e-Research approaches to historic weather data: sources, collaborations and methodologies for researching environmental change
Project outline
This project investigated e-Research approaches to historic weather data focusing on sources, collaborations and methodologies for researching environmental change. The network activities brought together stakeholders from disparate research communities to investigate, discuss and document the key historical source materials for weather reporting, and to explore ways in which these materials can be represented and accessed digitally in order to create new knowledge. The network was comprised of researchers from the arts, humanities and scientific disciplines, representatives from archives, libraries and museums, and climate scientists from the Met Office to scope and uncover historic weather source materials through articulating a series of key research questions. It investigated ways in which greater engagement and interaction with these materials could be encouraged via digitisation and representation online. The network also explored ways in which primary source materials related to climate change enabled new research in the sciences and the humanities.
The aims of the project were to:
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Articulate and explore a series of humanities research questions that would enable a better understanding of historical climatic variability and climate change which could then be addressed through the use of digitized source materials and ICT research methods
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Develop an e-research approach to integrating sources, academics and computational tools and methods for the representation and modeling of the data
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Bring together key stakeholders responsible for the curation and use of historic primary research materials related to historic weather records, including maritime and terrestrial records (e.g. ship logs, diaries) with scientists and humanities researchers
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Investigate how secondary source materials, including travelogs, diaries, and published data, could be linked to the primary source materials and also illustrate historic weather information
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Facilitate collaboration between humanities scholars and researchers of climatic variability and climate change
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Bring about effective public engagement with primary historic source materials
Events
Workshop 1
Location: University of Exeter
Date: 22nd October 2010
The meeting was an opportunity to present a number of projects that are working with archival sources that contain information about historic weather (including ACRE initiative, Old Weather, JISC SAILS, and AHRC BL India project), and to discuss the research objectives of these projects with an interdisciplinary group of stakeholders, including invited representatives from the maritime history community. Secondly, the group was able to address some of the issues of documenting, managing and using these sources for widest possible use and analysis, using e-research approaches.
Workshop 2
Location: British Library
Date: 16th December 2010
The second workshop included both a steering committee meeting and a technical planning meeting which discussed the potential and possiblities of e-Research approaches.
Achievements
The network has been able to make recommendations for the development of a technological infrastructure to facilitate international, inter-disciplinary access to this material by the broadest community of users, taking a collective intelligence approach.
Network partner
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