Anzacathon

Activities for everybody

• Study the honour roll of your village, company, school or club or start with our list of lone Anzac graves
• Put the names in a spreadsheet. Add in missing details, especially the service numbers, these are really useful for search engines.
• Find the records in the National Archives. Search using name and service number. If you don't have service numbers, try using their name with the year of death, year of birth or home town until you find a match.
• After you have the service numbers, you can type the last name and service number into any search engine, like DuckDuckGo or Google, to find more documents.
• If your Anzac heroes are buried abroad, make connections with the community there, especially for communities where they only have a small number of Anzac graves.
• Search foreign archives for additional photos and documents related to your Anzacs. Consider searching using foreign words, like chute d'avion (plane crash) in French, there are sites in German too.
• Use the Mural software to build a site about an Anzac. Here are some examples that we built already.

For programmers, hackers, data scientists and power users

Study the data sets that we are sharing over IPFS, see this walk-through.

Create innovative reports based on the data. For example, out of 20,000 cemeteries around the world, how many have only one Anzac like this?

Use reporting software like Eclipse BIRT to build visual reports about the data.

Develop queries to detect errors, inconsistencies and duplicates in the data and provide feedback to NAA, the AWM and other organizations

Use tools like Scrapy to obtain Anzac information from the web and share it in IPFS

Using the honour rolls from your village/organization, create a calendar of Anzac anniversaries. Publish it as an iCalendar file over IPFS too.

Using the anniversary data, develop a mechanism to automatically include announcements in your intranet or web portal on the relevant days

Develop a script to automatically extract images from NAA, AWM, CWGC and Wikimedia Commons and auto-generate Mural web sites for each Anzac

We have provided two different tables of location data, the CWGC cemetery locations and the Traces of War locations, which includes cemeteries, monuments, sites of plane crashes and similar data. Try to automatically correlate the data to identify monuments related to Anzacs. Try to automatically identify the monuments and cemeteries missing from OpenStreetMap.

Help organizations like NAA, AWM, CWGC to publish their full data sets over IPFS in accordance with the Australian Government's Open Data policy.

Get prepared

Get a copy of the honour rolls from any places or organizations you participate in

If you live abroad or plan to travel abroad, locate any Commonwealth war graves there

Install the IPFS peer-to-peer software so you can share our large data files. We don't want everybody to access the NAA simultaneously and overload their server.

Create an account in the National Archives online forum and introduce yourself there

Create an account with OpenStreetMap and find other mappers near you