Info 202 Fall 2011

Citizen scientists have been enlisted in a new project inviting them to transcribe weather measurements in old Royal Navy logbooks. The OldWeather.org project is part of the Zooniverse group, responsible for several citizen science projects discussed in class, with the goal of crowdsourcing information that sailors recorded aboard ships during WWI. The transcribed historical weather data will be used by scientists to refine models of the Earth's climate, and gain further insight into how it has changed over the last century.

Old Weather currently has logbooks from 228 vessels, with 638,000 pages already  transcribed. When contributors transcribe these documents, they not only make note of scientific data (such as the state of sea, temperature, latitude and longitude), but also historical information about the ships the observations were made aboard. Using this additional information, users can browse a specific ship's history, their voyages, ship type, and even information about their crew.

As a student with a humanities background in the iSchool, I find it interesting that a project like Old Weather threads both scientific and history enthusiast communities. The original BBC article even states that the purpose of the project is to "fill in gaps in our knowledge of an important stage in British history." The organizing system for these logbooks was designed to manage both the tabular scientific data, and free-form historical data in a way that makes the data reusable for both science and history. I would assume that Old Weather's data model was intentionally designed to attract the largest community of enthusiasts.

As citizen science continue to grow in numbers, it will be interesting to see if other projects emerge that similarly attract scientific and historical enthusiasts. The Zooniverse group has already launched another project, called Ancient Lives, that asks enthusiasts to transcribe papyrus images.

Original BBC Article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11532534