A British crowdsourcing project brings the everyday heroes of the First World War back to life.
Everyone was at that ‘party’. Paul Klee, a leading figure of Expressionism, Cubism and Surrealism, as well as of the Bauhaus movement, painted camouflage on German fighter planes. Maurice Ravel, the composer of Bolero, was a volunteer truck driver near Verdun.
Basil Rathbone, cinema’s Sherlock Holmes, slipped behind enemy lines disguised as a tree, freeing hostages and sussing out military secrets. There is a wealth of information on the actions of the most celebrated personalities of the time during World War I, but the same cannot be said of everyday people, 65 million of whom fought and suffered in the trenches. And the nine million men and woman who never made it home.
Today, however, an unprecedented research project is bringing back to life the memory of these unsung heroes, tracking down their names in a sea of coordinates, abbreviations, acronyms, and dates. It is the interactive website Operation War Diary, a joint project of the official National Archives of the British government, the Imperial War Museums organisation and the portal Zooniverse, a Wikipedia for scientific research. “[Operation War Diary] will allow us to give half-a-million or so people a place in history, people whose names are currently strewn throughout 1.5 million documents”, says Luke Smith of the Imperial War Museums.
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A British crowdsourcing project brings the everyday heroes of the First World War back to life.
Everyone was at that ‘party’. Paul Klee, a leading figure of Expressionism, Cubism and Surrealism, as well as of the Bauhaus movement, painted camouflage on German fighter planes. Maurice Ravel, the composer of Bolero, was a volunteer truck driver near Verdun.
