Doing Digital History. Project Story Map

For the third assignment in “Doing Digital History: Introduction to Tools and Technologies”, our class had to create Story Maps with information about someone who had participated in the First World War. The assignment is part of a Master I course at the University of Luxembourg under the guidance of Max Kemman. The task of this project was to find a diary on Europeana 1914-1918 (http://www.europeana1914-1918.eu/de) to retrace the movements of these participants during the war and to try recounting his/her story with a Story Map (https://storymap.knightlab.com/).

Our group consisted of Jérôme Courtoy and Jim Carelli and we decided to use the diary of a German soldier named Hermann Köbele, born in 1897 in Bavaria (Germany). Köbele was part of the Bavarian army, and he fought during the First World War from the 20.05.1917 to 29.10.1918 on the Western front in France. In 1917, at 19 years old, Köbele decided to join the Bavarian army as a volunteer. He left school a few months before his graduation. He was deployed on the Western front for six months until the 29.10.1917 (the last dated entry of the diary). Köbele died 1945 during the Second World War in Hungary.

In 2007, Wolfgang Köbele, who hardly knew his father Hermann, decided to transcribe the war diary for his younger siblings and their children. The original diary recounted his experiences at the front. It contained drafts, postcards and newspaper articles, some of which were from a later date. The Story Map will include some of these extracts. There are some other literary texts by his father (e.g. poems), where he tried to show how a young man made sense of his experience of war.
With the link below, the user can explore the Story Map telling the journey of Hermann Köbele.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/4e2bfdfc9681cf237a4fd3abd74f545a/war-dary-of-hermann-kobele-20-05-1917-29-10-1917/draft.html