World War One Centenary: Continuations and Beginnings

My experience of social media for a ‘Real Time’ experiment – or – Confessions of an Arras Tweeter. Guest post by Everett Sharp, Subject Expert.

I am a very lucky man. When I joined Oxford University in an administrative role in one of its many departments computers were something relatively new to many staff including me. Therefore as we evolved through 246 to 346 and Microsoft’s Wordstar to Word within MS Office and its many updates I learned progressively more. I have graduated therefore today to being one of the many ‘silver surfers’, relatively computer literate and able to use the various programmes that are relative to my lifestyle.

And what a lifestyle – I sit here in my ‘office’ near the sea and a view of Exmoor in glorious north Devon typing this on my Viglen PC as I took early retirement when the fantastic First World War Poetry Digital Archive (http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/) came to an end. It was therefore with great delight that I accepted Kate Lindsay’s offer to take part in her Arras95 project (http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/battle-of-arras/arras95/) writing various articles concerning the Battle of Arras 19th April to 16th May 1917 a relatively unknown but major event in the conflict. One strand of the project was an attempt to record the events in ‘real time’, exactly 95 years earlier on a day to day; and sometimes hour to hour record using the social media programme Twitter.

I am termed a Subject Expert, for those of us who are given such titles know that you had better live up to it and consequently I read everything I could on that specific offensive and what else was going on in the world during from November 1916 to May of the following year. This was very enjoyable and enlightening showing that the actual battle involved people from all four corners in the globe. It was also interesting to learn of external events that influenced the course of the conflict although many not happening directly in France.

Writing the articles was straightforward and reminiscent of creating essays for university, with a limited number of words; direct, broad brush writing honed down to present the facts. But what of Twitter? This was new to me and initially I found it simple to establish an account which is rather easy and intuitive. The greater challenge was using the small number of keystrokes to impart the relevant information.
This took me a little time to master but after a few days when the ‘Tweets’ were a little hesitant I got to grips with the programme and reduced my entries to the required length, giving the information in a very concise and abbreviated form; however when writing I had to remember that my audience or ‘followers’ may only have a superficial knowledge of the First World War in general and Arras in particular. Remember that I wanted to include global issues, Russian Revolution the US declaration of war Chinese labourers etc.

How did I do? Only someone else can decide, so if you want to read my efforts please go to Twitter EverettSharp1. For me it was informative and like many good things a little taxing so if you do read my efforts I hope you find them interesting.

Guest post by Fionnuala Barrett, Student Ambassador and Social Media Co-ordinator for @Arras95.

I have been overseeing the @Arras95 live-tweeting project, which came to an end on the 16th of May. Initially I was given a factsheet, prepared by Everett Sharp, with day by day details of the Battle of Arras. My first job was to construct these into tweets, so that they would suit the persona Kate Lindsay had devised – a real-time reporter sending messages back from the Front – and so that they would fit into about 130 characters, to facilitate easy retweeting.

My second job was then to line these tweets up for sending. We used a Twitter client called Tweetdeck, which allows you to schedule the tweets ahead of time to be published at a time and date of your choosing, as well as to add geotag information which we would later use to create a map of the tweets.

My last job on @Arras95 was day-to-day caretaking of the account, responding to and retweeting the messages of others. The group interaction made this part of the process most interesting, even including a few other users tweeting in character (notably @2ndCMR and @8thEastLancs) — a development we had not anticipated!

Now that the “Battle” has come to an end, we are creating new resources from the tweets. Though I like the tweet timeline, I am particularly gratified by the tweet map; while I was somewhat laboriously geotagging each of our tweets, I was unsure how useful such information would be, but I am very impressed with how the map turned out, and gives a new dimension on understanding some of the movements. It works particularly well with the Arras: Before and After resource.

As for evaluating @Arras95, I felt that commentators on the Great War Forum in this thread on the project put a number of very valid points, both pro and con. J Banning was particularly fair-minded about the limitations of the project, and the fact that a 140-character message would only be able to engage with complete neophytes to a limited extent. I think the brevity, combined with the project’s very specific remit, limited its appeal to those who were already quite knowledgeable about the period. Certainly there were times that the 140-character limit was a frustration, particularly with the more anecdotal stories sourced by Everett Sharp (as opposed to the factual messages such as “this village was captured” or “this number were wounded”) which I felt might have drawn in a less specialist audience.

Yet David Underdown makes an excellent point when he points out, on the same forum, that the live-tweeting project gives some idea of the “fragmentary … nature of the reports being received on the way up the chain of command”. Similarly, like a number of forum commentators, I want to see what is possible with the new technologies now available to historians, and @Arras95 is a valuable insight into how such tools can be exploited in research and dissemination of that research (and the maps and timelines are a further extension of that). Because the technology itself and the academy’s involvement in such technologies are both so young, naturally there is much to learn, and experiments such as these are the best way to discover what we still need to find out.