Despatch rider W.J.A. Allsop. This photo is in the possession of his son John and was sourced after the Build-a-thon by Geraldine Walsh. More photos can be seen on Flickr.
At the Build-a-thon, Elise from SLNSW introduced us to the diary of stretcher bearer and despatch rider W.J.A. “Allan” Allsop.
Read more about Allan and his diaries.
This section of the blog aims at new approaches to presenting a diary online.
Experiments
Diary browser 0.3
“Breaks in the transcript caused by page numbers were removed and the text reflowed. The text was also made larger for what is hopefully a more pleasant reading experience. You can now link directly to a page. And at top right a menu (inspired by the Adobe Reader function) allows you to jump straight to a page number. Twitter Bootstrap provides the navigation menu. A comments box was dropped in via Disqus to allow anyone to leave a note.” – Bernard
- MLMSS 1606/Item 1 – 23 July 1915—1 July 1916
- MLMSS 1606/Item 2 – 2 July—13 September 1916
- MLMSS 1606/Item 3 – 14 September—22 November 1916
- MLMSS 1606/Item 4 – 23 November 1916—4 January 1917
- MLMSS 1606/Item 5 – 1 January—31 December 1917
Diary browser 0.2
“A second go at the SLNSW Allsop diaries. The script required some serious bodging to accommodate the inconsistencies in the markup, but still – a result. Now you can browse the transcript with the page scans close at hand. (The gaps in the text that came from moving from a page to a date-based view should be cleaned up though.) This formatting will help in transferring the daily entries to a spreadsheet so that we can begin annotating key locations by hand.” – Bernard
- MLMSS 1606/Item 1 – 23 July 1915—1 July 1916
- MLMSS 1606/Item 2 – 2 July—13 September 1916
- MLMSS 1606/Item 3 – 14 September—22 November 1916
- MLMSS 1606/Item 4 – 23 November 1916—4 January 1917
- MLMSS 1606/Item 5 – 1 January—31 December 1917
Diary browser 0.1
“Tim Sherratt inspired me to have a bash at Python and this is the first semi-useful thing I’ve built with it. Unlike the text and markup for the dates, the page numbers and associated anchor tags in the SLNSW transcripts were mostly consistent, allowing me to generate this diary browser. Each diary’s pages are presented on a single web page, with a lightbox effect that allows you to move easily through pages with your mouse scrollwheel. Compare with, for example, the album view of Item 4 on the SLNSW website. But – this version doesn’t have the associated transcript to hand, and we’re still looking to present the diaries by date (rather than page) and with complementary maps.” – Bernard
- MLMSS 1606/Item 1 – 23 July 1915—1 July 1916
- MLMSS 1606/Item 2 – 2 July—13 September 1916
- MLMSS 1606/Item 3 – 14 September—22 November 1916
- MLMSS 1606/Item 4 – 23 November 1916—4 January 1917
- MLMSS 1606/Item 5 – 1 January—31 December 1917
Resources
- Allsop war diaries, 1915-1917 held by the Mitchell Library, SLNSW
- Trove list by Alison McCallum
- Photos from the private collection of W.J.A. Allsop – kindly shared by his son, John