What Can Digital Humanities Do? Old Weather

What is this project?

Old Weather is a project that enables users to transcribe naval ship logs from archives around the world. The project’s team includes scientists, digital project managers, engineers, research managers, historians, and archivists. Partners to the project include a long list of archive, science, and university supported organizations. Old Weather is part of the larger Zooniverse Project, the “largest online platform for collaborative volunteer research,” according to their website.

What research questions or objectives are being addressed by the project team?

The project’s team says that the main goal of the project is to help climate scientists determine how weather has evolved through time and how might they use that information to predict future weather. They also cite that the learned information from the log books is valuable to historians, geographers, and the general public.

“We’re simply attempting to gather more information about historical weather variability, to improve our understanding of all forms of weather variability in the past and so improve our ability to predict weather and climate in the future.” -Philip Brohan, team member

Who is the audience/are the audiences for this project?

According to their “About” page, this project will be helpful for geographers, historians, scientists, and the general public. However, their target participants to help transcribe the information are ordinary people. To encourage participation, the site rewards users with titles and badges as they transcribe more and more. Additionally, users can pick individual voyages to transcribe from, thus hooking the users with the owner’s story. The easily navigable and highly aesthetically pleasing site makes anybody want to participate in this project and learn more.

Screenshot from their "Home" page.

Screenshot from their “Home” page.

How does this project relate to what Alan Liu says about the Digital Humanities? 

In Alan Liu’s essay, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities,” he claims that the digital humanities is a symbol for the future of humanities in general. He says the main obstacles for DH and general humanities are competition between objectivity and subjectivity in our society, and the lack of diverse perspectives. He is concerned about how our data and analytical driven society will effect our perceptions on human events. Increasingly, he cites, students today are taught that A caused B, but in reality events occur due to multi-layered and complex actions. He hopes that people that dismiss quantifying human experiences will use the digital humanities to see the complexities in the world and , hopefully, use this information for good. To put it simply, he wants the humanities to promote participation in humanity, and hopefully DH can help achieve this goal.

While Old Weather’s main goal is to provide data for climate scientists, it can create a sense of humanity. While users transcribe, they learn more about the log’s author. Instead of transcribing famous works, they are working from logs from ordinary people. This look into the lives of regular people is a rare and new perspective in the humanities. Users on the site can also collaborate and chat with one another. Not only does this provide more accurate observations, but it also allows users to discuss their different perceptions and views. I think Liu would agree that although the project is aimed to collect data, the actual people involved in the transcription process are invested in what the humanities is all about: the humans involved. If the users weren’t invested in the human authors, they wouldn’t have transcribed 64% of the logs already.