Autumn 2020Data Science Projects

Data Science Project: Did the Professional or Voluntary Status of Nurses in World War I Shape How They Reflect on Their Wartime Experiences?

Posted digitalww
By Devin Deatrich (Autumn 2020 student)

The following embedded visualizations were created using Voyant. These are shown as examples, we encourage you to see more of Devin’s visualizations by following the links in the footnotes of the project reflection below.

Cirrus Visualization of most common words in Testament of Youth (vis. 10 in footnotes):

Cirrus Visualization of most common words in four accounts written by British Q.A. (British Army) nurses (vis. 12 in footnotes):

Word link association within Testament of Youth (vis. 11 in footnotes):

Word link association between four accounts written by British Q.A. nurses (vis. 13 in footnotes):

Excerpt from reflection:

            World War I nurses are generally portrayed in public memory as exceptional heroines who broke the divide between the “home/domestic front” and the European front[1] and brought their feministic duties to serve in the War, albeit in a different form from male soldiers[2]. While much has been researched on the roles of women and nurses in the first World War, much less attention has been paid to how these women thought of their own experiences. One attempt to do such took place right after the war in 1919 by the Women’s Work Committee, who sought to collect exciting reports of firsthand experiences of Army nurses[3]. In this data science project I seek to go a little further than collecting stories from these nurses, I aim to compare four accounts of professionally trained Q.A. nurses from this collection with that of the very famous memoir Testament of Youth by a volunteer V.A.D. nurse using the open-source text reading and analysis site Voyant. My goal is to see whether or not the professional training of nurses, the Q.A.s, or lack thereof, the V.A.D.s, had an effect on how they reflected on the war.

            My first step was to transcribe the four Q.A. into Google Documents so they could be read by Voyant. This process took much longer than expected, but I felt I understood them more as a whole than if I simply read the work; which is what I did with Testament of Youth. For Brittain’s account I was able to find a whole transcript of the work online[4], but I encountered a few issues when moving this work into a google document. Copying the transcript to a google document somehow resulted in a few hundred spelling errors due; I was able to resolve a majority of these, but it is likely that a few slipped in as the work is nearly 700 pages in Length. I believe the only way to do this more efficiently is if I transcribed the work myself, but this would have taken too much time. Now that I had all of my war accounts in readable documents it was time for me to place them into Voyant.

I first placed the four Q.A. accounts into Voyant individually, in hopes to first observe the words each nurse chose to emphasize, and then I inputted all four accounts into a single Voyant program. The resulting word frequencies of each individual account did not differ much from their accounts when lumped together[5]. What I examined was how each Q.A. nurse emphasized their work the most, meaning the “wounded”, the “patients”, or the “men”[6]. Each nurse also paid great attention to where they served, being it a “hospital”, “train”, or “ship”[7]. These high word usage continued in the doc composed of all 4 accounts. The most frequently used words here are “patients”, “hospital”, “wounded “, “men”, & “board” (as in “onboard the ship”, these even the longest memoirs)[8]. Testament of Youth’s most used words, on the other hand, were not as directly related to Brittain’s duties as a nurse. These words include “war”, “time”, “day”, “Long”, and “life”[9]. While the words “men”,  “work”, & “hospital” all appeared as well ,they were at a much less frequent use[10]. It is worth mentioning that I also merged all memoirs into a single Voyant program, but I did not find any useful conclusions from information. The most frequently used words were the exact same as Testament of Youth; this is simply due to it being significantly longer than all four Q.A. accounts combined[11]. This negated any sort of meaningful conclusions.

            By comparing Testament’s most frequent words to those of the Q.A. Nurses does reveal differences between how they reflected on their war experiences. The most obvious difference is that the Q.A. nurses’s appear to reflect most on the soldiers & their work to heal them, while the V.A.D. nurse’s memoir appears to reflect most on her personal interpretation of the war. This conclusion is further strengthened when comparing the most common word links of Testament of Youth to the four Q.A. accounts. The program containing all four Q.As accounts linked the word “hospital” to ” experience(s)”; wounded to ” sick”, ” men”, “carried”, and “lying” ; and “patients” to “morning”, “time”, “lying’, & “kept”[12]. Clearly the focus here was on their wounded patients and their attempts to save them. Testament of Youth, by contrast,  linked “war” to “years”, “end”, and “work”; “time” to “think” and “tide”; and “day” to “night”, “later”, and “came”[13]. While there is some mention to her nursing experiences, Brittain seems to reflect most on her interpretation on the war at hand and not necessarily the wounded men being cared for.

There are a few possibilities for this conclusion.  First is the answer to the question I posed, that of the professional training of the Q.A. nurses affected the ways they reflected on the war experiences and vice versa for the untrained volunteer V.A.D. nurses. Since the Q.A. nurses had more training, their reflections were tailored more to their jobs at hand while the V.A.D. nurses would reflect rather on themselves in the conflict. Another possibility is the sheer length differences between Brittain’s account & that of the four Q.A. reports: Testament of Youth is nearly 230,000 words[14] while all the Q.A. accounts combined is just over 7,000[15]. In Britain’s account she had much more time and space to record not only her experiences but her thoughts on those experiences, while the QA accounts were intended to be more concise (less space to internally reflect) stories on extraordinary accounts of these nurses. Another possible conclusion is due to the different publishing dates of these accounts: all the Q.A. accounts were written in 1919, while Brittain’s was published in 1933. Brittain had an extra 14 years to reflect on her experiences, giving her more time to explore her personal interpretations, while the Q.A. nurses wrote while the memories were more fresh and had less time to digest their personal reflections. This plays into the fourth and final possibility, where the interpretations of nurse experiences were tailored to conform to the “generic expectations of contemporary male antiwar tales of loss, horror, and disillusionment”[16] that “left men emasculated [while empowering] women, including nurses, a degree of matriarchal power”[17]. This conclusion makes sense as many professional nurses already had this sort of “power” prior to 1914 as their work and professional status kept them well within the public Sphere[18]. It was less likely that the volunteers had this kind of access prior to the war. In addition, some comparisons between Brittain’s Testament of Youth and the diaries she kept during the war reveals “the extent to which she rewrote her war story” to fit this public perception of women “escaping the limitations of prewar domesticity”[19]. In the end, the different reflections of the war experiences of Q.A. and V.A.D. nurses is likely to be due to the prior’s professional level of training, influencing their reflections to be more work related while the V.A.D. accounts were more personal. However, these differences could also be due to the different lengths of the account, the different publishing dates, or even have been influenced by the social norms of the time. 

[1] Christa Hämmerle, Überegger Oswald, and Birgitta Zaar. Gender and the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) 109

[2] Hämmerle et. al., Gender and the First World War, 109.

[3] Laurie Marhoefer and Taylor Soja, Nursing Documents Guide A to M.

[4] Brittain, Vera. Testament of Youth, Edited by Devin Deatrich, Archive.org. https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.34310/2015.34310.Testament-Of-Youth-An-Autobiographical-Study-Of-The-Years-1900-1925_djvu.txt

[5] Voyant visualizations here (2), here (4), here (6), here (8), and here (12)

[6] Voyant visualizations here (2), here (4), here (6), and here (8)

[7] Voyant visualizations here (2), here (4), here (6), here (8)

[8] Voyant visualization here (12)

[9] Voyant visualization here (10)

[10] Voyant visualization here (10)

[11] Voyant visualization here (1)

[12] Voyant visualization here (13) 

[13] Voyant visualization here (11)

[14] Brittain, Testament of Youth.

[15] Voyant visualization here (14)

[16] Christine E. Hallett and Allison S. Fell, Nurse Writers of the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016) https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1b3h94f.13, p 378

[17] Christine E. Hallett and Allison S. Fell, Nurse Writers of the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016) https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1b3h94f.13, p 377

[18] Hallett and Fell, Nurse Writers of the Great War, 377.

[19] Ibid.

Bibliography and Additional Voyant Visualizations:

  • Fell, Alison S., and Christine E. Hallett. First World War Nursing: New Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2015.
  • Hallett, Christine E. Nurse Writers of the Great War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.
  • Hämmerle Christa, Überegger Oswald, and Birgitta Zaar. Gender and the First World War. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
  • A. Meldrum Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service Reserve, “A Sister’s Experience on a Hospital Ship,”. Museum of Military Medicine,Aldershot, UK- Doc. 43.1985.12.4, Transcribed by Devin Deatrich
  • Report from A. L. Walker Q.A.I.M.N.S., An Officers’ Hospital in France during the War., Museum of Military Medicine, Aldershot, UK- Doc. 43.1985.12.12, Transcribed by Devin Deatrich
  • Report from K. Flower Q.A.I.M.N.S.R., WITH NO 14 AMBULANCE TRAIN, Museum of Military Medicine, Aldershot, UK- Doc. 43/1985/12/5, Transcribed by Devin Deatrich
  • Report from M. E. Webster Q.A.I.M.N.S.R., NOTES ON THE GALLIPOLI CAMPAIGN, Museum of Military Medicine, Aldershot, UK- Doc. 43/1985/12/9, Transcribed by Devin DeatrichBrittain,
  • Vera. Testament of Youth, Edited by Devin Deatrich, Archive, https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.34310/2015.34310.Testament-Of-Youth-An-Autobiographical-Study-Of-The-Years-1900-1925_djvu.txthttps://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.34310/2015.34310.Testament-Of-Youth-An-Autobiographical-Study-Of-The-Years-1900-1925_djvu.txt

Voyant homepage for Four Q.A. Accounts: https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=5b90490b8c8ba0e98e9043b36ffe60e6