Difference between revisions of "MarineLives"

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==We need your help to create three thousand biographies==
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==Celebrating our tenth anniversary this year==
  
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'''To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the founding of Marine Lives we aim to make publicly available and searchable by the end of 2022 a high quality machine transcription of 34 mill words of English High Court of Admiralty depositions, 1574 to 1688.'''
    <div style="background: #b0c4de; padding: 5px 10px 5px 10px; font-size: larger; font-weight: bold;">Anchorsmiths, apprentices, bakers, ballastmen, blockmakers, boatswains, booksellers, brewers, brokers, butchers, captains, carpenters, chandlers, cheesemongers... mariners, master's mates, merchants...stevedores, stewards, steersmen, turners, upholsterers, vintners, watermen, widows, winecoopers, woodmongers and yeomen</div>
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<div style="font-famil:Garamond; font-size: normal;">'''We need the help of volunteers to create three thousand biographies of men (and some women) who gave evidence in the High Court of Admiralty in the 1650s.'''
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'''These witnesses range from anchorsmiths and bakers through to woodmongers and yeomen. Over eighty-five different occupations. Aged between seventeen and eighty-two. From most parishes in London, and many in Middlesex and Surrey, but also from Brazil, from Angola, and from Persia.'''</div>
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To give you a flavour of what is involved, please take a look at any of the following people: The shipwright and ship's carpenter '''[[William Venus]]''', the grocer '''[[Henry Tulse]]''', and the sailor and foremastman '''[[Henry Betts]]'''. Click on their names and you will go to a short biography and factbox about the person.
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[[File:Our HTR Goals Revised 11092022.jpg|1000px|thumb|left|Celebrating our tenth anniversary]]
  
You can see the simple form which has been used to create these biographies by typing one of their names into the box below and clicking on "Create or edit a MarineLives biography", for example "Henry Betts". You will be able to see the information as it has been entered by a volunteer. To be able to edit the information, or to create a new biography, you will need a Username and Password. Please [http://marinelives.org/wiki/Special:MarineLivesContact contact us] if you would like to learn more about volunteering.
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[[File:Model 3.322 Three 12032022.jpg|1000px|thumb|left|We are already getting excellent results from our machine transcription models]]
  
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[[File:Model 3.322 Two 12032022.jpg|1000px|thumb|left|This machine transcribed test page is the start of a deposition made in 1630 in the English High Court of Admiralty. There had been no manual correction of the transcription.]]
  
{{#forminput:form=SemBioLongInfoBoxThreeWithBanner|size=50|default value=|placeholder=Type name of an Admiralty Court deponent|button text=Create or edit a MarineLives biography|new window}}
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[[File:Model 3.322 Four 12032022.jpg|1000px|thumb|left|Here are the learning curves and formal performance characteristics of our Series Three C17th Secretary Hand models optimised for English High Court of Admiralty depositions]]
 
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[[File:Henry Betts 28072016.PNG|700px|thumb|center|MarineLives profile of [[Henry Betts]]]]
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{{#ask:
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[[Henry Betts]] OR [[Henry Tulse]] OR [[William Venus]]
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|mainlabel=Deponents
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|limit=0
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|Searchlabel=Click to see data table
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|?Occupation
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|?Birth year
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|?Res parish
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|?Res town
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|?Dep date
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|?Dep start
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|intro=The data in the factboxes will be fully searchable and available to all users of our wiki, as will the text biographies - a chance for each of you to help the project and to make a contribution to historical research.
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}}
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</div>
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</div>
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==MarineLives research agenda for 2022==
  
==Interviews with historians==
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'''Marine Lives celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2022. To mark reaching the remarkable digital age of ten we announced in March 2022 our goal to publish by the end of 2022 a high quality machine transcription of sixty volumes of English High Court of Admiralty depositions for the period 1574 to 1688. This initiative will use handwriting recognition models we are developing for C17th Secretary Hand and links to the first point in our four point research agenda for 2022:
  
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1. Developing and optimising keyword search algorithms for C17th Secretary Hand in English language English High Court of Admiralty manuscript documents.
    <div style="background: #b0c4de; padding: 5px 10px 5px 10px; font-size: larger; font-weight: bold;">Interviews with Historians</div>
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<div style="font-famil:Garamond; font-size: normal;">'''We are conducting a series of interviews with professional historians about their use of electronic search in support of their research strategies'''</div>
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Recent interviews include social historians Dr Andy Burn (Durham University) and Dr James Brown (University of Sheffield) and maritime historian Dr Cathryn Pearce (University of Greenwich)
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[[File:Dr Andy Burn 09072016.PNG|100px|thumbnail|left|[https://durham.academia.edu/AndyBurn Dr Andy Burn, Durham University]]]
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2. Completing the next phase of our metadata for the HCA 13/ series. Currently, we have metadata for 22,000 deponents from the years 1570 to 1688, supported by 50,000 digital images held offline.
  
Dr Andy Burn is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Durham. His current research concerns "Social Relations and Everyday Life in England, 1500-1640", a Leverhulme-funded project led by Professor Andy Wood. The first year of this project involved extensive research across England in local record offices and archives in which Andy examined mainly legal documents generated by Church and National courts. Andy's research is now moving more online and will mine State Papers (using State Papers Online) as well as Early English Books Online (EEBO), plus local records accessed electronically.  
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3. Publishing a [http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/HCA_30/636_Project_Home_Page#Work_product_by_the_HCA_30.2F636_team hybrid digital edition of three ship account books from the 1620s and 1630s], taken from HCA 30/636.
  
[http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Tools:_Team_Two#Dr_Andy_Burn.2C_University_of_Durham Click here to read the interview with Dr Andy Burn].
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4. Organising two workshops with the Oldenburg Prize Papers team on (a) Developing a broadly applicable digital C16th and C17th commercial document ontology (b) Forming and developing an online international community to study mariner letters.
  
 
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[[File:Dr James Brown 08072016.PNG|100px|thumb|left|[http://hridigital.shef.ac.uk/brown Dr James Brown, University of Sheffield]]]
 
  
Dr James Brown is based at the University of Sheffield. He is affiliated both to the Sheffield HRI Digital group and to the Sheffield history faculty.  He is currently one of two research associates on the project [http://www.intoxicantsproject.org 'Intoxicants and Early Modernity: England, 1580-1740' (ESRC; PI: Professor Phil Withington)]. James completed his PhD at the University of Warwick on Inns, Taverns and Alehouses in Early Modern Southampton in 2008. Between 2009 and 2013 he was project coordinator and then digital project manager for 'Cultures of Knowledge: Networking the Republic of Letters, 1550-1750' at the University of Oxford (Mellon Foundation; PI: Professor Howard Hotson), overseeing (inter alia) the development of its union catalogue of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century correspondence, [http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/. Early Modern Letters Online].
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==Creating a Ground Truth==
  
[http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Tools:_Team_Two#Dr_James_Brown.2C_University_of_Sheffield Click here to read the interview with Dr James Brown]
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'''We are creating a bespoke HTR model to read C17th English Secretarial hand. We plan two models. The first using 500,000 words from our existing diplomatic transcriptions of HCA 13/72. The second will be twice the size, and will add an additional 500,000 words from an earlier volume of HCA depositions.'''
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[[File:Dr Cathryn Pearce 06072016.PNG|100px|thumbnail|left|[http://www.gre.ac.uk/ach/study/hpss/staff/cathryn-pearce Dr Cathryn Pearce, Visiting Lecturer, University of Greenwich]]]
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Dr Cathryn Pearce is an American maritime historian, living and working in the South West of England, who has studied and worked in Alaska, Canada and England. She was an active transcriber in the MarineLives project team back in 2012, when the project was first established. She received her BA in History from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and her MA in British and Maritime history from the University of Victoria in British Columbia. She received her doctorate  in maritime studies from the University of Greenwich. She edits the peer reviewed online journal Troze for the National Maritime Museum, Cornwall.
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[[File:Contact Us 10032022.jpg|750px|thumb|left|Contact Colin Greenstreet (Marine Lives) or Holly Brewer (UMD) if you would like to learn more about our work on machine recognition of C17th Secretary Hand]]
  
Cathryn's current research project is on life saving and coastal communities. This project centres on the private physical manuscript archive of the Shipwrecked Mariners Society. Cathryn has imaged the minute books of the Society, together with associated materials, and is now transcribing the material and exploring the background of the many individuals mentioned therein. The archive is located in Chichester and is a purely a paper archive with no electronic finding aids or search engine.
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Below an image showing the first manuscript page from HCA 13/72, which we have now entered into Transkribus.
  
[http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Tools:_Team_Two#Dr_Cathryn_Pearce.2C_University_of_Greenwich Click here to read the interview with Dr Cathryn Pearce]
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[http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Marine_Lives_guide_to_creating_a_Transkribus_Ground_Truth Click here] to view pages we are developing to illustrate practical aspects of creating a Ground Truth
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[[File:HCA 1372 f1r GROUND TRUTH 02032022.png|750px|thumb|left|HCA 13/72 f.1r: entered into Transkribus as part of the Ground Truth we are creating]]
  
==The Silver Ships research project==
 
  
[[File:SilverShipsEtchingDu-Gard BL.PNG|300px|thumb|right|Etching from Thomas Violet, 'A True Narrative of som Remarkable Proceedings Concerning the Ships Sampson, Salvador, and George' (1650s). Source: British Library: [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)] licence]]
 
 
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    <div style="background: #b0c4de; padding: 5px 10px 5px 10px; font-size: larger; font-weight: bold;">Our volunteers</div>
 
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<div style="font-size: normal;">'''Our volunteers make the MarineLives project special. Do please [http://marinelives.org/contact-us.html contact us] if you would like to discuss volunteering, or if you have ideas to improve our wiki.'''</div>
 
We would like to recognise and thank all those who have contributed to our project (in alphabetical order), whether as volunteer transcribers, annotators, commentators, advisors, interviewees, or PhD Forum participants.
 
 
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Dr Aquiles Alencar-Brayner
 
Dr Roberta Anderson
 
Deborah Ashby
 
Rachel Bates
 
Rowan Beentje
 
Dr Richard Blakemore
 
Lior Blum
 
Katie Broke
 
Dr James Brown
 
Dr Andy Burn
 
Elio Calcagno
 
Michelle María Early Capistrán
 
Rachel Carter
 
Giovanni Colavizza
 
Dr Justin Colson
 
Thierry Daunois
 
Dr John Davies
 
Thomas Davies
 
Jonathan Dent
 
Melvyn Dresner
 
Dr Stuart Dunn
 
Professor Kai Eckert
 
Bob Egan
 
Dr Charlene Eska
 
Louise Falcini
 
Emilie-Jane Farrimond
 
Dr Janet Few
 
Sara Fox
 
Dr Ian Friel
 
Dr Perry Gauci
 
Marja Geesink
 
Adam Georgie
 
Jaap Geraerts
 
Jamie LH Goodall
 
Guy Grannum
 
Colin Greenstreet
 
Francesca Greenstreet
 
Adam Grimshaw
 
Karen Gunnell
 
Yerevag Hagopian
 
Dr Liam Haydon
 
Phillipa Hellawell
 
Dr Helmer Helmers
 
Dr Philip Hnatkovich
 
Rachel E. Holmes
 
Dr Jenni Hyde
 
Steve Ives
 
Alex Jackson
 
Stefan Jäggi
 
Elin Jones
 
Sue Jones
 
Ross Keel
 
Dr Patricia Keller
 
William Kellett
 
Sara Kerr
 
John Kuhn
 
John Layt
 
Sjoerd Levelt
 
John Levin
 
Grace Mallon
 
Simon Marsh
 
Dr Alan Marshall
 
John Miller
 
Anne Mills
 
Kate Morant
 
[http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/User:MatthiasMuellerProve Matthias Müller-Prove]
 
Professor Steve Murdoch
 
Dr Shavana Musa
 
Harriet Richardson
 
Gordon O'Sullivan
 
Katherine Parker
 
David Pashley
 
Dr Cathryn Pearce
 
Nga Phan-Bellis
 
Professor Simone Paolo Ponzetto
 
Jo Pugh
 
Patrizia Rebulla
 
Bethan Reynolds
 
Daniel Richards
 
Andrew Richens
 
Dr Mia Ridge
 
Dominique Ritze
 
Dr Gavin Robinson
 
Margaret Schotte
 
Steven Schrum
 
Laura Seymour
 
Ida Sjoberg
 
Edmond Smith
 
Daniel Stewart-Roberts
 
Chad Stolper
 
Roger Towner
 
Alexis Truax
 
Dr William Tullett
 
Oliver Turner
 
Dr Brodie Waddell
 
Samuel Watson
 
Jill Wilcox
 
Royline Williams-Fontenelle
 
Ad van der Zee
 
Dr Kathrin Zickermann
 
Dr Suze Zijlstra
 
Cäcilia Zirn
 
and the ever helpful but anonymous [https://twitter.com/_mapnut @_mapnut]
 
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'''Three large ships (The ''Salvador'', the ''Sampson'' and the ''Saint George''), of supposed Lubeck and Hamburg build and ownership, were captured by the English in 1652 with highly valuable cargos of silver bullion.'''
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==Fantasy Early Modern book competition==
  
'''The ships were on their way from Cadiz with bullion from the Spanish West Indies going northwards. It was disputed in the English Admiralty Court as to whether the ships were bound legally for the Spanish Netherlands, or illegally for Amsterdam.'''
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'''Announcing a one week FANTASY EARLY MODERN BOOK COMPETITION.'''
  
The case was endowed with political as well as commercial weight - the Commonwealth, and then the Protectorate, was keen to have the bullion declared lawfull prize, but the Spanish government contested this.
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'''Rules: List the chapter titles of a fantasy book you WISH EXISTED and post to the [https://twitter.com/Marinelivesorg @Marinelivesorg Twitter] account.'''
  
The many and varied court depositions and other English Admiralty (and English and Spanish State Paper) records give very granular and highly colourful accounts of Seville and Cadiz, Hamburg and Lubeck, the Spanish Netherlands, the by-ways between the Spanish Netherlands and Amsterdam by which bullion could be smuggled overland and by canal, and the River Thames, where the ships and sailors were held following seizure.
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'''Winner(s) will be those book titles/chapters which get MOST LIKES ON THE [https://twitter.com/Marinelivesorg @Marinelivesorg Twitter]  account.'''
  
Thomas Violet, a rather dodgy goldsmith, was involved as an agitator on behalf of the State, and published a pamphlet pleading for reimbursement of his efforts, which supplements the Admiralty Court material on the MarineLives wiki.
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Here is my starter:
  
The Silver Ships project was launched by participants in the [http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Tools:_Three_Silver_Ships#Research_goals_and_approach MarineLives 2015 summer transcription training programme] and continues to be driven by volunteers.
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TITLE: <u>Early Modern Economic Lives</u>
  
'''Click to [http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Tools:_Three_Silver_Ships#Narrative read more]''' about the Silver ships and the historical and legal context of the resulting disputes.
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CHAPTER 1: Talking about work: Early Modern workers describing their occupations and work places
  
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CHAPTER 2: The melding of work and home and its implications for participation of men and women in commercial life
  
==Our team based transcription programmes==
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CHAPTER 3: Everyone lies: The importance of accurate record keeping
  
We run regular team-based transcription programmes on-line, facilitated by trained team leaders, with teams of three or four volunteer associates. These programmes last ten weeks, and will take a transcriber from a novice to a confident transcriber in that space of time.
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CHAPTER 4: The role of the Early Modern bookkeeper [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Accounting-Growth-Stripping-Camouflage-Accounts/dp/0712652809 accounting for growth]
  
Please [http://marinelives.org/contact-us.html contact us] to discuss volunteering, or to explore how we might work with your University, School or Local History Society.
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CHAPTER 5: Service driven functional literacy: How Early Modern international trade drove and was a product of literacy
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[[File:Thomas Davies 14052015.PNG|210px|thumb|left|Thomas Davies]]
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'''Thomas Davies was a third year history undergraduate student studying at Bath Spa University. In the summer of 2014, Thomas was a member of a four person virtual team of volunteers transcribing Admiralty Court witness statements from 1658 to 1660, facilitated by Dr. Philip Hnatkovich in Pennsylvania:'''
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CHAPTER 6: Risk and probability: How people thought about individual and group risk, and how it affected their commercial decision making
  
"There were some challenging aspects of the programme — the main being distance. This was because we worked as a team and half of the team were based in the United Kingdom and half were based in the United States, so we had to be aware of time differences and that we would be unable to meet in person.
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CHAPTER 7: Free will, contract, indentured labour, enslavement: Concepts underpinning the Early Modern labour market
  
To combat this we used email, Google Hangouts, and Skype and made good use of all the resources available to stay in touch when working on the documents together. We had weekly calls to discuss team business. The weekly calls helped because we would talk about the problems or issues we faced weekly and how the transcriptions were to be presented covering topics such as layout or abbreviations.
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CHAPTER 8: How to make Early Modern money (and keep it)
  
The biggest challenge I faced in the transcription itself was becoming accustomed to the peculiar writing and distinguishing letters. Some letters look very similar, such as f’s and s’s, r’s and c’s not to mention t’s and l’s. I began transcribing effectively by taking it slow and working out the letters individually instead of looking at the word as a whole as we do with modern writing. I found this approach to be very effective.
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'''Here's a possible plan. Assemble a group of authors, recruited through Twitter, who will write and publish the Fantasy EM book as an open source online book. The book would be peer reviewed by its readers, and will go through various iterations as readers comment, suggest and offer to improve.'''
  
MarineLives created a Bath Spa student section that helped me significantly, showing templates of letters and the different forms they have. This allowed me to tackle the many different writing styles the clerks used. Once I was able to distinguish between letters more clearly with considerable practise, I found I could transcribe enough of the page to get a good idea of what was being said in the documents. Then, I could alter words that did not fit within the context of the deposition, or using the context as a guideline as to what certain words should be."
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'''If we go with Early Modern Economic Lives (and I'm happy to go with a different Fantasy EM book), I (Colin Greenstreet) would be happy to write a draft of chapters three, four and five, but would need collaborators to write the remaining chapters.'''
  
[http://marinelives-theshippingnews.org/blog/2015/01/05/our-team-reflections-from-the-summer-programme-2014-part-2/ Read full article]
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'''What do you think?'''
 
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[[File:Katherine Parker 14052015.PNG|250px|thumb|left|Katherine Parker]]
 
  
'''Katherine Parker is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. She is currently writing her dissertation entitled “Toward a more ‘perfect knowledge': British geographic knowledge and South Seas exploration in the eighteenth century. She participated in the MarineLives Ph.D. forum in 2013, and the MarineLives summer programme in 2014:'''
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==New Year's wishes 2022==
  
"On summer research trips to London in 2011 and 2012, I had looked at a few HCA documents and knew that the cases recorded in them offered rich material for social, economic, and naval history. Over the course of several skype meetings, I and other PhD students got to give our opinions about the proposed platform and methodology for transcription. Working with a team created a strong community aspect to the project from the beginning; I have always been impressed by the inclusiveness and openness that drives MarineLives. Also, it was refreshing to have my opinion valued as a PhD student, as sometimes that stage in one’s education is isolating and transitional—you are not yet qualified as an expert, but also not unknowledgeable about certain fields.
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'''2022 is the tenth anniversary of the founding of Marine Lives. So here are our New Year's wishes for the next ten years for Marine Lives and for Early Modern studies generally.'''
  
The value MarineLives placed on the voices of the PhD forum made me want to participate further, even though the works being transcribed were not strictly within the chronological bounds of my dissertation project. Thus, when the summer transcription project was created, I jumped at the opportunity to use paleographic and transcription skills I had gained after a year in London archives on a Social Sciences Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (2013-14).
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<u>New Year's Wish One</u>
  
Writing styles change over time, just like clothing and furniture styles. Thus, the letters inscribed within HCA volumes from the mid-seventeenth century posed a challenge for me, as I am used to the fluid, upright cursive (often written by a trained scribe or clerk) of the mid-eighteenth-century Admiralty. I came to enjoy the challenge of squinting at the digital pages in front of me, willing the words to make sense, filling in paragraphs slowly until suddenly they all made sense."
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Digitisation and open licence publication of the C17th manuscript records of the [https://search.lma.gov.uk/scripts/mwimain.dll/144/LMA_OPAC/web_detail/REFD+CLA~2F004?SESSIONSEARCH Mansion House Justice Room] and of the [https://www.westminster-abbey.org/about-the-abbey/library-research/muniment-collection Westminster Abbey Muniments].
  
[http://marinelives-theshippingnews.org/blog/2015/01/11/our-team-reflections-from-the-2014-summer-programme-part-3/ Read full article]
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<u>New Year's Wish Two</u>
  
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Development of AI-enabled search tools for discovery within and synthesis of large scale digitised manuscript collections, bypassing the need for the manual creation of archival metadata.
==MarineLives Digital Pop Up Lab==
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'''The MarineLives Digital Pop Up Lab started this week.'''
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<u>New Year's Wish Three</u>
  
'''Team 1 will work on prototyping semi-automated handwriting recognition'''
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Implementation of federated search using AI-enabled search tools across multiple large scale digitised manuscript collections
  
We will explore line and text block recognition of legal documents using software tools developed by the Transkribus project. If we can get a Java coder on the team, we will embed the Transkribus tools in the MarineLives wiki. The team will work with C17th records from the English High Court of Admiralty and from the King's Bench. We will explore whether Transkribus tools can be used by volunteers to create metadata for virgin manuscripts for which there are neither existing metadata, keywords, nor full text transcriptions. We are interested in both the software and workflows required to systematise the creation of metadata and keywords to make previously "invisible" manuscript images discoverable.
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<u>New Year's Wish Four</u>
  
[http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Tools:_Team_One Click here for more detail on Team One]
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Development of Early Modern Material Lives to complement Early Modern Marine Lives, broadening scope from marine to land based occupations, and emphasising the interaction of Early Modern workers with the physical world.
  
<div style="float: left; vertical-align: bottom; margin-right: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; background:#dcdcdc; border: 1px solid #b0c4de; width: 450px;">
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'''[http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_wishes,_2018 Click here] to see our 2018 New Year's wishes.
    <div style="background: #b0c4de; padding: 5px 10px 5px 10px; font-size: larger; font-weight: bold;">Popular Finding Aids</div>
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'''[[Tools: Slavery|Slavery]]''' - Lists 34 English, Dutch & Portuguese slave ships in 1650s HCA records
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'''[[Tools: Probate records|Probate records]]''' - Lists full text transcriptions of merchant wills available on MarineLives wiki
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'''Please Tweet your comments on our New Year's wishes to [https://twitter.com/Marinelivesorg @Marinelivesorg] and share your own New Year's wishes for technologies to support historical research'''
  
'''[[Tools: London 1677 Directory probate record lookup|Probate & London directory 1677 lookup]]''' - Matches merchants in 1650s Admiralty Court records to Probate records and listing of merchants in 1677 London merchant directory
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[[File:Litle London Directory 1677 JC Hotten 1863 Piece 190114 copy.PNG|thumbnail|center|200px|[https://archive.org/stream/littlelondondir00lond#page/2/mode/2up John Camden Hotten (ed.), Little London Directory of 1677 (London, 1863)]]]
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==New MarineLives project: Researching three ship account books from the 1620s and 1630s: HCA 30/636/==
  
</div>
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[[File:Ship Diamond August 1637 Setting Out To Mallaga f,61r Ratcatcher Image 20212029 145150.JPG|620px|thumb|left|Item: Paid the Ratcatcher: 4''s'' - 4''d'', Account book of the ship the ''Diamond'': setting out expenses to Mallaga, 1637; HCA 13/635/2]]
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'''Team 2 will work on tailored algorithmic search, and will prototype semantic search methods on our semantic media wiki'''
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[[File:Account Books 13102021.JPG|800px|thumb|left|HCA 30/636 in all its glory, just waiting for some collaborative work by volunteers]]
  
We will explore how historians approach historical search when they are looking for people, places and dates. We will look at search engines employed by archives and libraries such as the National Archives and the British Library, at search tools provided by digital resources such as British History online and at federated search tools such as Connected Histories. We will look at search tools, glossaries, and lookup tables on the MarineLives wiki. Our focus will be on how historians really work, and on how technology can be used to speed up and make more effective the day-to-day task of historical search.
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'''Are you interested in a startup collaborative online project to look at, partially transcribe and understand three ship account books from the 1620s and 1630s? You have come to the right place. Marine Lives is launching a new project and is seeking volunteer collaborators. This will be a project about co-creation of a public resource, which will be published on the Marine Lives wiki and made available to all - public and academic historians alike (and those just intrigued by our past).'''
  
An explicit goal of team two will be to understand the semantic properties of the MarineLives semantic media wiki. This wiki was implemented in May 2015 by one of our volunteers, Rowan Beentje. With four million words of full text, over 10,000 manuscript images and over 20,000 pages, improved search will have a dramatic impact for all users of the wiki. A number of potential semantic search plug-ins exist, and we would like our volunteers to specify the functionality our users need and to explore the appropriate semantic search solution.
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HCA 30/636 is a document category which has been created to cover certain papers generated by the Prize Court jurisdiction of the English High Court of Admiralty papers. It contains nine sub-references. We have imaged all the documents within HCA 30/636 and will be making these available to volunteer collaborators online. Documents include three beautifully leather bound account books of various sizes, further paper bound account books, a letter copy book of letters written from on board ship, and various miscellaneous accounting documents relating to multiple voyages. In all we have over one thousand images.
  
[http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Tools:_Team_Two Click here for more detail on Team Two]
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We are in start up mode. Our current thinking is to make the images available on DropBox or OneDrive and to use this MarineLives wiki as our collaboration platform - to share ideas, to provide support, and to be the vehicle to publish our transcriptions and synthesis.  But we are open to your ideas about how to organise this project and nothing will be finalised until we have our team in place. You can get up to speed on our thinking by reading this [https://twitter.com/Marinelivesorg/status/1448320605384753156 Twitter Thread].
  
[http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Tools:_Semantic_Queries Click here for background on semantic search techniques] applied to the MarineLives wiki
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We have had expressions of interest from people from many places - Mexico, Michigan, Texas, London, Newcastle to list a few - which is perfect given the virtual nature of our project and the broad geographic scope of the papers which include multiple voyages from England to the West Indies, the Mediterranean and to Northern Europe.
  
[http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Special:Ask Click here for access to the Special:Ask Semantic Query Form] to query our the MarineLives wiki
+
We will be sending out an email to everyone who has expressed this interest this weekend (Saturday, October 16th 2021), and will invite people in that email to take a look at some sample images and to tell us about their research interests, skills and ideas for this project.
  
'''Team 3 will work on visualisation techniques'''
+
This is going to be a very relaxed project running through to the middle of 2022 in which people are welcome to dip in and out, and to do as little or as much as they have time and interest for.
  
We will explore how visualisation techniques can be used by historians for multiple purposes - to improve the discoverability of data, to highlight and analyse linkages in data, and to aid the comprehension of data. We will undertake an analysis of our own needs as historians and will explore how software designers have approached meeting those needs.
+
If you are interested in learning more, '''[https://twitter.com/Marinelivesorg follow Marine Lives on Twitter]''', tweet your interest and we will get in touch with you by Twitter direct mail.
  
An explicit goal of team three is to understand the visualisation potential of the MarineLives full text corpus and to explore approaches to mining the data for visualisation applications.
+
You can also '''[http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/HCA_30/636_Project_Home_Page access our HCA 30/636 account book project home page here]''', which we are starting to populate. Come join us and help us fill in the blanks.
We would like to explore the use an off-the-shelf Named Entity Recogniser to detect places, ships and dates, and to visualise the results in multiple ways and for multiple analytical purposes. We would like to compare this automated approach to the generation of tagged data to the hand extraction of geographical and other tagged data. We will build off earlier work done in collaboration with the Department of Informatics at the University of Mannheim. Team members will have an opportunity to work with, and improve upon, a MarineLives dataset for C17th ship sailing times between ports and dwell time in ports
+
----
 
+
==Women and Early Modern record keeping==
[http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Tools:_Team_Three Click here for more detail on Team Three]
+
  
'''For further background please use our [http://marinelives.org/wiki/Special:MarineLivesContact contact form].'''
+
'''In November 2021, MarineLives participated in an online seminar on Women and Early Modern recordkeeping, co-hosted by [https://oieahc.wm.edu/fellowships/fellows-since-1945/postdoctoral/caylin-carbonell/ Caylin Carbonell] and [http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Volunteer_research_interests_and_goals#Colin_Greenstreet Colin Greenstreet]. We hope to develop some of the themes of this seminar in 2022'''
  
'''For information on the technical background to the MarineLives semantic media wiki and to the three teams, please look at [http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Tools:_Tech_Talk 'Tech Talk' by our semantic media wiki designer, Rowan Beentje]
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Our contribution to the seminar was to a series of case studies from C17th English High Court of Admiralty depositions, in which [http://www.marinelives.org/wiki/Women%27s_investment_activities_and_record_keeping '''women testify about their investment activities and record keeping.''']
 
----
 
----
==The Court records==
+
==About MarineLives==
  
<div style="border:1px solid #90C0FF; background:#D0E0FF; width:99%; padding:4px; margin-bottom:10px">
+
[[File:About MarineLives 22012018.JPG|800px|thumb|left|MarineLives volunteers, past and present, 2015-2018. [[Tools: Biographies|Read more about them here]]]]
<div style="border:1px solid #90C0FF; background:#F0F0FF; width:99%; padding:4px">
+
[[File:Court_Procedure_060515.jpg|400px|thumb|right|Admiralty court procedure]]
+
  
'''The [[Introduction to the High Court of Admiralty|English High Court of Admiralty]] produced a wide range of documents. [[Court Records|Click here for a full listing of the Admiralty Court records within scope of MarineLives project]]'''
+
'''MarineLives is a collaborative volunteer driven project. The project started as a spinoff from a National Archives hackathon in early 2012. We are exploring lives touched by the marine world between 1540 and 1690. Commerce, materials, language and correspondence.'''
  
The various steps in a particular case can be followed in summary form in the '''Acts of Court'''.  
+
At the core of MarineLives is the collaborative transcription, linkage and enrichment of primary manuscripts from the English High Court of Admiralty, together with thematically related manuscripts from international manuscript and printed document collections.
  
A case was commenced with the issuing of a '''Warrant''' by the Court, and the preparation of a '''Libell''' or an '''Allegation''' by the party commencing the case.
+
In the past ten years over 250 volunteers have contributed to our transcriptions and to our synthesis of the many themes which constitute lives in the Early Modern marine world. Currently, we have {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} text pages and {{NUMBEROFFILES}} images available and nearly six million words of full text transcriptions on the MarineLives wiki.
  
Prior to witnesses being called to make their depositions, the defendant or "respondent" might make a '''Personal Answer''' in response to the Libell or Allegation.
+
We have finding aids for themes as varied as Early Modern women in the marine world; Materials handling; The Early Modern River Thames; Commercial record keeping; Mariners letters; and many more.
  
The most accessible of the court records are the statements made by witnesses, which are called '''Depositions'''. These depositions were in response to written '''Interrogatories''', which were prepared by both plaintiffs and defendants in a case.  
+
We have also developed a database of 22,185 depositions drawn from the HCA 13/ series covering the period 1575 to 1684, which provides quantitative and qualitative insights into this important series of Admiralty Court depositions.
  
Various written documents were submitted by plaintiffs and defendants, as well as witnesses, during a court case. Some of these have survived as loose documents in the '''Instance Papers'''.
+
'''[[Tools: Basic wiki skills & palaeographical tips|Sample our training material to see if this could be for you.]]'''
  
Many cases were settled prior to the giving of a formal verdict or '''Sentence'''. For those cases which went to sentence, the sentences can be found in document bundles. These bundles often include bills of expense related to the case, and in some cases include copies of the allegations or libells, and other miscellaneous documents.
 
 
 
</div>
 
 
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----
 +
<div style="float: right; vertical-align: bottom; margin-left: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; background:#dcdcdc; border: 1px solid #b0c4de; width: 530px;">
 +
    <div style="background: #b0c4de; padding: 5px 10px 5px 10px; font-size: larger; font-weight: bold;">Sample images</div>
 +
    <div style="padding: 10px;">
 +
<div style="font-size: normal;">'''This will be a project about co-creation of a public resource, which will be published on the Marine Lives wiki and made available to all - public and academic historians alike (and those just intrigued by our past).'''</div>
 +
[[File:Abraham Hardy Account Book Wages HCA 30 636.JPG|500px|thumb|right|HCA 30/636/3 Andrew Hardey's account book for voyage to Barbados in the ship the Abraham- extract from wages schedules]]
  
==Finding Aids==
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[[File:Abraham Handwriting Sample HCA 30 636.JPG|500px|thumb|right|HCA 30/636/ Handwriting sample]]
  
<big><div style="text-align: center;">Gallery of High Court of Admiralty deposition books <br />Finding aids by alphabet, age, folio, geography and occupation</div></big>
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[[File:Abraham Letter Copy Book HCA 30 636.JPG|500px|thumb|right|HCA 30/636/ Letter copy book from on board the ship the Abraham]]
  
<gallery class="center">
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</div>
File:HCA 13 67 FC.PNG|[[HCA 13/67|HCA 13/67]] <br />Feb 1653 - Sep 1653 <br />170 pages
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</div>
File:HCA 13 68 Credits4.PNG|[[HCA 13/68|HCA 13/68]] <br />1653 - 1654 <br />1405 pages <br />734 deponents <br />[[HCA 13/68 Deponents|Alphabetical]] <br />[[HCA 13/68 Deponents - by folio|By Folio]]
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File:HCA 13 70 Credits 1.png|[[HCA 13/70|HCA 13/70]] <br />1654 - 1656 <br />1511 pages <br />866 deponents <br />[[HCA 13/70 Deponents - By Folio|By Folio]]
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File:HCA 3 71 Credits 1.png|[[HCA 13/71|HCA 13/71]] <br /> 1656 - 1657 <br />1366 pages <br />[[HCA 13/71 Deponents|Alphabetical]] <br />[[HCA 13/71 Deponents - By Geography|By Geography]]
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File:HCA 1372 Credits.PNG|[[HCA 13/72|HCA 13/72]]  <br /> 1657 - 1659 <br />1330 pages <br />[[HCA 13/72 Deponents|Alphabetical]] <br />[[HCA 13/72 Deponents - By Age|By Age]] <br />[[HCA 13/72 Deponents - By Geography|By Geography]] <br />[[HCA 13/72 Deponents - By Occupation|By Occupation]]
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File:HCA 13 73 Credits.png|[[HCA 13/73|HCA 13/73]]  <br /> 1659 - 1660 <br />1333 pages <br />[[HCA 13/73 Deponents|Alphabetical]] <br />[[HCA 13/73 Deponents - By Age|By Age]] <br />[[HCA 13/73 Deponents - By Folio|By Folio]] <br />[[HCA 13/73 Deponents - By Geography|By Geography]] <br />[[HCA 13/73 Deponents - By Occupation|By Occupation]]
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File:HCA 13 76 Credits 2.PNG|[[HCA 13/76|HCA 13/76]] <br /> 1666 - 1669 <br />250 pages <br />23 deponents <br />[[HCA 13/76 Deponents - By Folio|By Folio]]
+
</gallery>
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<big><div style="text-align: center;">Gallery of High Court of Admiralty Act Books and Personal Answers <br />Finding aids by folio</div></big>
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+
<gallery class="center">
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File:HCA 13 124 Credits 1.png|[[HCA 13/124|HCA 13/124]] <br />  Personal Answers<br />1650 - 1652 <br />385 pages <br />[[Tools: 13/124: Index of Personal Answers|By Folio]]
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File:HCA 3 46 Credits.png|[[HCA 3/46|HCA 3/46]] <br />  Act Book <br />1654 - 1656 <br />307 pages
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File:HCA 3 47 Credits.png|[[HCA 3/47|HCA 3/47]] <br />  Act Book<br />1656 - 1658 <br />52 pages
+
 
+
</gallery>
+
 
+
----
+
 
+
==Themes==
+
 
+
<div style="border:1px solid #A3BFB1; background:#F0F0FF; width:99%; padding:4px; margin-bottom:10px">
+
<div style="background:#F0F0FF; width:99%; padding:4px">
+
 
+
 
+
<big><div style="text-align: center;">Thematic finding aids</div></big>
+
<gallery class="center">
+
 
+
File:Invective 11072016.PNG|[[Bad behaviour & Invective|Bad behaviour and invective]]
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File:BOOK MAP Lygon R Map Barbados 1657 IArch DL CSG 040212.PNG|[[Tools: Slavery|Slavery]]
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File:Jan Steen Hear It Sing It 1665 11072016.PNG|[[Inns, Taverns, and Victualling Houses|Inns, taverns & victualling houses]]
+
 
+
</gallery>
+

Latest revision as of 22:04, March 29, 2022




Celebrating our tenth anniversary this year


To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the founding of Marine Lives we aim to make publicly available and searchable by the end of 2022 a high quality machine transcription of 34 mill words of English High Court of Admiralty depositions, 1574 to 1688.

Celebrating our tenth anniversary
We are already getting excellent results from our machine transcription models
This machine transcribed test page is the start of a deposition made in 1630 in the English High Court of Admiralty. There had been no manual correction of the transcription.
Here are the learning curves and formal performance characteristics of our Series Three C17th Secretary Hand models optimised for English High Court of Admiralty depositions



MarineLives research agenda for 2022


Marine Lives celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2022. To mark reaching the remarkable digital age of ten we announced in March 2022 our goal to publish by the end of 2022 a high quality machine transcription of sixty volumes of English High Court of Admiralty depositions for the period 1574 to 1688. This initiative will use handwriting recognition models we are developing for C17th Secretary Hand and links to the first point in our four point research agenda for 2022:

1. Developing and optimising keyword search algorithms for C17th Secretary Hand in English language English High Court of Admiralty manuscript documents.

2. Completing the next phase of our metadata for the HCA 13/ series. Currently, we have metadata for 22,000 deponents from the years 1570 to 1688, supported by 50,000 digital images held offline.

3. Publishing a hybrid digital edition of three ship account books from the 1620s and 1630s, taken from HCA 30/636.

4. Organising two workshops with the Oldenburg Prize Papers team on (a) Developing a broadly applicable digital C16th and C17th commercial document ontology (b) Forming and developing an online international community to study mariner letters.


Creating a Ground Truth


We are creating a bespoke HTR model to read C17th English Secretarial hand. We plan two models. The first using 500,000 words from our existing diplomatic transcriptions of HCA 13/72. The second will be twice the size, and will add an additional 500,000 words from an earlier volume of HCA depositions.

Contact Colin Greenstreet (Marine Lives) or Holly Brewer (UMD) if you would like to learn more about our work on machine recognition of C17th Secretary Hand

Below an image showing the first manuscript page from HCA 13/72, which we have now entered into Transkribus.

Click here to view pages we are developing to illustrate practical aspects of creating a Ground Truth

HCA 13/72 f.1r: entered into Transkribus as part of the Ground Truth we are creating



Fantasy Early Modern book competition


Announcing a one week FANTASY EARLY MODERN BOOK COMPETITION.

Rules: List the chapter titles of a fantasy book you WISH EXISTED and post to the @Marinelivesorg Twitter account.

Winner(s) will be those book titles/chapters which get MOST LIKES ON THE @Marinelivesorg Twitter account.

Here is my starter:

TITLE: Early Modern Economic Lives

CHAPTER 1: Talking about work: Early Modern workers describing their occupations and work places

CHAPTER 2: The melding of work and home and its implications for participation of men and women in commercial life

CHAPTER 3: Everyone lies: The importance of accurate record keeping

CHAPTER 4: The role of the Early Modern bookkeeper accounting for growth

CHAPTER 5: Service driven functional literacy: How Early Modern international trade drove and was a product of literacy

CHAPTER 6: Risk and probability: How people thought about individual and group risk, and how it affected their commercial decision making

CHAPTER 7: Free will, contract, indentured labour, enslavement: Concepts underpinning the Early Modern labour market

CHAPTER 8: How to make Early Modern money (and keep it)

Here's a possible plan. Assemble a group of authors, recruited through Twitter, who will write and publish the Fantasy EM book as an open source online book. The book would be peer reviewed by its readers, and will go through various iterations as readers comment, suggest and offer to improve.

If we go with Early Modern Economic Lives (and I'm happy to go with a different Fantasy EM book), I (Colin Greenstreet) would be happy to write a draft of chapters three, four and five, but would need collaborators to write the remaining chapters.

What do you think?


New Year's wishes 2022


2022 is the tenth anniversary of the founding of Marine Lives. So here are our New Year's wishes for the next ten years for Marine Lives and for Early Modern studies generally.

New Year's Wish One

Digitisation and open licence publication of the C17th manuscript records of the Mansion House Justice Room and of the Westminster Abbey Muniments.

New Year's Wish Two

Development of AI-enabled search tools for discovery within and synthesis of large scale digitised manuscript collections, bypassing the need for the manual creation of archival metadata.

New Year's Wish Three

Implementation of federated search using AI-enabled search tools across multiple large scale digitised manuscript collections

New Year's Wish Four

Development of Early Modern Material Lives to complement Early Modern Marine Lives, broadening scope from marine to land based occupations, and emphasising the interaction of Early Modern workers with the physical world.

Click here to see our 2018 New Year's wishes.

Please Tweet your comments on our New Year's wishes to @Marinelivesorg and share your own New Year's wishes for technologies to support historical research


New MarineLives project: Researching three ship account books from the 1620s and 1630s: HCA 30/636/


Item: Paid the Ratcatcher: 4s - 4d, Account book of the ship the Diamond: setting out expenses to Mallaga, 1637; HCA 13/635/2
HCA 30/636 in all its glory, just waiting for some collaborative work by volunteers

Are you interested in a startup collaborative online project to look at, partially transcribe and understand three ship account books from the 1620s and 1630s? You have come to the right place. Marine Lives is launching a new project and is seeking volunteer collaborators. This will be a project about co-creation of a public resource, which will be published on the Marine Lives wiki and made available to all - public and academic historians alike (and those just intrigued by our past).

HCA 30/636 is a document category which has been created to cover certain papers generated by the Prize Court jurisdiction of the English High Court of Admiralty papers. It contains nine sub-references. We have imaged all the documents within HCA 30/636 and will be making these available to volunteer collaborators online. Documents include three beautifully leather bound account books of various sizes, further paper bound account books, a letter copy book of letters written from on board ship, and various miscellaneous accounting documents relating to multiple voyages. In all we have over one thousand images.

We are in start up mode. Our current thinking is to make the images available on DropBox or OneDrive and to use this MarineLives wiki as our collaboration platform - to share ideas, to provide support, and to be the vehicle to publish our transcriptions and synthesis. But we are open to your ideas about how to organise this project and nothing will be finalised until we have our team in place. You can get up to speed on our thinking by reading this Twitter Thread.

We have had expressions of interest from people from many places - Mexico, Michigan, Texas, London, Newcastle to list a few - which is perfect given the virtual nature of our project and the broad geographic scope of the papers which include multiple voyages from England to the West Indies, the Mediterranean and to Northern Europe.

We will be sending out an email to everyone who has expressed this interest this weekend (Saturday, October 16th 2021), and will invite people in that email to take a look at some sample images and to tell us about their research interests, skills and ideas for this project.

This is going to be a very relaxed project running through to the middle of 2022 in which people are welcome to dip in and out, and to do as little or as much as they have time and interest for.

If you are interested in learning more, follow Marine Lives on Twitter, tweet your interest and we will get in touch with you by Twitter direct mail.

You can also access our HCA 30/636 account book project home page here, which we are starting to populate. Come join us and help us fill in the blanks.



Women and Early Modern record keeping


In November 2021, MarineLives participated in an online seminar on Women and Early Modern recordkeeping, co-hosted by Caylin Carbonell and Colin Greenstreet. We hope to develop some of the themes of this seminar in 2022

Our contribution to the seminar was to a series of case studies from C17th English High Court of Admiralty depositions, in which women testify about their investment activities and record keeping.



About MarineLives


MarineLives volunteers, past and present, 2015-2018. Read more about them here

MarineLives is a collaborative volunteer driven project. The project started as a spinoff from a National Archives hackathon in early 2012. We are exploring lives touched by the marine world between 1540 and 1690. Commerce, materials, language and correspondence.

At the core of MarineLives is the collaborative transcription, linkage and enrichment of primary manuscripts from the English High Court of Admiralty, together with thematically related manuscripts from international manuscript and printed document collections.

In the past ten years over 250 volunteers have contributed to our transcriptions and to our synthesis of the many themes which constitute lives in the Early Modern marine world. Currently, we have 12,756 text pages and 12,148 images available and nearly six million words of full text transcriptions on the MarineLives wiki.

We have finding aids for themes as varied as Early Modern women in the marine world; Materials handling; The Early Modern River Thames; Commercial record keeping; Mariners letters; and many more.

We have also developed a database of 22,185 depositions drawn from the HCA 13/ series covering the period 1575 to 1684, which provides quantitative and qualitative insights into this important series of Admiralty Court depositions.

Sample our training material to see if this could be for you.


Sample images
This will be a project about co-creation of a public resource, which will be published on the Marine Lives wiki and made available to all - public and academic historians alike (and those just intrigued by our past).
HCA 30/636/3 Andrew Hardey's account book for voyage to Barbados in the ship the Abraham- extract from wages schedules
HCA 30/636/ Handwriting sample
HCA 30/636/ Letter copy book from on board the ship the Abraham