About

The War Service Bureau edition is an ongoing pedagogical project to teach digital editing with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) markup. Initially begun as a two-week course module for a general introduction to digital humanities, this edition has taken on independent purpose as a source of work combining technology and history for Rutgers graduate and undergraduate students.

Student editors transcribe, edit, and encode the letters, tagging people, places, and events. We selected a disabilities studies approach to focus in particular on narratives of illness, grief, loneliness, physical and mental trauma, and anxieties (as we see it) related to gender and the world that would await them if they were lucky enough to return. Our data gathering was assisted in a roundabout fashion by the fact that several Rutgers men were posted to the same hospital: Base Hospital No. 8 in Savenay, Loire Valley, France. These men write about each other and about other Rutgers alumni, allowing us as as editors to piece together a more complete picture than we would otherwise be able to do with the information gathered from genealogical databases. A nearby Base Hospital No. 214, treated the victims of shell shock, or post-traumatic stress disorder, including Wilbur Copley Herbert (RC 1917) after the armistice.¹

About the Source Materials

As director of the Rutgers College War Service Bureau, Earl Reed Silvers (1891-1948) is the hub in this correspondence network. Silvers began his work with Rutgers alumni in 1915 as Alumni Field Secretary. He shortly thereafter became assistant to college president William H. S. Demarest. With the U.S. entry into World War I in 1917, Silvers continued his alumni work with the War Service Bureau, founded to “[keep] Rutgers men in touch with the college and with one another” (see fig. 1). The service proposition was a bimonthly newsletter with “all the campus gossip,” issues of the Rutgers Alumni Quarterly, and personal correspondence to anyone writing Silvers directly.² Silvers also served as editor of the Rutgers Alumni Quarterly, which meant he orchestrated a constant flow of information from the letters to the Quarterly. He regularly annotated letters with missing dates, correspondents’ names, or the word “COPY” and directed clerical staff to type transcriptions of handwritten letters by Rutgers men and their family members.

As a graduate of Rutgers College class of 1913, Silvers was a relatively young man himself. He knew many of the men he corresponded with personally, either from Rutgers or from Rahway, New Jersey, where he grew up and lived with his wife Edith I. Terrill. In 1917, he and Edith welcomed their first son, Earl Jr. (nicknamed “Mike”). The correspondents who knew him call him Sil or Reed and they frequently connect on shared topics of interest like athletics or the Delta Phis (Silvers’s fraternity).

Training Materials

A slightly outdated tutorial for contributing to the project, based loosely on an assignment by M. H. Beals, may be found at https://github.com/giannetti/TEI-Close-Reading. Stay tuned for updates to our project documentation.

Data and Software

The War Service Bureau edition uses the Jekyll static site generator with the Ed theme for minimal editions. A few selectors were added to the _ed.scss file to render structural elements typical of correspondence and surveys, such as postmarks, sender and recipient addresses, pre-printed text and handwritten responses. See the project’s GitHub repository for more.

The TEI-XML encodings of the letters, together with the project schema and various processing stylesheets, may be found on GitHub at https://github.com/rutgersdh/wsb-data.

Recommended Citation

Personal correspondence from the Rutgers College War Service Bureau: a minimal documentary edition. Edited by Francesca Giannetti, assisted by Eden Biskin, Gabriella Hudyka, Madiha Maajid, Barbara McIntosh, Alissa Renales, and Rutgers Future Scholars interns. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University–New Brunswick, 2024. https://rutgersdh.github.io/warservicebureau/.