Wednesday, July 12, 2012
Recruiting volunteer project experts,
project facilitators and project associates for MarineLives, a project
using collaborative transcription, linkage and enrichment of High Court
of Admiralty primary manuscripts, 1650-1669.
MarineLives is an
innovative academic project for the collaborative transcription, linkage
and enrichment of primary manuscripts, which were originated in the
High Court of Admiralty, London, 1650-1669. The end product will be a
publicly and freely available online academic edition.
The
project is being conducted with the support of The National Archives,
Kew, and will work collaboratively on high quality digital images for a
complete volume of the court's records, selected from the period
1650-1669.
The C17th High Court of Admiralty in London dealt with
a range of maritime and commercial issues, including ship seizures
during times of war, and wage disputes involving ships' crews, captains,
owners, and freighters. The court's records provide a rich source of
commercial, material and social history, as well as a source of maritime
detail. They cover English, Scottish, Irish, Swedish, Danish, Dutch,
Flemish, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Genoese, Tuscan, Venetian, and
Ottoman merchants, mariners, ships and trade.
We are now seeking
academics to join us as part-time volunteer project experts (ten to twenty hours commitment) and project
facilitators (twenty to fifty hours commitment) between August and
December 2012. Project induction and training will be provided in
August 2012, with full project kick-off in early September 2012. Current
team members include postgraduates and academics at the University of
Cambridge and King's College, London.
Project associates, who are
asked to volunteer fifty hours of research time between September and
December 2012, will be drawn from interested postgraduates, graduates,
school students, and amateur local and maritime historians, both within
and outside the United Kingdom.
Volunteers for all three roles
(project expert, project facilitator, and project associate) are welcome
from both within and outside the United Kingdom. We have a particular
interest in recruiting English speaking project volunteers from
Barbados, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey.
This project offers
participants an opportunity to acquire and deepen their digital
editorial, project management, semantic markup and data mining skills.
Please contact the project team ([log in to unmask]), if you would like further information, or access the project website (www.marinelives.org)