About MarineLives

Editorial history.

Created by JW 05/04/14

CONNECTING PRIMARY SOURCES CHARITY & THE MARINELIVES PROJECT

Connecting Primary Sources Foundation

Connecting Primary Sources is being as a new Charitable Incorporated Organisation by the leadership team of the MarineLives project. Its stated goals are: “To encourage, develop, run, manage, support, and digitally publish collaborative educational ventures, bringing together academics, schools and the general public in the field of history.”

The charity will provide a legal and administrative home for MarineLives project, over time it will originate additional projects, and projects originated by others. The charity will be led by a board of trustees, with advice from a panel of academics and institutions.

MarineLives Project

MarineLives is an innovative academic/public history not-for-profit organisation for the collaborative transcription, linkage and enrichment of primary manuscripts, originating High Court of Admiralty, London, 1650-1669. The end product will be a freely available online academic edition under a CC by 3.0 licence.

Since the project’s inception in September 2012, project volunteers have transcribed, edited and annotated over 1.5 million words. The team is seeking to create a fully searchable semantic web based corpus of over 20 million words by 2017.

Advised by an all volunteer leadership and advisory team. MarineLives has two co-founders and directors:

Colin Greenstreet he studied human sciences, philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford, and was the recipient of a Kennedy Scholarship to study at Harvard Business School. His career has been spent in finance, consulting, pharmaceutical R&D, and as an entrepreneur, most recently in Mumbai and London.

Jill Wilcox passion for family history led her to complete a history degree at the University of Hertfordshire as a mature student. Subsequently, she has spent thirteen years as a secondary school teacher and head of department. She recently completed a MEd in leading teaching and learning at the University of Cambridge. Throughout her career Jill has used technology to engage and assist her students in their learning.

MarineLives has established an ambitious collaborative research programme for 2014 and 2015. involving partnerships with the departments of History and Creative Computing at Bath Spa University (England), the Data and Web Science Group within the department of Informatics at the University of Mannheim (Germany), and the department of History at the University of St. Andrews (Scotland). The project team is also exploring potential collaboration with individuals and departments at the University of Ancona (Italy), the École Polytéchnique Féderale de Lausanne, and the University of Pennsylvania (USA).

What people say about MarineLives “Good history creates a kind of shared narrative and memory – a community of understanding. MarineLives builds that community into the very process of researching and writing about the past. MarineLives suggests one of the ways that history can be re-imagined for the online and the connected.” (Professor Tim Hitchcock, University of Sussex, co-director of Old Bailey Online, London Lives, Locating London’s Past)

“MarineLives has huge potential to produce new insights, not only into Britain’s maritime past, but also insights into what might be the future of archival research” (Jo Pugh, former Education and Outreach Officer, The National Archives; PhD candidate in Digital Humanities, University of York)

Commenting on material on the international coal trade derived from the Marine Lives corpus: “The material on the coal trade is interesting and unexpected – it shows … how significant the corpus could be.” (Professor Martin Daunton, Economic Historian, Master of Trinity Hall, Head of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Cambridge)