Old Weather: Whaling

Project Description

This is the third incarnation of the Old Weather projects which provide Arctic weather observations from mid-19th century ships' logs. In these projects, volunteers' transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and will improve scientists' knowledge of past environmental conditions. In addition, historians will use the transcriptions to track past ship movements and tell the stories of the people on board. For Old Weather: Whaling, Zooniverse partnered with the New Bedford Whaling Museum to create a transcription project using logbooks from mid-18th century to early-19th century whaling ships.

Documents

The documents in this project are logbook pages from whaling ships. The structure of each page generally consists of daily log entries that begin with the date, location, weather observations, and any notable events. Occasional artwork, poetry, and cargo manifests may be found. Click here to view a sample logbook.

Data

The primary data of interest are weather measurements and textual descriptions or confirmations of sea ice. However, without locations and dates for context, the aforementioned observations will be incomplete. Therefore, geographic coordinates, the names of ports and cities, or other text that provide a location reference must be recorded. For this project, since most journal entries are separated by date entries, their physical location on the page in addition to the transcribed dates themselves, will be used in post-processing to determine the dates of any additional transcriptions that occur on the document.

For this project, a subject corresponds to a single page within a logbook. It follows that a subject set and a group represent a single logbook and ship, respectively. Note that a group may have multiple subject sets because multiple logbooks can belong to the same ship.

Subject Sets

Since subject sets represent logbooks, they contain multiple subjects that are loaded into the multi-page navigation tool for browsing.

Groups

In Scribe, each group has its own "info" page that is pre-populated with any metadata included in the groups.csv manifest file. In addition, groups are automatically listed in the homepage (as long as there is more than one group present), along with links to the "info" page and available workflows. This allows users to browse through ships and gives them the ability to go directly into the mark or transcribe workflows.

Config

The heavy narrative aspect of the documents found in Old Weather: Whaling informed several Scribe features that are now standard (but remain, to some extent, optional). In an early beta test, several users reported being frustrated because they couldn't follow the stories that unfolded sequentially from page to page within a logbook. In other words, the transcribe workflow, which displays random marks in need of transcription, from a random logbook, was not sufficient. This prompted the addition of two additional points of entry to the transcribe workflow: 1) the "transcribe" button on each mark, which is a direct way to transcribe a particular mark and return to the marking workflow immediately after, and 2) the "Transcribe this page now!" button on the task menu (right-hand side of the screen), which sends the user to the transcribe workflow to transcribe only those marks within the page. After the user completes the last transcription, a "Return to marking" button is displayed.

Mark Workflow

The mark workflow displays a single page of a logbook at a time. As long as there are multiple subjects (pages) within a subject set, the multi-page navigation tool will be available for browsing. Note: At the time of this writing, an additional feature was introduced to Old Weather: Whaling (i.e. not Scribe in general) to bookmark the last page a user creates a classification (e.g. each time a user creates a mark or submits the answer to a question by clicking the "Next" button). The next time the user visits that logbook, he/she will sent to the bookmarked page.

Transcribe Workflow

The transcribe workflow serves random marks for transcription.

Verify Workflow

Old Weather: Whaling does not use the verify workflow at the moment.