@Arras95

Contribute. Collaborate. Commemorate. @Arras95 Time Machine. 9th April 2012. bit.ly/H9JwhT #arras95 #ukoer

Between the 9th April and 16th May 2012 an experiment in social media will take place. We will tweet the events of the Battle of Arras in real time, from the perspective of a neutral reporter on the field. What makes this Twitter event different from other real time tweeting initiatives (and there are some great ones out there!) is that @Arras95 will engage online communites, crowdsourcing facts about Arras and the individuals who played a part, asking for reappraisals and additions to the action as it happens.

Why are we doing this?

@Arras95 will surface a key, but lesser taught, turning point of the War, providing an innovative opportunity for others to engage in discussion about this historical event. By asking online communities to contribute their own knowledge and materials, @Arras95 will increase open content around this one focal point, providing teachers, students and the general public with a wealth of resources for free use and adaption.

After the event a searchable archive of the Twitter conversation will be made available, open content will be added to the Resource Library of our web site, and the event maps and geotags will be analysed and refined to produce OpenLayers of data for overlay on 2D maps and 3D Earth browsers.

How to get involved

• Follow @Arras95 on Twitter
• Tell your followers to follow @Arras95 on Twitter – blog about us, talk about us, facebook us.
• Engage with us. RT the latest news from the Arras battlefield. If you think further information could be added or another perspective contributed, add your own tweets to the conversation by using the #arras95 hashtag. We welcome tweets in languages other than English and information provided about any of the troops involved in the Battle. If you would like to schedule your own live tweets from Arras, read our Scheduled and Geo-located Tweeting Guide [add link].
• If you are able to add location data to your tweets do so. We’ll be placing tweets with location data on a Google map.
• Can you enrich the community’s experience by linking to relevant photographs, primary source documents or articles to the event? All material that we surface must be open licenced and we will check the license before quoting you. Open licences we will accept include: Creative Commons Attribution, Creative Commons Attribution* Non-Commercial, Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike*; Open Government Licence; Open Parliament Licence; other Open Content Licences; and items in the public domain with no copyright restrictions. Examples of where to find such material include Wikipedia, Wikipedia Commons, The Commons on Flickr.
• If you have photographs and documents in your own private collection and can digitise these with a scanner or digital camera you can make them available online under an open-licence. Here are some of the commonest ways:
  – Upload your images to Wikimedia Commons, the media repository for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects
  – Upload your images to a photosharing site like Flickr, specifying one of the above creative commons licences.
  – Upload your images to your own website, with a clear and unambiguous statement that they are under a specified open licence.
• Add information and links to open content on our Google Event Map. See this short video tutorial on how to do this .

“Attribution” means that the copyright holder must be given a credit.
“ShareAlike” means that if someone uses your picture, anything made with it must have the same licence.