 D procurement. I thank you for the introduction earlier and for the opportunity to speak to you this afternoon. I'm speaking on behalf of my team that Rebecca introduced earlier, so my colleague Paul Nicholson and also Hilary Reese. I'd like to talk to you about our project, Views of an Antique Land imaging Egypt and Palestine in the First World War. We're based at Cardiff University but we have a very fortunate received heritage lottery funding for our Mae'n gwneud bod am ystod o'r holl bwysig, ac mae'n gweithio'r rhai o'r bynnag o'r ffordd y llwyth gwybod o'r rhai o'r pwysig o'r llwyth gwybod o'r ffordd o'r holl bwysig? Mae'n gweithio'r bwysig o'r holl bwysig. Rhyw gwrthod, mae'n gweithio'r ffordd o'r holl bwysig o'r holl bwysig o'r holl bwysig, ond o'r ffordd ymlaen i'w gwybod. Ac yn y g 늦, ymlaen y cartwn ymlaen yw'r ddweud ychydig yma yw'r ymlaen yma yw'r gael yma. Yr ystod, nid oedd yw'r cyffredin, yn ddod o'r llwyddoedd ymlaen ymlaen yw'r Egyfryd, ond yw'r jynt yn i gynnydd i ddefnyddio, i ddefnyddio allan o'r cilydd a'r iawn i'r cyffredin. Dyma yma yw'r ymlaen yw'r eitiannau ymlaen yw'r eu cyffredin i'r ymlaen yw Egyfryd, Egyftu. Roeddwn i'r project yn gweithio'r enw yn gyflym iawn i'r canfeydd o Egyftu yn Palastau. Felly, byddwn i'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio, ond mae'r ffocws yn y ffdon wahanol, a'r ffordd o gweithio'n gweithio yn y bwysig yn gyflym ymddangos ym mwy oed. Felly wnaeth beth o'r ffocws ym gyffredin o'r canfeydd o Egyftu yn Palastau. Roedd mynd i os gallwn gwaith a bod hynny yn y form o fotógrafau, i'r form o postcard, i'r form o postcard-converted images ond mynd yn ddechrau o archaelog才ng, i'r wneud camps, a'r wneud acioedd, yn rhanol, ond, i'n geifio'r locatio ond dweud. i chi sylfaen i'r ddysgu? A'r ddysgu yn y ffordd yma, yma yw yw 1914 a 1918, yn y cyfnodol, y llwynt ar gyfer ymdweith. Mae'n ymdill yma'r persepeth y ffrif, y Llyfrgell, y Llyfrgell, y Llyfrgell, ymwysig a'r cyfnodol, ac sef i weld y llyfrgell, y Llyfrgell, y llyfrgell, y llyfrgell, eu llyfrgell, y Llyfrgell, y Llyfrgell i chi? One of the things that we've been talking about quite recently is when we think about Egypt now, for many people, one of the first things they think about is Tutankar Moon, Howard Carter, so on and so forth, but at the time of the First World War, of course, none of that was in place. We have a different perception of Egypt and Palestine, the archaeology of that world than we do in the present day. And also, being archaeologists, we're interested in how the archaeological sites have changed from then until today. So many of them have gone through significant transformations in the last hundred years, and a lot of that is to do with making them more presentable to tourists as well as the ongoing archaeological research. So that's the main thing that we're focusing on, collecting images. And at this stage, I guess we're in the process of going from the physical entities to virtual entities. So we're doing a series of road shows, a number of which we've already had and some which are forthcoming, where we're inviting people to come along with any kind of collections of images that they have of the Egypt and Palestine campaigns dating to the First World War. So, for example, we've been to Firing Line, the Museum of the Welsh Soldier in Cardiff. We've been to the Petrie Museum. We've been to the Tank Museum. Very recently, two weeks ago, we were at Oxford University for the TE Lawrence Society. And we've had a lot of response of people coming in with collections of individual images, series of postcards. Many people were buying commercial postcards and then sending them home at their time to let their loved ones know how they're getting on. But we've also had entire albums of images, which may have 50 or 100 images in, which we weren't expecting at all, that people had kind of photo albums of their tours, their experiences while they were out there in Egypt and Palestine. And we've got another series of road shows coming up. So, we're going to be at Canaven Castle in the weekend after next and at the National Civil War Centre in Newark in November. And that is particularly to coincide with an exhibition of the Great Arab Revolt and Lawrence of Arabia. So, we're trying to tie those aspects together there. So, we're collecting our objects, as you like, our images at road shows, and then during that process, we're simply scanning them or re-photographing them. And during that process, we're also conducting training and workshops. We work with a series of volunteers, and they are volunteers from the various institutions or locations that we work at. We have our road shows at, so they can be curatorial staff and museum volunteers at the various locations, some of whom have military experience, which is something that we don't. And one of the interesting points about the previous two talks is about who are the experts and reaching out to experts. So, one of the parts of the things of physically going out and doing road shows is trying to make connections and who are the people that know about this kind of material more than perhaps we do as archaeologists is reaching out to military historians as well. But we're also conducting workshops in schools drawing upon some of the material that we've collected so far. So, our School of History, Archaeology and Religion at Cardiff University has a series of workshops in schools throughout South Wales. These are to secondary schools, and these are all about trying to encourage school children to think about what universities do at an early stage, so it's about widening access and outreach. But one of the workshops that they've been doing recently has been all about the First World War. And what they do is that they have a series of characters, real characters, who are based from South Wales, but who had different kinds of experiences during the First World War. So, one of them is an evacuee, one of them is a nurse, and one of them is a private Horace Lewis, who we found out about through one of our donors coming to one of our road shows. And for each of those workshops or each of those characters have a collection of items that help the school pupils think through who that person might be and what their different experiences during the First World War might well have been. And for our character, Private Lewis, we had a Kodak Vesper camera, we had a map of Cairo, we had a little souvenir box from Egypt, but we also had a series of postcards or copies of postcards that he'd written home to his sister. And at the end of that workshop what we asked all the pupils to do was to write postcards themselves as if they'd been out in Egypt and Palestine and what the kind of things, how would they communicate their experiences back to people. And here's some examples of some of the postcards that they've done. What we're very interested in and what we became interested in this, I don't know if you can read any of these, they make for some interesting reading if you do get the opportunity. But what was really interesting was that many of the school children had never really come across the idea of a postcard before and the fact that you write using postcards and send them home after you'd been somewhere, which was not something that we'd ever thought about, but it was new to us. But it was obviously very, very fundamental to what our project is doing. This is a whole idea of communicating by writing by postcards and sending them home. I mean obviously different forms of media are used to that effect these days. So in a sense the workshops have become a way of crowd-sourcing in different ways of thinking about how people communicate at different times, different periods in the past, but in different frame of works. I mean I don't know how people communicate in more times now, but I'm sure it's not through postcards. So that I'm encouraged just to think in different ways. So with the items that we're collecting, our main output I guess is to create a website where those materials will become available, which we're currently in the process of constructing now. That's a holding website address now as we build towards the main interactive website where people will be able to access the images that we've collected through our roadshows, as well as hopefully what we're hoping is to add additional information about the images, the postcards. They might have information about regiments, about uniforms, about where military activities, about military hardware, so on and so forth, that perhaps we don't know or our donors don't know about. So it might help people find out more and also the ancestors of the people who served there find out more about, sorry, the descendants find out more about their ancestors. So we're working currently with the Centre for Digital Archaeology, who are based in the Bay Area in San Francisco, and they have developed this company which is based on expertise in working with images from archaeological projects. So they used to work at UC Berkeley, University of California Berkeley, but then they went off and set up their own projects. So they got sort of 15 years of experience of working with images for archaeological projects, which is why we were able to form a relationship with them, having worked with them before. And so they are developing a database for us, which enables us to put all of our content in the individual images, and many of the images have content on the back. So they might be in the form of postcards with information about dates, locations, publishers of the postcards, as well as comments that the people writing the postcards were sending home. Here's an example of one of the images from our database, and you can access the image itself, but also we can add metadata about the image front and back. And then from the database, the idea is that this would automatically upload into our website, which is currently being developed, and will then make that content available. So you can see the front and the back of that particular postcard there, which is dated to the 16th of May, 1916. And we have some information about that postcard now. What we do know is that those were a series of wounded soldiers who were at the Mina House Hotel. I don't know if anybody knows the pyramids, but there's the Mina Hotel there near the pyramids today. But during the First World War, that acted as a hospital, so many of the soldiers were there. But it was a common thing, like it is today, to have your photo taken in front of the Sphinxes and in the pyramids, so you'll see many photos like that. But equally important is the information on the back of the postcard as well. So we're trying to make, transliterate that and make that information available. But hopefully other people, once the website is fully active, will be able to contribute additional information that we don't know about the content of the images, and also about the content about what's written on the back of the images. So just to talk you a bit more about some of the surprises, some of the interesting things that we've discovered along the way, things that we didn't really anticipate, which are encouraging us to think in new directions. I just mentioned about the Mina House Hotel as it is now, but it was a hospital during the First World War in the front of the pyramids. But during the First World War, there was also the Mina Camp, which was behind the pyramids. And that was a lot of the service personnel there were Australian and New Zealand, but also British. And this comes, this is an example from a serviceman called Herbert Sanford, who served out there. He was in the Royal Field Artillery. And one of the interesting things about this picture is you probably see next to the great pyramid to the left of it, there is a cross there. And that is where they had a heliograph station located on the pyramid during the First World War. And that was to send signals using the sun and mirrors to reflect light out to the British residency in Cairo. So that's got us thinking about, well, where is the Mina Camp? Where was the Mina Camp in relation to the pyramids? Well, we think approximately about there, but hopefully we can find more detail about that. But he is getting us to think spatially about the information that we're getting. This is a picture of the platoon that Herbert was in, and you can see the heliograph there with the arrow underneath it. But this is where we think they were signalling from the pyramids through to Cairo. This is where the British Embassy in Cairo is today. But at the time they were sending signals out to the British residency, and we're trying to work out now if they're in the same place, and we're hoping that people will be able to help us find out that information. And where that kind of technology was being used for communications at the time, and how very different that is to what we're doing today. So we're using, we're thinking about spatial technology that can use us, add additional layers of information which we haven't previously thought about. We've been getting information coming through about hardware through the war, which there's not surprises, but we didn't know how many tanks served out in the desert during the First World War. So here's an example of HMLS War Baby that was destroyed in one of the battles of Gaza. But we've now been able to search in various different locations. This is the map of the battlefields around Gaza during the First World War. We think it was located at Outpost Hill that tank was destroyed, and then we can compare that with modern mapping to think about how landscapes have changed through time. I mentioned Private Lewis earlier on. He was in the Welsh Regiment, then the Army Service Corps and the Remount Corps, and he was sending lots of photographs back to his sister who was based in Penarth just outside Cardiff. But the great thing through those postcards is that we can track his movements during his Egypt and Palestine campaign. So he was in 1917, he was in Cairo, then he was in Alexandria in July 1917, then he moved back to Cairo in 1918, early 1918, then he was in Jerusalem for Christmas of 1918. He stayed in Jerusalem, but on his way to Damascus in February 1919. He was still out in Beirut in April 1919, so beyond the end of the First World War, and then finally made his way home via Marse, as long as late as August 1919 after the war had finished elsewhere. So that's what I'll be able to add a narrative around individual personnels, people that served out there, which I think adds an interesting thread that people can more easily connect to. Other interesting things which we didn't expect from George Durstan, who served out in Egypt during 1916 and over into early 1917, but he was making Christmas cards out of part of his khaki shirt and then sending them home. Something which we never anticipated, but it's an imagery in a way which we never thought about, but that's one of the opportunities if you go out on these roadshows and do these sorts of things, you'll come across extraordinary things which you never thought about. So that's one example there. And another example is a pincushion that private Evan Jones, who was in the Royal Arby Medical Corps, and then later the Royal Flying Corps, he had made whilst he was out there with a photograph to show that he was well and then sent back home. Again, another thing we never imagined we'd come across, but that goes to show that some of the surprises that you might come across when you're sourcing data in these kind of ways to tell stories in different ways in ways you probably never thought you would be able to do. So, as I say, we're still conducting roadshows. Our website, which will contain the data, the images we've collected so far, will be available soon and will be available for comment. Additional information that we hope people will be able to supply, but also for an opportunity for people who aren't able to come to our roadshows to donate material directly to the website via that. So all donations gratefully received. Thank you very much, and just to acknowledge our funders, our project volunteers, our roadshow hosts, and our university as well. Thank you very much for listening.