New World War 2 Bomb research website and mobile app launched
Thursday 29th November saw the launch of a new research website and mobile app called Bomb Sight. The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) funded project, lead by the Department of Geography’s Dr Kate Jones, maps the London WW2 bomb census between 7/10/1940 and 06/06/1941. Previously available only by viewing in the Reading Room at The National Archives, Bomb Sight is making the census available to citizen researchers, academics and students wanting to explore where the bombs fell and to discover memories and photographs from the period.
The locations of the falling bombs over an 8-month period of the Blitz have been combined with geo-located photographs from the Imperial War Museum and geo-located memories from the BBC’s WW2 People’s War Archive. The project demonstrates the clustering together of lots of different data using the power of geography. In time the data will be made available under a creative commons licence and has the potential to be used in lots of different types of teaching and learning activities within the department and beyond.
You can start discovering London’s wartime past at http://bombsight.org/
