MarineLives

The MarineLives collaborative public history project was established in 2012 to digitise, transcribe and annotate the manuscript records of the English High Court of Admiralty from the 1650s and 1660s. The original records are held at the National Archives in Kew.

Released May 2015 as a SMW. Ported and consolidated data from eight previous wikis on http://wikispot.org.

Current development is focussing on semanticising the content of our wiki through semantic biographies and semantic geographical pages, together with in-line semantic markup, using volunteers in facilitated teams to create markup. Exploring addition of Semantic Maps and Semantic Drill Down extensions.

Running a Summer 2016 Digital Pop Up Lab for historians and coders. For background see Tech Talk by Rowan Beentje

Interested in comparing functionality and useability of SMW approaches to semanticising historical texts with alternative approaches to XML publication.

Major challenge is to resolve datastructure underlying our SMW - our implementation is built around SMW pages defined as = images of physical manuscript pages, but underlying data is grouped in legal cases and legal depositions (witness statements). A deposition can be anything between one third of a physical page and ten to twelve physical pages. The result is that a physical page can have multiple depositions starting or ending on that page.