The project aims to catalog and transcribe the handwritten letters of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle during his service in the Boer War (Oct 11, 1899 – May 31, 1902) in South Africa. Arthur Conan Doyle was a British writer and physician. He is known for his work on Sherlock Holmes. The work will be concretized into a website with a digital edition of Doyle’s known wartime letters that will contain: the images of original documents, their transcription (following the setting of a diplomatic edition), the XML version.
Some of those letters will be metadated with XML markup following the rules of the TEI setting for mail. We will improve the web page with the development of an interactive map showing the mailing places of the letters (using tools from Knightlab), a biography of Arthur Conan Doyle (complete with his wartime photos), an historical contextualization of the Boer War, and a section for the comparison with some letters from nurses and soldiers from the same battlefield where was Conan Doyle during the war.
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle KStJ DL (22 May 1859 - 7 July 1930) was a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are milestones in the field of crime fiction.
The outbreak of the war between Britain and the Boer Republics on 13 October 1899 was the culmination of a long campaign in Cape Town by Cecil Rhodes – former prime minister of Cape Colony – and the British High Commissioner Sir Alfred Milner. Their motives were commercial – control of the gold mines in the Transvaal. Arthur Conan Doyle always wanted to participate in the war as a military man or as a volunteer, but due to his age, he was not accepted in the army. But then came an opportunity to show his expertise not as a soldier but as a physician. The Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) was struggling to cope with the huge number of casualties so they offered a volunteer physician and that’s how Mr Doyle was appointed. He volunteered for six months in the war. And during that, he started his journey of writing letters describing his stay.
