USER STORY:

Rediscovering that corner of a foreign field

Great War Digital have captured trench maps using Colortrac and Contex large format scanners

For most people today the only connection remaining with the First World War is a old photograph of a unknown, uniformed grandfather or perhaps his colourful campaign medals buried in a drawer somewhere. Despite the condemnation of the years there is a growing interest in this terrible period when thousands of miles of Great War trenches were built and destroyed at a cost of some 5 million lives.

In the 90 years since the last shot was fired, the vast Western Front trench system that ran from Switzerland to Zeebrugge on the North Sea has been filled in by man or reclaimed by nature. Like the 160,000 British missing, presumed dead, whose bodies were never recovered, the trench system has slowly disappeared from view, merging relentlessly into one with the rolling green farmlands and woods of France and Belgium.

Marina Sinton from New Zealand
visiting Grevillers Cemetery,
where her great-great uncle
James is remembered on the
Memorial to the Missing.

Each year thousands of descendants of those who fought in the British Empire forces - Britons, Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Indians and others - visit the battlefields of the Great War. Many simply want to visit the grave of an ancestor, others come to visit the actual site where a relative was mentioned in Despatches or won a medal for their action. Visitors find the many well-signposted cemeteries and memorials easily enough but the trench systems are more elusive. Most are now mere folds in the ground, a shallow ditch in most places.

The best way to locate the trench systems where our ancestors and countrymen fought and died are the battlefield maps printed by the British Army Royal Engineers between 1914 - 1918. Good examples of these maps are scarce. Most are preserved in national institutions like the National Archives, Imperial War Museum and the Royal Geographical Society, as well as in smaller numbers in private collections throughout the world.

Lest we forget

Great War Digital is a UK company whose purpose is to conserve historical maps and documents by digital scanning and by making them available on DVD to the public. They aim to supply the most comprehensive archive of trench maps possible. It's a project that began four years ago and which will occupy them for several more yet. In the process they have created a software program called LinesMan, "The Great War Western Front GPS Companion". They believe it is the first commercial application of historical data to a satellite navigation system.

Great War Digital's commercial director is Jerry Whitehead, a Map Associate at the Imperial War Museum. He also runs Kingshead Adventures, a UK battlefield tour company offering a bespoke tour service for individuals or small parties who prefer to travel independently rather than as part of a large group. Guy Smith, Great War Digital's technical director, was responsible for the ground-breaking Imperial War Museum CD ROM in 2001 which brought a hitherto unseen archive of 175 trench maps to the public attention. Both are members of the Western Front Association.

The sacrifice of the Canadians
at Vimy Ridge is remembered.

Whitehead and Smith wanted to make historical trench maps available to the public in a format more useful than a simple compilation CD ROM stuffed with maps. Far better, they thought, would be to display geo-referenced First World War trench maps on popular hand-held GPS / PDA devices. This would allow the user to follow the actual trench system by car or on foot and see their exact location relative to the trench maps.

However, before LinesMan could display any trench maps at all Great War Digital had first to find and scan them. During the years they were developing LinesMan, Great War Digital accumulated some 750 British sector trench maps in 1:10,000 scale from major institutions and private collections. Trench maps are usually A0-size maps which fold down to pocket-book size. Drawn on linen, the maps have a hard outer cover made of thick cardboard. When opened the cover is attached to the outside edge, making scanning awkward or impossible on thin media scanners.

First, capture your trench map

Great War Digital employed Document Options Limited of Crawley, Sussex, to scan the first Western Front trench maps which they had accumulated.

Index of trench maps at
1:10 000 scale. Each
rectangle is an A0 trench map.

Document Options Ltd is one of the UK's longest established document conversion centres and claim to offer "a range of products and services which are unparalleled in the market place". Document Options took pains to ensure each map received individual attention and was professionally scanned according to its needs. A number of the trench maps were damaged, many stained with mud, even blood.

Stephen Entecott, Account Manager at Document Options Limited, said "Most of the work was carried out on a Contex FSC 5010, scanning in 8-bit colour and saving as TIFF. The Contex WideImage software is able to scan natively in this format, which is a fairly unusual requirement. Our most experienced operator carried out the work for Great War Digital, making fine adjustments to the image enhancement parameters for each individual map to ensure the highest quality standards were achieved, bearing in mind the fairly restrictive requirement of 8-bit colour".

The Contex FSC 5010 is an earlier model colour CCD (Charged Couple Device) scanner which has now been replaced by faster Contex models with greater resolution. Scanning in 8-bit colour captures 256 colours, more than enough for the trench maps which normally comprise less than 20 colours. The benefit of scanning in 8-bit colour is a smaller file size. Saving the scan as a TIFF file also helps to reduce the file size further.

"As a great number of the trench maps were damaged some considerable repair work had to be undertaken in order to ensure that these fragile documents could be fed into the scanner. As the Contex FSC 5010 accepts a variety of paper types and thicknesses, it gave us the flexibility we required for this task. Trench maps which were too large or too fragile for the Contex scanner were captured in 24-bit colour on a Solar M5 digital overhead-camera using the SilverFast plug-in for Photoshop. The resulting images were carefully converted to 8-bit within Photoshop" said Entecott.

Whitehead was impressed and pleased with Document Options' successful completion of the first scanning phase of Great War Digital's project. The scans which they supplied were clean and sharp and provided Whitehead with the standard by which he would judge scanned image quality from other scanning services and scanners. The first release of Linesman included the Document Option scans covering the trench system of the British sector of the Western Front. However, almost as soon as this was done another source of some 800 trench maps became available in France.

A change of tactics!

As almost all the scanning of the most recently located French trench maps had to be done in France, Whitehead decided to invest in a wide format scanner and do the job himself on-site. It would give Great War Digital the flexibility to scan when and where they wanted. It would also be less expensive than using a scanning bureau. Whitehead had two main requirements. First, the scan quality had to be at least as sharp as what he had got from Document Options and, second, the scanned images should save as suitably compressed files. Portability was a lesser requirement.

Because users of Linesman need to zoom into the scanned image at high magnification in order to see as much detail as possible, Whitehead required sharp, high quality scans. As a result he decided early on in his scanner selection process that what he really wanted was a CCD scanner similar to the Document Options Contex FSC 5010.

Whitehead contacted Softcover, then a Colortrac Premier Accredited Reseller. (Softcover no longer sell scanners). Softcover arranged for Smith and Whitehead to receive a demonstration of a Colortrac SmartLF GxT 42e, a CCD scanner, at Colortrac's head office in St Ives, Cambs. Declan Tyler, Colortrac's SmartLF Product & Application Specialist, gave the demo. Softcover recommended the SmartLF GxT 42e (enhanced colour) because it had a thick media capability suitable for scanning thicker French trench maps and because it was the fastest colour scanner in the Gx series.

Peter de Winter-Brown, Colortrac's Sales and Marketing Director, recalls Great War Digital's visit to St Ives as a "memorable day. It's not too often that we get to speak directly with potential end user customers or ones with such an interesting application.

Great War Digital have created digitally
enhanced Relief Shaded versions of
the Trench Maps.

"It was a strange, almost reverent feeling to hold an original 90 year-old trench map in my hands and through that connect with the originators and users of the document and imagine what they had experienced and endured during the First World War. I find it difficult to explain fully how I felt. This was a document that was much, much more than a piece of vellum with some information printed on it" he said.

Guy Smith showed de Winter-Brown and Tyler how Great War Digital's Linesman software integrated the trench map data produced by the scanning process with modern digital terrain maps (DTMs), allowing the user to zoom in and out of the map, change the 'camera' angle and position, etc., so that the Linesman user can walk along the length and breadth of the trench system with all the 3D topography of the land reproduced. "It is amazing what you can do with a laptop and software these days!" said de Winter-Brown.

Great War Digital purchased a SmartLF GxT 42e a few months later.

After taking the scanner on a short visit to Deepcut Barracks in the UK, Whitehead removed the Colortrac SmartLF GxT 42e from its bulky shipping packaging and transported the scanner in its inner box with its stand in the rear of his Land Rover Discovery 3 to France.

Scanners4CAD finally caught up with Whitehead during a break in his busy schedule.

Scanners4CAD: "How did things go in France? Did you go alone or with help?"

Whitehead: "Two of us went on each trip. We have now been to France twice and to a remote site in England and have scanned approximately 800 maps faultlessly."

Scanners4CAD: "Did you need to recalibrate the SmartLF GxT 42e when you arrived?"

Whitehead: "On arrival at each destination we set up the scanner on its stand and allowed it a one hour warm-up and then performed normalisation and auto-stitch routines."

Scanners4CAD: "Were there any problems or issues while scanning?"

Whitehead: "No. There were no serious problems. Each evening we left the scanner powered On such that the following morning we could repeat the normalization routine and then recommence scanning straight away."

Scanners4CAD: "Did you achieve the scan quality you wanted?"

Whitehead: "Yes. The minimum scan quality required was 300 dpi, 24-bit (16 million colours). This was achieved on all map scans, up to A0 size, with ease."

Scanners4CAD: "Were the files compressed enough for your needs?"

Whitehead: "The files were initially prepared uncompressed for archival standards and subsequently reduced in resolution and size to run with proprietary software and this to date has not presented any problems."

Scanners4CAD: "How would you rate the scan quality from the Colortrac SmartLF GxT 42e compared to Document Options' scan quality?"

Whitehead: "The Colortrac GxT provides at least the quality previously supplied by the bureau with the advantage of us being directly in control."

Scanners4CAD: "Speedwise, was the Colortrac SmartLF GxT 42e fast enough for your needs?"

Whitehead:"The speed is fine, quite remarkable actually. Even with a large map scanned in high resolution it zips through quite quickly."

Scanners4CAD: "How long did it take you to scan 800 trench maps?"

Whitehead: "We scanned 800 or so trench maps during two trips to France. Working about six hours a day we scanned 500 maps in four-and-a-half days on one trip and about 300 maps in three-and-a-half days on another".

Scanners4CAD: "How would you rate the Colortrac SmartLF GxT 42e as value for money?"

Whitehead: "The scanner has fulfilled our needs so far and provides us with more flexibility than previously with the bureau and thus in our situation the scanner has proved to be good value for money."

Scanners4CAD: "Would you recommend the SmartLF Gx 42 series CCD scanners?"

Whitehead: "We would be prepared to recommend this scanner to others."

Scanners4CAD: "When will you make available for sale the scans you have made in France?"

Whitehead: "Our current scanning projects will develop into products for sale during next year - 2008!"

Scanners4CAD: "Overall, are you satisfied with the results of this project?"

Whitehead: "We do not regret purchasing this scanner. The results of our initial scanning are excellent."

Last post

Jerry Whitehead (right) using
LinesMan to locate trenches
and bunkers at Cambrai.

Linesman is now available costing �299 (excl) for a two box DVD set of 750 British trench maps in 1:10,000 scale. It makes trench maps accessible to amateur enthusiasts and professional historians and archaeologists alike, both as an archival tool and as a navigational companion for battlefield research. Whitehead uses Linesman extensively on his Great War battlefield tours of the Western Front, as do other battlefield tour operators.

LinesMan has proven useful for taking customers to precise locations on the battlefield where their relatives saw action.

"We can take our customers to the exact location where a specific action took place - perhaps where a relative was mentioned in Despatches, or even won a medal for their action - and follow in the footsteps of their unit during the Great War. Hand-held devices allow tourists to walk the battlefield and find precise points of interest as detailed on the trench maps or, indeed, map references as may be quoted in documented Orders or War Diaries" said Whitehead.

George McNulty at the site where
his uncle won the VC at Givenchy.

In 2006, Whitehead took George Angus McNulty, the nephew of L/Cpl William Angus, the first Scottish Territorial soldier to be awarded the Victoria Cross, to visit the site where his uncle had performed his act of outstanding bravery. This was the first time McNulty, a Normandy Veteran, had travelled to the site where his uncle had won his VC following a covert night time bombing raid in June 1915. McNulty was able to walk along the exact path taken by his uncle when rescuing a wounded officer in No Man's Land.

"There's a lot still to do" said Whitehead. "There are many individual trench maps in private hands. There are also tunnelers' maps and maps of Gallipoli. German and American maps are something for the future." He estimates that he has another 2 - 3 years scanning work ahead of him.

At the going down of the sun....

"Colortrac is very proud to be associated with this project" said de Winter-Brown. "It not only helps to preserve these historic maps but also brings them to life and makes them accessible for this and future generations who try to understand and remember the sacrifices of our forefathers."

In an earlier interview with Scanners4CAD before this article appeared, Niels Appel, Contex's Vice President, Sales & Marketing, said "I'm proud of being with Contex who do a lot more than 'just make scanners'. Contex help 'preserve history' by making it possible to archive old documents that would otherwise disappear".

How true! Both Contex and Colortrac have done their bit to help Great War Digital save the British Empire's and now Europe's Great War heritage.

Colortrac Ltd
www.colortrac.com

Contex A/S
www.contex.com

Document Options Ltd
www.document-options.co.uk

Great War Digital Ltd
www.greatwardigital.com

Kingshead Adventures
www.kingsheadadventures.com

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