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Success Stories
A rare collection of World War I photographs taken by a young soldier
For three recent high school graduates in PEI, producing the Jack Turner's War web site was an eye-opening experience. During the digitization of 200 photographs and over a dozen texts and articles, the youths came face-to-face with the gruesome reality of trench warfare. The students were confronted with photographs of soldiers no older than they were, sloshing through muddy trenches, their destiny uncertain.
Nicholas Burka, 19, his twin brother, Daniel, and Nathan Fredrickson spent the summer of 1997 creating a web site showcasing the unique photographs of the Jack Turner collection. Turner was a young PEI native who spent four years on the front lines of World War I battles. During those years, he secretly snapped photographs, developed them under astoundingly primitive conditions, and smuggled them to friends for safekeeping.
In order to ensure their respective nation's support and to fend off enemy spies, the Allied forces forbade soldiers any use of photographic equipment. During WWI, most front line photographs were censured from civilian eyes due to their horrific and devastating nature. Despite the Allied restrictions, Turner carried his camera wherever he went. His photos are graphic and to Burka, they are disturbing. "In one of them," he describes, "there's a kid of about 16 -- younger than we are now -- and we know that he died about three months after the photograph was taken."
Burka was especially moved by the shots of Passchendaele, one of the ugliest, bloodiest and muddiest chapters of the War. "The photos really capture the moment," Burka says, still overwhelmed by the horror of the bloodshed. "Considering the circumstances that Turner was living in, it's really amazing he was able to get the pictures."
The opportunity to digitize and post Jack Turner's War on the World Wide Web came through SchoolNet Digital Collection, a unique Industry Canada program. Funded by the federal Youth Employment Strategy, the Digital Collection program has enabled over 1400 young Canadians (ages 15-30) to gain valuable work experience in the multimedia sector. By converting significant Canadian content for display on the Information Highway, Canadian youth have not only gained skills for knowledge-based employment but have provided greater access to Canadian holdings located in archives, libraries, museums, associations and other sources.
The three students were hired on contract by Canoe Cove Studio, a P.E.I. graphic design firm. Owner Christopher Jette, an architect and graphic artist with experience in web page design, instructed the youths on technical basics such as photo scanning. "The guys we hired were excellent," Jette says. "They picked everything up very quickly and we're very pleased with how the project went."
Jette says he also gained experience from the project; he learned how to manage these sharp young minds and "keep them focussed." He assures us that the students were "all self-starters, so there was really no problem." Burka acknowledged that nothing prepared them for the enormity of the Digital Collection project. More than 100 photographs had to be scanned, categorized and properly labelled in just over seven weeks. They succeeded thanks to the skills and expertise of each individual who contributed to the well-tuned team.
They explored the possibilities multimedia offers by including real audio to record archived clips of an interview with Jack Turner. "I'd never recorded sound files before, so the whole experience taught me a lot about the technical side of web page design," Burka says. "It also taught me a lot about the war and history, and that made it especially interesting."
Now a freelance graphic artist, Burka is certain his newly acquired skills will translate into other jobs. The experience acquired during the Digital Collection project "looks great on my résumé and I learned a lot."
Visit the SchoolNet Digital Collections World Wide Web Site at http://collections.ic.gc.ca/
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