Browse Exhibits (4 total)

British propaganda represented the First World War as a mere skirmish which the British Empire would win by Christmas. Instead, over a million men died in battle over four years and three months, a war which progressed at a crawl, deep in muddy trenches and sprawls of barbed wire which laced No-Man’s Land.  News coverage sanitized the particulars of warfare, as did brightly colored army recruiting posters, but the long lists of the dead told a different story. In the trenches, the war poets responded: while these writers would be grouped together, the tenor of their work differed greatly.

Contemporary of the Bloomsbury group and minor poet Rupert Brooke would die of sepsis before the war was over, but his sonnet sequence promoted stirring English pride. His sonnet The Soldier would be read in Saint Paul’s Cathedral on Easter Sunday, 1915. Brooke injects the lines with a patriotic theme: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England.” (Brooke 1-3).

Other war poets were less rosy in their depictions of death and dying on the battlefield. In contrast to Brooke’s vision of dying for his country, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Mary Borden, and Isaac Rosenberg (among other war poets) depict the effects of war on the human body and psyche in unflinching detail. While their styles differ, reflecting their various educational backgrounds and investment to poetry, their themes reflect widespread disillusionment with their place on the Western front.

In my next case study, I turn to HathiTrust and its Bookworm tool to model how its timeline tool can be used to study shellshock across an 18-million volume collection.

I chose HathiTrust as they offer a number of open-access texts, which can be downloaded using their collection tool, into comma separated value tables. As a repository, HathiTrust includes content digitized via Google Books and the Internet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locally by libraries. 

HathiTrust's Bookworm tool allows researchers to search the entire collection for terms across time. Unlike Project Arclight, this project is made up of eighteen million volumes and counting, so I had a much larger sample set with which to experiment.