Digitizing, Curating and Visualizing Archival Sources of Maritime History: the case of ship logbooks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Abstract

A vast area of research in historical science concerns the analysis of historical archival sources. This involves activities such as digitizing the historical sources, usually using spreadsheets or simple relational databases, and then analyzing the transcribed data using a range of methods depending on the kind of data and the type of research question that needs to be answered. In this paper, we describe the process of digitizing, curating and visualizing original archival sources of maritime history, a process done in the context of a European (ERC) project called SeaLiT. In particular, we present a set of innovative tools that have been implemented for supporting historians in transcribing the original sources and curating the transcribed data as well as a web application that visualizes the curated data on an interactive map. The overall process is demonstrated for the case of 16 original ship logbooks from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries kept by seven archives in Greece and Spain.

Keywords

• Archival Data Transcription
• Data Curation
• Map Visualization
• Digital Humanities
• Digital Seafaring
• Maritime History