So, in working backwards and therefore in a nonlinear progression the film comes from the book. And the book is Black Hawk Down. In this case, it's a a tidying version so that lovely man, Josh Harnett, whose name I can barely say, is on the cover of this as well. That's published in 1999. We have before that the publication of Mark Bowden's investigative journalism within the context of the Philadelphia Enquirer. Now You will be used to just going to the website and you will be expecting there to be sidebars and hot links and a whole range of things. I find what the Philadelphia Inquirer and Mark Bowden has done with those articles, in terms of a site which is now kept going from I think the articles were published in around about 1997. Very interesting. Because it has in a sort of a microcosm created its own archival reference point. Now I'm going to go through some of the pages in this site. I already encouraged you to go a little earlier to go and look at it to give you a familiarization of the topic. but let's just, I know I used the word reflect and reference just far too much in this but let's just go and reflect on what we've seen here and reference to the material. Now just going back through these, the first thing to bear in mind is this is right in and it is a reflection back, as I said, on what happened. Was it a success, how do we actually consider it? I find this very interesting, as I said, because at the very top, one of the things we have here is what is, a hotlink to the garrison letter. This is Garrison's reflection immediately after the event. He's considering the information that he had that led him to make the decision to commit. And then he's reflecting back on the, the factors that did not work so well. I mean, 18 men dead I don't mean to underplay this. It's primary evidence. This is archival evidence that I wouldn't expect to be seeing so readily after the event. So, we've already got just a little bit of a transition here from a website, newspaper articles. And suddenly it is, as I said, as a microcosm of an archive of the information around it, around that particular engagement shall we say. Now I just want to take you back through one or two of the other pages. I really want you to explore this in full detail and, and consider this in a more rounded way. how much if you were going to write an essay on this. How much would you base on exclusively on the source we wouldn't advocate that. But the fact that it branches out. I use the term augmentment I think is quit an important consideration in this regard. One of the things that's been added here. Are clips from radio transmissions and interviews for those involved at the time. So, we're moving away from the printed text, your interaction with a statement that is available all the time, compared to something which might be transient. Thankfully, here it had been recorded. And now you have access to it. Some of it is very difficult to hear. I'm not at this point going to try and play any of it because let's face it, we're having to deal with London buses behind us. But again, you get a feeling of immediacy of the events. And that again can change your perspective on what's going on. Now, let's go and look at one or two of the other pages on this particular site and again consider how you might use these coming back and reviewing what's going on. Again I'm not going to play these now. But you have the video clips not links YouTube but in some cases the original Pentagon footage which has been released and linked to this page. If you go down here, it starts to deal with testimony from a number of different sources and it is, coming up, with a different perspectives as the events go through. Now you can watch these continuously or you can cross reference them with the individual chapters. And it might be worth you doing that just in terms of having read the text. Then taking a step back, and saying, and does that make more sense to me, hearing either contemporaneously? Or reflecting on it in terms of interviews after the event, what the people are directly involved with doing. I made the point a little bit earlier to the, the excellent film crew who are having to put up with me. Hi, guys. that Royal Holloway, we, in twentieth Century history deal with a, a number of quite challenging events, and of course, one of them is the Holocaust. Testimony , oral history, et cetera is a very important way to try and contextualize what was a devastating part of Western culture. So, the fact that you have access to audio and video in this site I think is, is something that, again expands your experience. We're talking about visual images having impact and principally in terms of photographs. Now, you have a, a number of multimedia ways of putting, ideas together. If you go back to the main index page you will see that it is set out chapter by chapter, I linked up a little bit earlier to the analysis, but as we go through this there is the branching across. You get the text, you get the hot links in there. So you can make a decision on how you actually interact with the information that's given. You can make a decision as to which pieces appeal to you most and concentrate on them. It is not just simply the book. Very good book, know this. Finally just to give you some idea of the geography of what's going on. there are number of maps which highlights how, the troops were intended to extract Aidid's the lieutenants from around the Olympic hotel site. And then what the plans were to defend and. extract the helicopter crews in particular. So while they're very stylized it gives you a, a more realistic view or at least a stylized view that you can relate to as to the environment these men were working in.
