We had a great  turnout for the first CWSMC of 2011 and everyone was keen to hear from BBC Coventry & Warwickshire’s Siobhán Harrison to talk about  Beyond the Blitz – a commemoration of the bombing of Coventry in 1940. From the initial idea of collecting 70 stories for 70 years for broadcast on the radio, the project grew and became a multiplatform affair incorporating many different parts of the BBC.  One of the hightlights of the project is the interactive map where memories, photos and experiences are plotted where they happened, adding a new dimension to the historic record.

As well as the recordings, the project also tried an experiment in social media with the @BBCCov1940 Twitter account. This ‘real-time’ newsroom reported events as they would have happened 70 years ago and included links to Pathe newsreel and audio news reports re-recorded but taken from scripts that had been used at the time. The culmination of the 14th November was a steady stream of tweets that reflected the events on the night and clearly engaged a new audience of followers.

Siobhán talked to us afterwards to give a flavour of the presentation (which is above, minus the audio/video clips) and as always a big thanks to our speaker Siobhán for the fantstic presentation and insight into a really amazing project that hopefully has a lasting legacy online.

But thanks to Steve Rumsby’s mighty forearms you can also see the full presentation below or on Vimeo

February news

We are back at Coventry University’s ICE next Friday 18th February from 10am-12pm – you can sign up using EventBrite…but at the moment we are struggling for a speaker, so if you’ve got any ideas or want a captive audience to talk about anything digital next week then leave a comment or get in touch with either Paul Squires (@paulsq) or @cwsmc on Twitter.

More pictures

Full presentation on Vimeo