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)