| PW-253766-17 | Preservation and Access: Humanities Collections and Reference Resources | Virginia Tech | The American Soldier Collaborative Digital Archive | 5/1/2017 - 4/30/2018 | $50,000.00 | Edward | Joseph Khair | Gitre | | | | Virginia Tech | Blacksburg | VA | 24061-2000 | USA | 2017 | U.S. History | Humanities Collections and Reference Resources | Preservation and Access | 50000 | 0 | 49846.2 | 0 | A planning project to develop a digital archive
of 60,000 survey forms containing personal observations and opinions of
soldiers, produced during World War II, gathered by the U.S. War Department and
used for the four-volume publication The
American Soldier (1949-50).
Our project will make available
to scholars and to the public a remarkable collection of written reflections on
war and the armed forces by American soldiers who fought in the Second World
War. During the conflict, the War Department's Research Branch surveyed
approximately half a million service personnel. Respondents were asked about
myriad topics, from the effectiveness of training to the preference of fabrics
used in uniforms. Service personnel were also provided space to write frankly
about their other concerns. Until now, only by visiting the National Archives could
one read the 60,000-plus anonymous "free text" captured by the
Branch. Virginia Tech and Cornell University will build an online digital
archive that reunites the branches’ social scientific data and these free-text
responses. We will also provide a tool that will allow students, scholars, and
the public to transcribe and analyze digitized free-text responses, so as to
render the text searchable and thus accessible. |
| PW-264049-19 | Preservation and Access: Humanities Collections and Reference Resources | Virginia Tech | The American Soldier in World War II | 5/1/2019 - 7/31/2021 | $349,864.00 | Edward | Joseph Khair | Gitre | | | | Virginia Tech | Blacksburg | VA | 24061-2000 | USA | 2019 | U.S. History | Humanities Collections and Reference Resources | Preservation and Access | 349864 | 0 | 346267.88 | 0 | The creation of an online collection of over
65,000 handwritten survey responses containing the personal comments of
American soldiers in WWII. The narrative responses would be transcribed and
reunited with quantitative data from the respondents; contextual information
would be added to facilitate access by multiple user groups.
Our project will make available to scholars and to the public a remarkable collection of written reflections on war and military service by American soldiers who fought in the Second World War. During the conflict, an in-house Army Research Branch surveyed approximately half a million service personnel. Survey respondents were asked about myriad topics, from the effectiveness of training to the preference of fabrics used in uniforms. Service personnel were also provided space to write frankly about any of their concerns. Until now, only by visiting Washington, D.C., could one read these 65,000-plus anonymous "free-text" commentaries. Taken together, these wartime records provide us the most comprehensive portrait of the largest citizen-soldier Army in US history. Our interdisciplinary team will reunite these one-of-a-kind free-text commentaries to their source surveys and make the entire reconstituted collection available to the public through an open-access website. |