A collection of oral histories of RI women's experiences during WWII, gathered by South Kingstown High School students.

What Did You Do in the War, Grandma? is an oral history of Rhode Island women during World War II. In 1988-1989, students in the honors English program at South Kingstown High School interviewed 36 women who recalled their lives in the years before, during, and after the war. In addition to transcribing the interviews, students researched the period and wrote character sketches of the women they interviewed.

STG redesigned the successful website What Did You Do in the War, Grandma? to improve accessibility and to exploit advances in streaming audio technology. We modified the appearance of the site and made some changes to the navigational structure, making it easier to find the various sections of the site, and making individual pages more readable. STG revised and expanded the timeline, and made one of the interviews available in its entirety, using the newly installed Real Audio server. This included not only digitizing the original tape, but creating a sequence of pages that situate and support the interview in a regional, national, and international context. These pages are presented as HTML files synchronized with portions of the interview. STG also created an additional utility, STG cEvents, to link audio files to transcripts and indexes. This technology was later put to excellent use in the "1968: the Whole World was Watching" project.

In 2009, Marie Force sent us an index she had created to the Grandma interviews, as part of her Masters project in Library Science, and it was appended to the website.

What Did You Do in the War, Grandma? Website is a project of STG (Computing and Information Services)

Contributors to this project include Linda Wood (External Consultant), David Reville (STG), Sara Grady (STG)

Funding for this project came from Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities NetTech (Northeast Regional Technology in Education Consortium