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Writing dispatches under battlefield conditions.

warren — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 18:20:00 +0000

With the coming of Remembrance Day we thought we would publish a short note on some preliminary work we undertook on some of the Great War diaries of the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry.

We looked at the messages being passed between the officers in charge of various companies as they battled at the front and the commanders some distance behind the lines. In total there are about 200 dispatches extracted from the war diary from about a dozen officers. We wanted to know: When crises intensify at the Front, do the officers in charge write less or not at all until the fighting slows? We speculated that this would be the case owing to the confusion and the increased need for hands-on leadership at such times.

We found that on the contrary, at the times of greatest activity, messages from the officers in charge at the front not only increased in number but in length at the times of greatest activity, when the troops and their officers were under fire or in other critical situations. These urgent messages tend to be an average of two sentences longer than other non-urgent messages.

The histogram shown here gives an idea of what is going on: messages get longer the more adverse front line conditions become. Using close reading techniques, we analyzed the long messages that our data-mining search had identified and drew the following conclusions about why these were written at the very times that we would have thought officers were far too busy to write them:

Front-line officers could not always follow the orders issued by commanders who were frequently working without up-to-date information about the situation on the ground. When HQ commands were not carried out at the Front, the officer in charge would write out a fuller explanation of his company’s actions than he would ordinarily make so as to explain decisions made by junior officers at the front. These officers must ask for permission after the fact: “I trust this meets with your approval.”

Furthermore, since the commanders lack crucial information, ofﬁcers-in-charge need to convey that information thoroughly and accurately, which explains the details and time taken by company officers to write comprehensive dispatches to their superiors.

These longer memorandum also offer evidence of group decision making when confusion at the front is particularly acute: front line officers will make contact with other officers in charge of adjacent companies in order to establish a clearer picture of what is occurring at the front and to form a plan that they then forward back to their commanders: “I talked the matter over with Major Hudson of the RCR and he and his junior officers agreed with me that the trench was too crowded and that I should withdraw.”

The data used in this specific research is derived from the war diaries transcribed by volunteers at the Canadian Expeditionary Force Study Group and the analysis is an ongoing collaboration between Shelley Hulan and Rob Warren.

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About the splash page

warren — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 21:19:35 +0000

The splash page was created using pixelize written by Paul Wilkins using the images of documents from the Australian Red Cross, Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau as a pixel source. The represented portraits are from of the people of that era of which a good picture was available with the right contrast for pixelization. The first image is of Lt.-Col. John McCrae who wrote the poem "In Flanders Fields". The image was taken from the Library and Archives Canada photostream on flickr, and is cropped to remove his dog from the picture and scaled to enhance his facial features. This is followed by an image of General Currie, the commander of Canadian Troops in France, with a pixel size of 25. The image was sourced from the Library and Archives Canada photostream on flickr and did not need to be manipulated. Major Georges P. Vanier follows using an image from the Library and Archives Canada photostream on flickr, the image was cropped and resized to focus on the profile and enhaced the contrast. The image of General Sir Samuel Hughes was not changed. The image of Field Marshal Douglas Haig is curtosy of the Wikipedia Commons and was enlarged and re-centered. The landstrum infantryman with the spiked (the spike was meant to catch cavalry swords) helmet is cropped from a postcard scan on flickr from the Great War Flickr Pool, the württembergisch infantryman is also from another postcard scan in the same flickr pool.

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Images

First data dump from Library and Archives Canada

warren — Wed, 19 May 2010 23:32:00 +0000

The first data dump from Library and Archives Canada has been shipped to the Sharcnet data-center and loaded onto the cluster for processing. The data contains scanned images of the enlistment papers of Canadian Expeditionary Force soldiers (about a million images) and the full personnel file of about 200 soldiers (about twenty thousand images). The hard drive was first picked up in Ottawa and then traveled with a Muninn staffer to Waterloo, Ontario to one of the Sharcnet machine rooms.

The contents were copied directly to the disk array of one of the computer cluster to be worked on. The first step will be to catalog every image and link it to its subject. Since the contents of the image is not always known, we have to identify the form that was scanned and the information contained in it before we are able to extract the information. It has been asked why we use hard-drives to move the data from a donor institution to Sharcnet instead of just sending it over the Internet? This has mostly to do with the practical considerations of moving and managing large amounts of data amongst different organizations and systems. Donor institutions do not always have the facilities available to transfer large amounts of data over the wire, nor may they be comfortable doing it for IT security reasons. Another has to do with backing up what is essentially primary source data in the distributed computing system that has become the Muninn back-end: a hard-drive on a shelf is an insurance policy against computing mishaps. The data is being worked on now and should be visible on the online catalog system shortly. We will announce results and extracted data-sets on the blog.

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