing andcient Greek texts

Moon Zoo, for identifying objects on the surface of the Moon

and

Galaxy Zoo, classifying objects in deep space photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope

posted by univac (10 comments total)

The data from Operation War Diary will be fed into Lives of the First World War which looks an absolutely amazing project.
posted by Coobeastie at 11:10 AM on January 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

Zooniverse also organised the search for gravitational lensing during last week's Stargazing Live on the BBC. The result? Some fifty lenses found.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:13 AM on January 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

Sir, I have fetched the rug.
posted by Behemoth at 11:25 AM on January 14, 2014 [4 favorites]

Poor Reggie.
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:19 PM on January 14, 2014 [4 favorites]

Man, this sort of thing is exactly what there should be move on the Internet. Imagine if these sort of projects got as much attention as [inane pop culture thing].
posted by entropicamericana at 12:36 PM on January 14, 2014 [3 favorites]

It's so hard to believe we're 100 years past the start of WWI.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:56 PM on January 14, 2014

It's so hard to believe we're 100 years past the start of WWI.

There's still several months to go. Things don't really get going until the July Crisis.
posted by zamboni at 1:55 PM on January 14, 2014

How did they get access to all the diaries, I wonder?
posted by newdaddy at 3:29 PM on January 14, 2014

How did they get access to all the diaries, I wonder?

They're the unit war diaries, not personal diaries. The Natiional Archives have been working on scanning them.
posted by hoyland at 4:14 PM on January 14, 2014

That Lives of the First World War link could be a FPP of its own. I wish I'd had the resources the internet brings to bear on history when I was a grad student.
posted by immlass at 9:04 AM on January 15, 2014