About Jack Peirs….

This week, I decided to review the Jack Peirs Project. The link can either be found on our Project resources page or here http://jackpeirs.org/.

A professor, archivist, and a group of students at Gettysburg College created this project as a way to share this World War I letter collection with the public and to provide a learning opportunity for students. Although not specifically stated , the audience is the general public, students, scholars, and whomever has an interest in World War I. The research questions that the project appears to be asking is: Who is Jack Piers? and What was it like to be a soldier during World War I?

Overall, the website is very easy to use. There are only a couple tabs to navigate and they are all labeled for easy navigation. The home page is aesthetically pleasing, clean, and neat. However, I found that the site was slow to load. The writing was very clear and concise. Although it was scholarly writing, I was able to understand what was written. The site did not read like a traditional paper; it had a more personal tone to it.

The site contains two About pages. One page is about the project and the other is about Jack Peirs. But, there is no other technical information regarding the creation of the project. The site is powered by WordPress. There is a Timeline embedded in the site powered by Timeline JS, and twitter is embedded at the bottom of the page which updates and lets the viewer see tweets from Jack Peirs. Although I am not using Timeline JS, this was the main digital tool that was used as for the project. I think Timeline JS was chosen because it was able to represent at which point the letters were written. It is both a visual aspect of the project and a form of navigation. My only critique is that the Timeline was very slow to load. I also saw that there was a map in the making. I think the map will add another visual dimension to the project. It will be interesting to see where Jack Peirs toured in Europe and what battles he fought in.

There is a lot that you learn from this  project that you wouldn’t be able to learn from a traditional research paper. You wouldn’t be able to have an interactive timeline and map in a research paper. There also would not be any hyperlinks or tags that allowed you to learn more about what you were reading. Overall, the project was very well made and interesting. There is a story behind the project that makes it interesting and engaging to read.