War Service Bureau
The Personal Correspondence of the War Service Bureau is a pedagogical project to teach digital editing with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) markup to students. The letters of the Rutgers College War Service Bureau collection (1917-1919) encompass many vivid and diverse perspectives on the war experience, from men of different military ranks and socio-economic backgrounds, to chaplains, medical personnel, women working in the war effort, and women left at home. We focus on a subset of letters that shed light on the topics of mental illness (shell shock), Spanish influenza, physical injury, death, loneliness, and grief.
The edition uses a minimal computing approach to keep technical and editorial complexity to a minimum. Encoders tag information on people, places, and events, which may be reused to create tables and visualizations, such as the correspondence maps included on selected correspondent letter anthologies.