Creating a mind-map of the War poets

[Stuart]

Dear All,

You may have seen information that we received a bit more funding to
'enrich' the First World War Poetry Archive (http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/
ww1lit). This will involve two activities - 1) adding Sassoon's
manuscripts, and 2) creating resource packs, teaching material, and
demonstrating web 2.0 applications.

With reference to the latter one thing I'd like to show is how a tool
such as a piece of mind-mapping software can demonstrate something
interesting.

What I have done, therefore, is take a preliminary stab at showing -
in a mind-map - the relationships between the poets we have
concentrated on in the project (or will be) and show how they might
have known each other, etc. By no means is this complete, but it
begins to show poets who were clearly at the centre of things
(Sassoon, Thomas, Graves, and eventually Owen) and those who were on
the periphery (Leighton, Jones, Brittain).

I have used the free piece of software called VUE designed at Tufts
University. You can download this at http://vue.tufts.edu/. You need
to do this to look at, or edit, the file I I have uploaded to the
group (poetmap.vue).

What I was wondering is whether the group could assist with this. I
think there are two potential tasks:

1) check I have not made any errors in the mind-map and add anything
which is clearly missing

2) take the mind-map in new directions, by creating a new map in
itself, e.g. start to show in more depth relationships with artists
from the period, musicians, psychologists/anthropologists, etc
(poetmusic.vue, poetartists.vue, and so on).

What I would hope to do then is make all the mind-maps available on
the web site of the project for people to use in teaching. If you are
interested then please drop me an email and we can discuss further.
Any contributions to the mind-map, however, must be done in agreement
with the standard licence (JISC/HEFCE) we use in the project, i.e. you
agree to your work being disseminated free of charge for educational
use across the world, but not to be used for commercial use. (Sorry to
be so legalese).

So I have uploaded my first mind-map. Feel free to use it as you see
fit but if you are willing to add to it let me know *beforehand*
(stuar...@oucs.ox.ac.uk) and I can try and co-ordinate activities.

Key to the map:

ORANGE = the main poets of the project
GREEN = other people the poets knew or interacted with
BLUE = publications
Lines = how 'a' interacted with 'b' with a short explanation

VUE, in theory, also allows you to add hyperlinks to web sites which i
will try to do later on.

Yours

Stuart (Lee)
University of Oxford