MarineLives is now actively seeking PhD students in History and associated fields like English, Geography, Historical Linguistics, Sociology and Anthropology to participate in four online SKYPE forums to be held beginning in the last week of November, 2012.
The PhD Forum will consider the potential relevance of High Court Of Admiralty records, as revealed by the substance of HCA 13/71 (1656-1657) to four broad research areas and to the specific research interests of participants. The research areas of interest are: (1) Material & Cultural (2) Commercial & Legal (3) Geography & Trade (4) Language with a separate SKYPE forum held for each area.
These forums will assist us in understanding the research questions relevant to forum members that can be addressed using tools such as semantic markup, data mining, and data linking. This input will influence the second phase of our project between January and March, 2013.
We will gain an understanding of how forum members would like to interact with the data, on completion of transcription and markup, influencing the specification and implementation of our production server and software, as well as the data formats to be utilised in further phases of the project.
In addition, we hope that the forums will establish linkages between the project team and the wider research community while at the same time raising awareness of the rich research potential of HCA materials.
As part of these forums, we will provide the participants with advance access to our project resources such as the digitised images of HCA 13/71 (1656-1657), the first cut transcriptions as they go up and are then edited, the MarineLives project dictionaries and the project manual.
In return, participants in the forum will commit to one 90 minute online SKYPE conference call. Each PhD Forum member will participate in only one forum.
Briefing notes will be distributed to each participant in advance and prior reading of this document and assessment of the project resources would also be required to contribute meaningfully to the forum. Notes taken of the discussion will be distributed to participants after the event, with the opportunity to respond further to the points raised in writing.
This is a terrific opportunity for PhD students to participate in an exciting digital project and we would welcome your involvement to help shape the future direction of MarineLives. If you are interested in participating, you can sign up by emailing phdforum@marinelives.org with details of your areas of study and interest.
There are limited places available in the forum so please note that the deadline for confirming participation is Friday, November 2, 2012.
We look forward to hearing from you,
Richard Blakemore, Associate Research Fellow, Centre for Maritime Historical Studies, University of Exeter
Dr. Liam D. Haydon, University of Manchester
Philip J Hnatkovich, PhD Student, Pennsylvania State University
Gordon O’Sullivan, M.Phil Student, Digital Humanities and Culture, Trinity College Dublin
Laura Seymour, PhD student, Birkbeck College, University of London
PhD Forum Convenors MarineLives
I’m currently doing a PhD at QMUL on ‘Masculinities and Material Culture in the Royal Navy, 1758-1815′.
I have e-mailed previously to ask about getting involved but didn’t recieve a response to the last e-mail I sent.
If I could be of any help I’d love to get involved, and whilst I know my period of specialisation is later than the years your project is focusing on, I feel I would be able to add something to the ‘Material and Cultural’ side of the forum.
Kind Regards,
Elin Jones
Dear Elin,
Great to hear from you. Our previous emails must have crossed somehow. We have allocated you a Username and Password for the MarineLives online Project Manual, image bank, and transcription software, so that you can take a look at the project.
Laura Seymour will be the convenor of the Material and Cultural Forum within the overall PhD Forum. She introduced herself to blog readers in an earlier blog entry entitled Hungry Work (http://marinelives-theshippingnews.org/blog/2012/09/25/hungry-work/)
Gordon O’Sullivan, one of our MarineLives PhD Forum convenors, will be in touch with you to discuss your participation in the PhD Forum. Thank you for your interest in the project and in our forum. We look forward to your contribution.
Colin Greenstreet
MarineLives project leader and team facilitator
am very interested in being involved in this project. I have just started PhD at Birkbeck college with research into early modern literature about pirates, looking in particular at utopian ideas, space and mobility. I will be out of the UK until 08/11/12 but would like to be involved on my return.
Dear Sue,
We are delighted that you are interested in the MarineLives project and would love to get your involved, both as an associate and as a member of our PhD Forum. You will find some kindred spirits amongst us looking at piracy – in the West Indies, on the Barbary coast, and elsewhere.
We plan to publish a blog article in a few weeks time on English mariners’ attitudes to the risk of enslavement by Barbary “pirates,” as revealed in HCA 13/71, and it would be great to get you involved with us on this topic. Fears of capture drove mariners’ behaviour, and affected the routes they were prepared to work, as well, arguably, the wages they required to do so. Despite the formal monopoly of the English Levant company, there is plenty of evidence of informal English shipping movements and coastal trading around the eastern Mediterranean and Barbary coast, involving ships from the ports of London and south-west England.
Gordon O’Sullivan, one of our PhD Forum convenors will be in touch with you to discuss the Forum, and I will follow up with you regarding the project in general, including publication opportunities.
Best regards,
Colin Greenstreet
MarineLives project leader and team facilitator