71 14 15 16 17 18 The GreatWar Booth’s shell-shock diary is part of the Operation Canada Digital War Diaries Project, housed at the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University (Figure 3), where it has been digitized and made available online, along with a scholarly transcription and research contextualizing it, provided by a team of national and international experts and more than a dozen students immersing in these artefacts. The Operation Canada Digital War Diaries Project focuses specifically on personal diaries. The term “war diary” has long been used to describe only the officers’ official regimental logs, relegating all other diary writings into the more generic category of personal writings. Consequently, diaries written by soldiers and war workers overseas and by homefront workers across Canada are not accounted for, and only a fraction have been fully digitized. However, they deserve our attention because they are intricate artefacts that offer human stories as well as visual and material information, as evidenced, for example, in Matron Inga Johnson’s 1917 autograph book (Figure 4). Created in the Canadian General Hospital in Étables in northern France, it visualizes not only the network of relationships but the Figure 3: Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre, The Operation Canada Digital War Diaries Project, Landing page, 2021, https:/ wardiaries.ca/s/operationcanada/ page/home. Figure 4 Inga Johnson, Drawing of Canadian “Bluebird” Nurses and a Soldier, Inga Johnson Notebook, 1917-1918, Digital Frame 87, The Operation Canada Digital War Diaries Project, MLC Research Centre, Toronto. Courtesy of CanadianWar Museum Archives, Ottawa.
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