 So we'll start off the panel with Greta Seutter who will give us some background on Ryan and his collection, as well as why transcription is such an important aspect of creating a digital collection. And this project would not be possible without the incredible team of volunteers whose work has been its backbone and we're incredibly thankful to have three of them here today, Sarah, Luigi and Alice who will tell us about their experience transcribing these accounts and what draws them to the work and hopefully this will inspire some of you to join their effort. These volunteers not only offer their time and skill to enrich this collection for everyone but they also bring themselves to the work and hearing about their personal interests and connections to the stories when within each account has informed our own understanding of what this collection contains and its importance to communities outside of academia. Next we'll hear from Jeff, who in the course of his own research and in connection with the CRMA reached out to us at Ohio University with an interest in accessing and transcribing the Canadian accounts, which we'll get in touch with. So we immediately saw the enormousness and possibility in having outside help with transcription and we were excited to work with Jeff and CRMA. The timing of Jeff's contact turned out to be fairly fortuitous and a little strangely so as digitization of the Canadian accounts began the pandemic became a glaring reality altering the way work could be done at Ohio University. One of our internal strategies was to subscribe to the online transcription platform from the page to offer library staff a way to do meaningful work from home. We quickly realized that this also created an ideal opportunity to enhance any collaboration with CRMA as from the page would make the material to be transcribed easy to access for volunteers and offer us a seamless way to add their work to our digital collection. The date over 1346 pages of Canadian accounts have been transcribed by the 22 CRMA volunteers and Nathan, who will wrap up this panel, served as volunteer coordinator and a vital connection between CRMA volunteers and Ohio University libraries. As executive director of CRMA, Nathan will also share his experience bringing these kinds of firsthand accounts to life through the incredibly impactful Project 44 and he'll also share his vision for where this collaboration might go next. We'll end the panel with a Q&A, so please feel free to put your questions in the chat. Use the raise hand function or go ahead and unmute yourself. I'll ask that everyone hold questions to the end and please keep your mics needed during the presentations. However, do keep an eye on the chat as we'll be dropping pertinent links from our panelists there. And Greta, I will turn it over to you. All righty, thank you. Hi, I'm Greta Souter. I'm the Manuscripts Archivist at Ohio University. I've been in this position since January of this year and I'm so happy we were able to put this panel together. I'm learning so much about the collections at OU and all of the people that work together to make it available online. I'm going to give a brief introduction to Cornelius Ryan, his papers at OU, and the work of digitizing and transcribing the questionnaires. Cornelius John Ryan was a war correspondent, journalist, editor, and author. He was born in Dublin, Ireland on June 5th, 1920. He was educated in Dublin by the Christian Brothers and studied violin at the Irish Academy of Music. At the age of 20, he entered the service of Garfield Weston as a secretary and moved to London. On this slide we have his childhood home in Dublin and also Reuters news agency on the bottom. His ambition was to write, however, and in 1941 he joined the London staff of Reuters news agency. In 1943 Ryan joined the staff of the London Daily Telegraph as a war correspondent and covered the air war over Europe until June 6th, 1944, when he joined General George Patton Jr.'s Third Army. Following the end of the war in Europe, he transferred to the Pacific Theater and subsequently opened the Daily Telegraph Japan Bureau. In 1946 he was transferred to Jerusalem as the Middle East Bureau Chief, where he also served as a stringer for time and the St. Louis Post Dispatch. In 1947 Ryan was offered a job as contributing editor for time and emigrated to the United States. He left time in 1949, served briefly with Newsweek and joined Collier staff as an associate editor in 1950. During 1950 he also married Catherine Morgan, whom he met at time and became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. During his time with Colliers he achieved international recognition for his journalistic reporting on the beginning of the U.S. space program. In 1956 two of his articles, One Minute to Ditch and Five Desperate Hours in Cabin 56, gained him three national awards for Distinguished Magazine Writing. The Benjamin Franklin Award, the Overseas Press Club Award and the University of Illinois Award. After Colliers' demise in 1956 he began serious research and writing on the longest day, a book about T-Day. When it was published in 1959 it was an instant success and gained him international repute as a book author. He was awarded the Christopher Award for the best book on foreign affairs in 1959 and the Bat Carella Prize in 1962. He joined the staff of Reader's Digest immediately following the publication of the longest day and continued his career in journalism while he began to research his second World War II battle book, The Last Battle, which was published in 1965. He was diagnosed with cancer in the summer of 1970 and he began a program of chemotherapy. Meanwhile he continued his research and writing on the third of his battle books, A Bridge Too Far. In July 1973 he was awarded the French Legion of Honor in recognition of his contributions to the fields of journalism and historical writing. The following year he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from Ohio University and A Bridge Too Far was published. Shortly afterward he re-entered the hospital and died of cancer on November 23, 1974. The notes and tapes he made during his bout with cancer were compiled and edited by Catherine Ryan and published in 1976 as a private battle. The Ryan Collection at Ohio University primarily consists of material relating to World War II, European Theater of Operations, in the form of his research papers and files for his three battle books. There are personal files for 3,072 individuals, both military and civilian participants of the battles, and contain 2,551 questionnaires, 955 interviews, and numerous letters, diaries, accounts, and observations. There are also numerous newspaper and magazine articles and book excerpts dealing with the battles. Ryan collected military documents of all types as well, combat interviews and after action reports, war diaries, message files and logs, strategic and tactical analyses, maps, and unit histories from all the national forces involved. So how did Ryan's papers end up at Ohio University? It is mostly thanks to John R. Wilhelm, founder and dean emeritus of the College of Communication at Ohio University. Wilhelm's career began before World War II as a reporter in Chicago. During the war, he worked for Reuters and the Chicago Sun, covering Patton's 3rd Army across Europe. He was a foreign correspondent for 11 years and worked for McGraw Hill for another 12 years. Prior to heading the College of Communications, he was director of the School of Journalism at OU. He met Cornelius Ryan while covering the war in Europe. Ryan was responsible for introducing John to his future wife Peggy, a Red Cross worker. Here we see an article from Life Magazine that states, Warzone Bride gets kissed, Margaret Maslin, Port Chester, New York, Marys John Wilhelm, Washburn, Wisconsin, gets kissed by 16 war correspondents, and congratulations. The Ryan's and Wilhelm's stayed in close contact throughout the post-war years, especially in connection with the overseas press club and periodic trips to the battle grounds of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. John Wilhelm died exactly 50 years after arriving on Omaha Beach in Normandy on June 6, 1994. On June 6, 1981, Normandy Park at Ohio University was dedicated. 23 World War II correspondents were in attendance. It was the 37th anniversary of D-Day. This was the only part dedicated to World War II correspondents, though there is a National War Correspondence Memorial in Gaslin State Park in Maryland and a tree in Arlington National Cemetery dedicated as a War Correspondence Memorial. This event was a reunion for the group and included Jack Thompson, Ben Wright, John Groff, Ann Stringer, William Hagenbotham, Clinton Congo, Ed Cunningham, Al Dopkin, Boyd Lewis, Don Coe, Gladwin Hill, James Cassidy, Iris Carpenter-Ackers, Ken Dixon, Larry Newman, Howard Cohen, Flora Lewis, John Daley, Art Milton, and Pat Conger. During this event, Catherine Ryan presented Cornelius Ryan's World War II papers to the university as the Cornelius Ryan Memorial Collection. Eight other correspondents also donated their personal papers at this time too. On this slide, we see an example of a scrapbook from the Ryan Collection showing a photograph, letter, and clipping from a conference awards banquet for the Benjamin Franklin Magazine Awards from 1957 and a panoramic image of the Ryan Room, a room dedicated to showcasing materials from the Ryan Collection located next to the Monsignor Archives and Special Collections in Alden Library. Here are some more images from the Ryan Collection. There are folders containing the rough draft of one of his books, index cards he used to organize his research, and folders showing original labeling. Ryan collected the personal accounts by placing ads in Reader's Digest during the 1950s. Questions such as, what was the trip like during the crossing of the channel? Do you remember any conversations you had or how you passed the time? And what were the rumors on board, the boat, ship, or plane in which you made the crossing? And in times of great crisis, people generally show either great ingenuity or self-reliance. Others do incredibly stupid things. Do you remember any examples of either from D-Day? These questions help shape Ryan's account of D-Day and allowed him to incorporate the points of view and stories from many individuals. Today, the questionnaires allow people to connect directly to the individuals that filled them out. Currently, we are systematically digitizing the collection, focusing on the interviews and questionnaires Ryan collected. Here's a screenshot of the digital archives. We currently have 960 items digitized. About 500 of those are from the longest day or D-Day research. And we are continuing to add more all the time. Since many of the items were handwritten, it is important that we transcribe each item. This is a time-intensive task and without the help of volunteer transcribers, it would be very difficult to get this work done. This work is happening thanks to a partnership between Ohio University and the Canadian Research and Mapping Association, which requested Canadian D-Day accounts be digitized to support Project 44, which we'll hear much more about in a little bit. The CRMA, Ohio World War II Transcription Project, was this born, and the CRMA was critical to recruiting and training volunteer transcribers. We have just opened up the transcription via from the page to anyone to volunteer, and we are expanding the digitization to British and American veteran accounts as well as Canadian. I wanted to share an example of what this looks like in our digital archives. Here is a multi-page document, and below that is the transcript to the page. This allows easy keyword searching for all of the documents, and if you'd like to take a look, you can start at the Cornelius Ryan landing page. We'll put a link to that in the chat, and then go on to the digital collections. You can also just google Cornelius Ryan Ohio University digital collection, that'll get you there too. Here's an overview of the World War II collections that are in the manuscript collections. Many of these are from journalists and authors, but there are also some from veterans themselves. These mostly focus on the European Theater, but there are a couple from the Pacific Theater as well, and in addition to those, we also have the John Wilhelm Papers in the university archives. So if you're interested in checking out any of these collections, feel free to reach out to me at the Montcenter. We're currently hosting researchers by appointment through the summer. So next up, we'll hear from three of our volunteer transcribers. Okay, can you hear me? Yes, sorry about that. Hi, I'm Sarah Powers. I am located in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. I'm a chief foreign officer in the Canadian Armed Forces. By trade, I'm a human resource administrator. I've been serving for 24 years. This is the picture I had them add just because it's fitting to the topic. So how I found out about the Ryan questionnaires and the opportunity to transcribe them is when I was posted to Petawawa, I was talking to somebody from the Garrison Museum, and they had mentioned Project 44, and I am active on Twitter, so I followed it, and then I saw, through that I saw a call out for transcribe, transcriber volunteers, and I thought that would be a great idea, especially it was during COVID and on lockdown, so I wasn't doing much volunteering outside the house or socially, so I thought I'm a fast typist. This is something that I could contribute to, and that's how I got involved with this project. This is the first time I've done transcribing other than at work after meetings, so I had very little experience doing this kind of transcription. The reason that I was interested in this particular project was I think that making historical documents or any documents of that matter accessible and available to all is really important. The BBC had a documentary one time titled The Traits That Make Human Beings Unique, and in the write-up of that documentary, it states that ever since we humans learned to write, we have documented how special we are. Yes, we see the roots of many of our behaviours once considered uniquely human in our closest relatives, like chimpanzees, but we are the only ones who peer into our world and write books about it, and I think that not everybody has an opportunity to tell their story, and these are incredible stories, and this is allowed for the passage of knowledge that otherwise may not have happened, and if we didn't transcribe these, what would happen to these young men's stories? This was the most terrifying time in their life, and it could have been their last day of life, so to have these stories unboxed and read and transcribed for others to read and not to be lost in history is what I feel the least I could do. My grandfather was in World War II in the Navy, and he talked about it occasionally, and I always regret not recording not writing it down, because it would be really nice to look back and read and share with my son. So in terms of specific questionnaires that really stuck with me, I would say all of the files I get really attached to, I almost have like a sense of ownership, and I'm always afraid to leave somebody's file unfinished. I'm afraid someone else is going to log in and finish it. I like to start the file and see it through. It's almost like they're my guys. I don't know if that's part of the Surgeon Major in me or the Human Resource Administrator in me, but particularly this folder, 23 from box 24, H. Gunnerson, really kind of struck me because he was a rifleman, very young, so he was like at the pointy end of the stick of this amazing day, and the way he recounted it was very honest and raw, and along with his questionnaire he sent this letter, which you can see on the screen, to more fully capture his experience. I'm just going to read a bit of an excerpt of that letter, so he had said, Dear Ms. Ward, I have trouble recalling exact details on so many things. This has to be an experience, this has to be experienced to be believed or understood. We were conditioned to accept anything. I have never been able to think of any description of my feelings except the word surprised, that one applied to everything, that I was in France, that I was still alive, the bullets fired missed me, and most of the others. Another excerpt, Corporal Bullcloss of German descent, he was apparently badly wounded and the section pinned down by a machine gun in a pillbox. He ordered his 2IC to wait till the firing stopped, and he crawled towards the pillbox. The firing stopped and the sections moved on. He was found later in the pillbox, dead with a German by the throat in each hand. He was a wrestler from Brandon, Manitoba. I was with battalion headquarters in the afternoon, 6th June, when we were a few miles inland and the troops some distance ahead, a mile or more, a German soldier stood up with his hands up in a grain field wanting to surrender and obviously wondering if it was safe to do so. His sudden appearance actually caused consternation among us and hurried conferences were held to decide what was supposed to be done with prisoners. Everyone had quickly gathered around to see what this ferocious breed known as Germans looked like. Finally, someone had taken time to look around and saw 40 more Germans standing further back in the field with their hands up patiently waiting for us to notice them. Another one, I never felt so stupid in my life. As we walked inland, everybody was loaded down. I was carrying a case of three Piat thoms that weighed about 25 pounds. I had no idea who had the Piat itself an anti-tank gun, nor had I ever fired one. It was a very unpopular weapon and nobody wanted any part of it. A couple of days later, somebody nailed two German panther tanks and after that everybody wanted a Piat. Another one, the attitude to death quickly assumed a pattern. Everybody living was your special friend but if he got killed he was just a fellow you knew and once out of sight, out of mind, the battalion lost 250 men mostly on the beaches on D-Day. Around midnight, 200 new reinforcements came up and by that time we were considering ourselves veterans. The time in the assault was the worst for me largely due to sea thickness. The water was very rough. You're also sitting ducks which doesn't make you feel comfortable. I hope this is of some help to you. Please write again if you have any more questions. So that this one really struck me like I said he was very young and he he hit on many things that happened during the day. I just I really liked how he wrote. So I also do occasionally when I come across some of the the files I do go on Google to look up for example a unit or a place on a map sometimes because I am in the Canadian Armed Forces and we are a smaller force. I'll see a name that I recognize like a last name Stuart and I'll wonder if they're related to somebody who's in now so sometimes I'll do a little bit of research on that but my research skills are limited so I haven't really connected anything yet probably if I dug in a bit more there would be some and if I if I have any advice for people who are interested in transcribing or new transcribers I'd say don't be shy if you think you'd be interested even if you aren't a good typist just do it. You get better at typing and you'll get to know so much and it is really an honor to be part of someone's story even if you're just transcribing it. It's been extremely fulfilling for me so thank you for having me join your project. Hi everyone, my name is Luigi Van Cano, I live in Lucera, Italy and I'm one of the volunteer transcribers. I'm a passionate military history of the Second World War and I've conducted a personal research based on the Allied armies that were here in Lucera from September 1943 to the late 1945. I found out about the Cornelius Orion questionnaires thanks to Project 44. After I read one of their posts on a social network in which they were looking for volunteers I answered the call and I gave my availability so I took part in this project and I began to transcribe the longest day accounts in June 2021, almost a year ago. Working as a volunteer transcriber gave me the opportunity to learn much more about the history of the day through the first end tales of the soldiers that took part in the Normandy landings. In those stories it's possible to perceive emotions, the courage of the soldiers and it's a unique sensation that I feel every time when I read their answers to the Ryan questions and it's this feeling together with the possibility to make a much more contribution to preserving by transcribing this part of the day history that brings me back to the Cornelius Orion questionnaires. In about a year I have transcribed many but the one that impressed me more and then the others it's the questioner of Francis Kishen, I hope I pronounced that well the name. He was a IUS soldier of the 115 infantry regiment, 29 infantry division. In his questioner he described with great detail the difficulty of the landings, the fear of the mines on the beach, the danger of the enemy snipers and all the chaos around him due to the explosion and wounded. The narrative is so intensive that it's almost possible to imagine the scenes but there is a sentence he wrote that struck me the most and it's the noise of the battle were the first wounds of the assault and I believe that in this phrase is contained the odor of the war which these brave soldiers have to face that day. This strange bond that is created between me and the stories told in these questionnaires leads me every time to try to know more about them. If there are any photos to put a face to the names, the history of their military units and also to know more about the cities which they come from. I hope that my own interest and enthusiasm towards these questionnaires will also do the new volunteers and I hope it will involve those hesitant to become volunteers transcribers. At last I just have to thank you and the University and the Project 44 for this chance. This is for me a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Thanks. Alrighty, hello everybody. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay, cool. You're okay, awesome. Hi, I'm Alice Janet. I am currently residing in Hamilton, Ontario. I am one of the transcribing volunteers. While I'm not pursuing this transcribing endeavor, I am a merchandising manager in retail. It's not as exciting as some of the stories I get to read about but we're getting there. I had initially stumbled across Project 44 within my general research of history. I went to school for history at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario and I've always had a very fascinating interest in military history specifically with the Second World War and even now I'm moving back in time into the First World War but I saw somewhere in my social media a call out with Project 44 for transcribing help and with COVID happening and obviously malls weren't open. I figured it'd be a great time to learn a new skill and I just think having access to first-hand accounts of any sort of historical data is fascinating and I was willing to give transcribing a shot. I think it's really awesome that this project even exists and the fact that we can transcribe these works for future use, for accessibility use is just fantastic and I could not be more happier to be contributing to something outside of myself and for the future. I did not pick a specific questionnaire necessarily but I do find it interesting how the level of detail for some of the answers, some of the answers are quite long and like they wrote on the back of pages and they're just pages and pages of their answers and others are very short and it's just interesting because you can kind of gain perspective on maybe the personalities, their thoughts and feelings, like looking back on it, recalling things and I think the most interesting questions that were on there were the ones where they were talking about if they were told about the invasion prior, some had like a year or seven notice, some were like much later on in the year. The rumors on board question was also pretty fascinating just to figure out some people are just like yeah I took a nap and others were like no I was very scared or others were playing cards, others were gambling and it's just it's just really interesting to just sit there and kind of like get immersed in that world and kind of put yourself in their shoes with their words, you can kind of develop personality. As mentioned before I also do look up when possible like their name if I can find an image of them who they were related to just so I can kind of gain like a fuller picture of the words of a human. I do have one word of advice for anybody who wants to be, not one word, one phrase of advice for anybody who wants to kind of get into transcribing and I know like curse of handwriting is particularly difficult to read, there's a lot of short form words that come up but there's like sometimes you have to like zoom in and figure out what words, what letters or what. My advice would be if you're unsure of something that is handwritten whether it be a full word, short form, sometimes that context of what that word could be might appear later on within like that entry in the response or like you could figure out like if you guessed what the word was later on like you're in the moment and then you can go back you're like oh that's what that word was like I find and I find myself going through that a lot but honestly this project is a lot of fun to work with and it's it's really really cool thank you. Okay it looks like I'm up next so I'm Jeff Osborne it's very kind that the university listed me as a researcher I like to think of myself as just a guy in Toronto who really cares about this project and is passionate. My full-time job is I work in the energy sector but Nathan would attest to the fact that you know as a as a board member of the CRMA that's that's really my my real passion that's my job on the side but I'd like it to be my full-time job if I could so researching this project has been a really special opportunity for me and if we could just go to the next slide you know I can tell you a little bit about my journey and I promised I'd be brief and try not to get too emotional but I was recently rereading the longest day and this section really stood out to me and says what follows is not a military history it's the story of people and that's in the forward and I read that and I thought to myself that's that's really really very true of this whole project and in the book so if we could just go to the next slide so my my journey as I would call it sort of started back in in 2018 with with Ohio University because ahead of the 75th anniversary of D-Day I was doing research on my on my grandfather's role on D-Day and he'd he'd retired as a lieutenant current with the Canadian forces never really spoke about his experiences but after he died in 2008 I'd really spend a lot of time trying to research and and Sarah's story earlier really you know resonated with me because I was trying to I wish I'd asked him so many questions and and asked him more things when he was alive and so it really became important to me to learn everything I possibly could and I became a little bit obsessed with D-Day in particular and and back then I I had found a news article about a PhD student at Ohio University who is researching the Ryan collection and I I guessed his email and I reached out to him I said hey I want to try to figure out you know what's what's going on with this collection because I had known that my grandfather contributed to the book The Longest Day but that was all I knew and I I made a post on a military forum and someone said you know there are accounts of the interviews at Ohio University and so I said okay well I'll try to reach out and I got connected with someone named Doug McCabe many years ago back in 2018 and later that day in my email inbox I had a handwritten account my grandfather had written in the 50s of D-Day and what was extremely emotional and powerful for me was I was 30 at the time and and reading and if you could look at the top right that that's his account the first page of his account he was a 30 year old staff captain with the Canadian headquarters and he'd had a son the day after D-Day and and all of these things went through my mind if we know what was he thinking it was you know probably the scariest day of his life he was also having his first son and expecting his first son the next day a lot of things must have been going through his mind and so I think what's truly important about The Ryan Collection and not just my grandfather's interview is the the personal stories and emotions that you can glean that you know as we have fewer and fewer veterans in the future those stories are are finite and so I think The Ryan Collection is is incredibly important and so I think and so I wanted to say thank you as well to Ohio University, Erin, Miriam, Janet, Greta, everybody you know who set this call up because you know it has been an experience and and I you know obsessed was is probably the right word and hopefully not too annoying but if you told me today's conversation would be happening back then I think I'd never have believed you just because this project has really turned into something incredible and so after reading my grandfather's account and getting excited about that I said to myself there's 113 other Canadian accounts and there's 113 other people who have the opportunity to experience what I did and and so it was right ahead of the 75th anniversary of D-Day and the Globe and Mail which is a major Canadian newspaper picked up the story and so the image in the middle is they they highlighted four of the accounts and my grandfather was one of them was fortunate that they they chose him but some of the images you'll see on this slide include so the news article I had my grandfather's handwritten account of D-Day from from what he'd written on the beach and that's in the bottom right and then the picture below is the Canadian headquarters along with the general Keller who led the Canadians on D-Day you know striding along the beach with his staff where you know with briefcases looking like it's not a battle zone and so you know telling stories is really important and so transcribing the accounts making this accessible it became so crucial and obviously Ohio University choosing to work towards digitizing and making the the documents you know more accessible was was was vitally important for people like me who aren't military historians or researchers who didn't know what a division or regiment was who didn't know that these files even existed so it's a it's an incredibly important step in making this user friendly and accessible and I think the impacts and possibilities are enormous frankly from an academic perspective I mean I think there's new information all these accounts that people just didn't know about that it adds a different perspective and a different light on how the stories have been told of different units and regiments and whatnot from a cultural perspective I also think there's incredible value I mean you're hearing what people thought at that time how they're describing their experiences even the language they're using the phrases they're using you know I look at my grandfather's account and I see he uses the word chaps a lot and it's funny just because he's you know a Canadian and I maybe that was a common phrase here or maybe it's something he picked up while he was in in the UK but it's it's those little tidbits that are so important and then from a family history perspective obviously you know in my case this was vitally important to everything I was doing in all of my research and so it makes it easier for people to to learn about the relatives and and so you know as a as a board member of the CRMA I also I'm very happy that Nathan was eager to take up the call to try to you know get his volunteers who have really been the backbone of this project frankly and I can't thank them enough because this is only you know this conversation today is only happening because of them but so Nathan and his team actually took the step of creating a short video with some of the accounts narrated to try to make them a little bit more real and so that was that's that link there for anybody who wants to see a look and check out a little bit of what what one of the possibilities is and if we could just go to the next slide and so this is I'll just touch on this very briefly but I just wanted to really show exactly how this can help an individual's research and so what I became obsessed with was trying to learn everything I possibly could about D-Day from my grandfather's perspective and so I had Army War Diaries which talked about the generalist perspective and the overall battle and you know they had GPS coordinates and really really incredibly useful information ships logs that had times locations you know information from from the captain of the ship and his staff academic literature and you know various books written by Canadian authors as well as American authors about the other landing zones and then I had my grandfather's personal accounts I mean I had his handwritten letters I had artifacts he left he was an accountant so he was meticulous in in leaving leaving many artifacts behind but we didn't know what they meant we didn't know what the sentimental value is we didn't know how to interpret what most of them were and so when I found the longest day interview it really helped to frame a lot of things and put them in perspective and it also led to me finding a lot of other interviews he'd done over the years that he'd never told our family about and so those all helped to really frame the story but what also became very important to me was that I began telling my grandfather's story but I as I learned he was with people obviously and I began to try to tell their stories and I began to try to find their relatives and say well here's an account of my grandfather meeting your relative on this part of Juneau beach and here's what they said to one another here's what your grandfather was doing and I've had that experience with a number of people now which has been really really powerful and so the longest day interviews of other people they all intertwined to tell one big story together they're not just individual accounts they all they all link together and that's what's really exciting to me so you know you can you can tell this kind of network story and on the right there's just an image of all the different Canadian you know units and where they were and what their objectives were so there's a lot out there and I think what I really wanted to emphasize on this slide is from my perspective at least as someone who just knew so little about military history and military research there's so much out there and you don't know unless you start looking but you'd be unbelievably surprised how much detail and is information is accessible and available today the record keeping back then although handwritten was in some ways better than it is in times today so how if we could just go to the next slide please and so you know I just wanted to end off with this and highlight again you know what I've really been very passionate about trying to do is bring faces to the collection bring awareness to the collection get other people as excited as I am and I think that there all of the accounts are an incredible glimpse into emotions and perspective and obviously the project we're working on just started focused on just the Canadian accounts there's British American accounts German accounts there's French civilians accounts there's there's just such an incredible opportunity and a treasure trove of information that we've just scratched the surface on delving into it and all of the accounts show people's perspectives not units perspective governments perspectives organizations perspective it's what a person felt and and that as I said earlier with so few veterans remaining those stories are worth their weight in gold in my opinion and so these untold stories and information is just so valuable and if you look to the right I've just you know highlighted this example of what a military you know what a war diary looks like you've got kind of a description about the the different units from the general's perspective in this case this is the third Canadian infantry division headquarters what time they were at different locations if you've even got GPS coordinates so there's a lot of great information about the overall big picture but then when you layer in stories and individual accounts and I've highlighted one from below from my grandfather which was I'm just trying to hold my thing up so I can read this it says we walked through the beach exits into the Normandy countryside after moving south a few hundred yards we came to an east west country road and turned east from a neighboring farmhouse a small girl about eight years old rushed up to me as I was leading our group and handed us and handed a flower and me a flower all I could do is say merci thank you and carry on and that's obviously a small total story but there's there's thousands of them in in these accounts and so it goes back to digit digitization and transcription has improved the ability to share and learn and that's that's the most important thing and that's the overall objective here so sharing the stories enabling new research and remembering are crucial and I just want to end by saying again thank you so much to Ohio University all the researchers and Nathan for for putting up with me over the years and and I'm very very pleased with where we are today great thank you very much my name is Nathan Keeler I'm the Executive Director of the Canadian Research and Mapping Association and co-founder of Project 44 I served 13 years in the Canadian Armed Forces and I have an extensive background in geomatics and GIS so mapping is kind of my specialty next slide I wanted to say thank you before we go on to our volunteers Sarah Louie Jean Alice who came on today it was great to meet all of you it's kind of our first time actually seeing each other and these three people I don't have the statistics anymore but last year I looked at they represent about 75 percent of all the transcription work so they all you know we're putting in a ton of effort and we really appreciate that so quickly we're going to talk about Project 44 it's been talked about a couple times in this presentation what it is so Project 44 is a free online web map showing the war in Europe from 1943 to 1945 the web map covers the battle of Normandy in 44 the liberation of Europe in 45 and the Italian campaign from 43 to 45 next slide the website consists of two main elements the first is the 100 sorry next slide thank you the website consists of two main elements the first is the 135,000 unit positions that have been mapped using situation maps in unit ward iris and the second element is the 15 pages of transcribed ward iris that describe the day to day operations of some of these units next while the web map covers a wide range of nationalities the inception of the project is from Canada where we're based and much of the more granular details on the web map are focused on Canadian units this includes more than 130 units at the battalion or regimental level including their unit ward iris we are slowly growing the web map to include British and American units at the same level of detail including their unit ward iris having added more than 20 new units in the last year that the public can explore next so this is just an example of what the web map looks like runs obviously in the browser using a map box mainly to explore any day of the war in Europe or Italy from 43 to 45 and if you want to visit the website the link is project44.ca next so for the 80th anniversary of D-Day which is coming up in two years project44 wants to work with Ohio University and the Alden Library to build an interactive web map to display some of the most riveting accounts for no longer stay questionnaires next the goal would be to create an easy to use website that allows users to see where major events took place read the accounts and learn more about the soldier and listen to audio recordings of the accounts being read out next so the first major goal would be to locate where individual accounts took place to provide users with a reference point of where a soldier was during D-Day geography is an important part of a soldier's story where a soldier was fighting to help describe what they may have been doing and provides a third dimension to their story next as well having a biography for individual soldiers will be important to providing context of who they were before and after the war so we want to provide the ability for people to fill in a biography on soldiers so if we look at Jeff's grandfather um Captain Earl Olmsted during D-Day Jeff may be able to go in and talk about what his grandfather was doing before the war what he did after just to provide more dimensionality to to these accounts and this can be done in much the same ways the longest day questionnaires were transcribed relying upon volunteers and family members to build the biography in a crowdsourced approach next slide oh i think can you go back one i think we're missing one maybe more to the right perfect right there so last summer we created a 10 minute video of Canadian volunteers bringing out excerpts from Canadian accounts this included Canadian celebrities Jay Bereshel and Peter Mansbridge amongst many others having people lend their voices to the accounts allows users to be engaged and feel like they're taking part in the longest day so along with having these accounts georeferenced tagged on a web map where people could see where they took place so third Canadian infantry division at uh Juno Beach first infantry division or the first Ranger battalion at Omaha and Pointe de Hoc we can allow people to understand where these soldiers were then provide a biography about who they were right and where they went after the war and then if we can provide some kind of audio recording you know a great example is what Sarah did earlier reading uh her account it provides really riveting way to understand that account to hear the emotions that a volunteer you know gets into the story and then you know you can kind of bring those emotions out to the user and then we'll just go back to that slide that last slide and finally that perhaps the most important element is creating easy to search website that will promote families to search for their own relatives account is well known that veterans rarely share their own stories with their families the longest day questionnaires are important first hand accounts of day day veterans that many families may not know exist so we just want to promote a way for people who don't know about this that you know maybe there's a chance that their relatives account is in is out there and that they can find it easily thank you yay okay thank you everybody who presented thank you all so so much for sharing your perspective on this project I think it's super super exciting we're gonna open it up to questions now if there's anyone in the audience that has any questions feel free to you can unmute yourself or you can ask it in the chat okay I got one for you do you all three four three of you I'm curious how much time do you spend like an hour day every day of the week to get up in the middle of the night like how much do you do I'm curious I'm Lorraine by the way I forget the library it's a very cool project and thank you can you hear me yes um some Sundays um depending on you know what I had going on at work I wouldn't get very much in Sundays just after work after dinner I'd just sit on my couch with my laptop and I could be doing it for hours because sometimes once you get into it like I said you don't want to you don't want to leave it undone because you like for me I was like I don't want anybody else to finish this file because I want to see it to the end I want to know I want to know the story so you know some Sundays if I just could spend a little bit of time but I always like to try and finish a file some of them are quite long so sometimes a couple hours but you get wrapped up in it and then you don't know until you have like the pain in your neck and you're like how long have I been sitting here yeah I would um I would agree with Sarah on that like but we were in lockdown it was just so much like I was like hey like this is a great way that I can just spend the day doing this so I do it like for a whole afternoon um then I'm like oh no wonder I'm hungry it's dinner time despite the fact I work right beside the kitchen um and but now like now that things are open back up again and lives are changing again I have less time but I'm trying to rework the project back into my very busy busy schedule but whenever like even if you could commit like no not really commit but just set aside like an hour or two a day but like Sarah said like there are some that are like 20 pages and you're like okay I guess I'm in this one for the long yeah thank you I mean I don't expect you all I thought maybe someone might have some weird little writer's thing like I always like light a candle and then something like that thank you I just wanted to add quickly um that hearing this is so it's so amazing and the amount of time and effort that the volunteers put into transcription like that that labor is so significant and it makes such a difference um one of the things that we wanted to make sure we did was to credit that labor in in the digital collection so we have designed um that that note that goes into every account that's been transcribed in this project and we would love to hear feedback or any other ideas about kind of how to acknowledge and kind of shine a light on this labor that can sort of go unnoticed or can be a little bit hidden and then thank you so much I had a quick question for Nathan if I'm allowed to ask some another panelist a question but I Nathan I'm curious what is the the one project that you are most excited about in your term as a next step because you highlighted so many great projects but what's the what's the one that you're most excited about that we're working on next or that I want to work on both um well you know I'm very inspired by the longest day questionnaires uh as I mentioned before I serve the Canadian forces for 13 years so I kind of think about not necessarily my own service kind of my generation service um is there a modern day longest day equivalent we have tens of thousands of Canadian veterans there's probably I don't want to guess there's probably well over a hundred thousand there's gotta be even more than that American veterans probably even millions maybe all these stories that can be captured in some way in sort of a modern longest day equivalent so it's something I'm very interested in uh you know because most of veterans of my generation were still young you know some of these events were not that long ago being still talk about them being still write them down so that you know some of these little stories don't get sort of forgotten about or washed out with all sort of the bigger nuances and the other thing I'm really excited about is what I did talk about in the presentation 80th anniversary of D-Day you know how can we really shine a strong light on longest day accounts because a lot of these well a lot of these first-hand accounts did make it into the book a lot of these accounts didn't make it into the book and so in history you know things kind of get narrowed down to specific events so you know it's D-Day it's going to talk about Omaha and the airborne landings sort of the band of brothers which are all great stories there's all these other stories are kind of off to the sides and even in the longest day when we talk about we kind of often get very focused on the army side but there's lots of great accounts on the air force and the Navy side you know including there's a account of a landing craft tank ship you know just going underneath a battleship that just was there for one minute the next minute was gone what happened to that crew I have no idea that's an incredible story that you don't really hear about so that's what I'm very excited about we have a couple questions in the chat that I can go ahead and read to our panelists the first one is what advice do you have for someone starting out with research I think it depends on what kind of what they're looking for I think if they're interested in the Ryan collection they can reach out to me or they can start looking at what we have online you know a lot of the things aren't digitized yet so we definitely get requests that are looking for specific interviews or you know there's people mentioned in the book and we haven't got those interviews digitized yet so there's still a lot that's that's kind of buried a little bit so sometimes it does take some digging I think the future goal of just being able to put in a person's name and having all of their information come up would be amazing and I think we're headed in that direction and it certainly works for you know over the 900 that we have so far but there's still a lot more in there that we need to do so I think depending on how lucky you are and depending on what's out there already you know it's kind of a a little bit of a gamble but just starting somewhere is is probably the best way my answer to that question for what it's worth would be and I speaking from experience of not knowing where to start when trying to research is try to talk to people who and just and talk to everybody you can and and if you get connected with Ohio University as quickly as possible that'll save you a lot of trouble and steps and talk to talk to Nathan and and reach out as quickly as you can yeah and Janet mentioned in the chat that the digital collection is demand driven so when people request certain um questionnaires get digitized then we prioritize those and it doesn't happen the next day but it's in the queue and um so yeah if there is anything that you see in the finding aid or online that you'd like digitized we can you know that's a good way that we add to the collection that's research user driven another question that came through the chat is how how is this funded how can someone help with further continuation and it was partially answered in the chat by Miriam Nelson who said that it's not specially funded and at Ohio University we incorporate the project into our existing priorities I don't know if anyone had anything else to add I did suggest um that Nancy could reach out to me um and also possibly Nathan are you the right person at CRMA to reach out to yes for sure I have another question I'm happy to ask if we got a lull here but Sarah um now having read the questionnaires um and you made that comment about wanting to ask your grandfather questions is there any particular question based on the way Cornelius Ryan asked his uh or wrote out his questionnaires that you or you know what what basically what would you if you're comfortable what would you what would you want to ask today if you could or any specific experiences or is it is it the big questions about the big battles or is it the little personal questions about what were you doing you know how did you feel about this event yeah I think it's more of like the little the little questions and the reason I say that is because I find that you know the big picture I can get that from other sources but how he was feeling and how and whenever we have I had had tried to speak to him about it um like you had said like he didn't want to talk about it he said you know I went over there with sorry that's my god thank you but I went over there with um you know his brother and four friends and he said like I'm the only one who came back so it was very raw but I wanted to know like those things like you know you were seasick or you know what did you do to pass the time or what were you feeling like those really personal things that I think people feel sometimes more comfortable putting in writing to a stranger than they do to their granddaughter or so yeah those little questions like that great question and another question in the chat so hypothetically speaking from what Sarah said could any transcriber work on a document but stop before completing it or does it wait for the same volunteer to get back to it and I can go ahead and answer this I'm Erin I'm one of the project coordinators I work in the digitization unit at Ohio University um it's a joint effort to transcribe even a single folder or account so um you can leave leave a document partially transcribed save your work for somebody else to pick up on it you can't necessarily reserve them or save them for yourself as Sarah might like to do or some of our other transcribers um but I think that people do have a tendency to start one and pick it up later or not continue perhaps what someone else has started and the way that the collection's organized uh each folder is for a different respondent so that's a good way to kind of break up the work is by by person yeah I was gonna just add to that I think that's uh from the page is a great resource um and what I do enjoy about is is you don't have to open account you know if something comes up you don't have to worry about if if you can't complete it somebody else can pick it up but then you know Sarah talking about how she kind of wants to own that one account which I can really understand at the same time so I think it's a really beneficial crowd sourcing tool um and fairly easy to use I do believe that um all of the questionnaires are in English is that could someone corroborate that is that true from what I've seen so far it's all been English I don't personally recount seeing any of the Canadian accounts in French um maybe one of the volunteers can correct me but I think I viewed most of them and I don't recall seeing one it would be fantastic if there was one in French but I don't recall seeing one yeah no they're they seem to be mostly in English and then obviously like the places if they're in France or like a French name like those are like the only French words you'd come across but usually like they're spelled you usually write in the context makes sense because they're plus names and you can find them on the map or like google how to spell it properly if you think it's misspelled if you're not comfortable with French you can look it up I actually find that question interesting because I'm thinking when Cornelius Ryan had put that advertisement in the reader's digest in that time if it would have gone to portions of Quebec because if it wasn't French um maybe there was just not a market so maybe that's like a whole untapped area of of accounts from you know French predominantly French units and and that's just interesting that just made me think that perhaps we're missing a slice of it well one one interesting thing not necessarily related to the different languages but I remember reading my grandfather's account and there's a question at the end that says did you know anyone else who participated in D-Day so people were referring other people and in my case the person he referred actually became someone I began to just research independently and and want to connect with so I think that you know how people would have passed on the references is very very interesting thinking about that but it's it's too bad and I think that's a very very good point that there probably wasn't enough representation by by those units there are accounts in different languages they're not necessarily longest day and they're not necessarily Canadian so there are things in German and some other languages but it's predominantly English well if there are no other questions we could wrap it up a little early here I just want to say thank you to everyone who participated truly truly we're so you know helpful thankful for all your help for being involved in the project and being involved in and doing all the transcription work and all the knowledge you guys bring to it so it's really wonderful to to see and hear your perspectives and thank you so much thanks for inviting