harbour – Code The City

Building on our foundations

After such a successful weekend at CTC19, we were delighted to be back for CTC20 to continue work on the Aberdeen Harbour Arrivals project. As expected, the team working on the project was made up of both avid coders and history enthusiasts which brings a great range of skills and knowledge to the weekend.
A second spreadsheet was created to input adjustments, this allowed us to clean data to be more presentable whilst keeping the accurate ledger transcriptions intact; a must when dealing with archival material. This data cleaning has allowed us to create a more presentable website which is easier to understand and navigate.

Expanding the data set

The adjustments spreadsheet also included the addition of a new column of information sourced externally from the original transcription documents. When first registered fishing vessels were assigned a Fishing Port Registration Number. Where known, that number has been added and will hopefully allow us to cross reference this vessels with other sources at some point in the future.

Vessel types and roles

Initial steps were taken to begin to create a better understanding about the various vessels, their history and purpose. Many of the vessel names contain prefixes relating to their type (e.g. HMS – His Majesty’s Ship for a regular naval vessel, HMSS for a submarine) and they have now been extracted and a list of definitions is being built up. Decoding these prefixes highlighted just how much naval military activity was taking place around Aberdeen during the First World War.

Visualising the data

Some of the team also looked forward to consider how the data could be used in the future. A series of graphs and charts have been created to highlight patterns such as most frequent ships and most popular cargo. We even have an interactive map to show where the in the world the ships were arriving from.

As with CTC19, the weekend has been a great success. Archivists learned more about data and the coders benefitted from over 15,000 records to play with.

Next steps

An ideal future step for the project is the creation of individual records in the website for each vessel so we can begin to expand on the information – i.e. vessel name, history of Masters, expanded description about what it was, what role in played in the First World War. Given the heavy use of Wikidata by many of the other projects that were part of CTC19 and CTC20, consideration has to be given to using Wikidata as the expanded repository for building up the bigger picture for each vessel. However, as we are still very much in the historical investigation stage and not entirely sure about the full facts for many vessels it would not be appropriate at this stage to start pushing unverified information into Wikidata.

A blog post by Mollie Horne, Project Archivist at Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives and Ian Watt of Code The City.

The arrivals transcription project is an ongoing partnership between Code the City and Aberdeen City & Aberdeenshire Archives. It forms part of a wider project funded by the Archives Revealed initiative funded by The National Archives which aims to improve the accessibility of records.

The arrival registers are a small part of a much larger collection which was transferred to Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives as a result of a partnership with the Aberdeen Harbour Board.

The project was originally intended to be part of the physical Code the City 19 event in April 2020 but in anticipation of the nationwide restrictions, it was decided to move entirely online. In the week before we were told to work from home, Mollie photographed each individual page (all 649 of them) from the arrival registers from 1914-1920 and uploaded them to the Google Sheets system which had been set up by Ian. This meant that we had a large amount of material which could be worked on for an extended period.

After creating a set of guidelines and helpful links, we invited the public to work on transcribing and checking entries from March 27th onwards. As the online CTC19 event was scheduled for 11-12th April this allowed us two weeks to create enough data to be useful to the coders over the official weekend.

Transcribers accessed two Google sheets. The first was to log their participation and note what photograph they were transcribing.

The second sheet was the one into which they transcribed the data.

We also set up an open Slack group where transcribers could chat, ask questions, get help etc.

Progress was rapid: by the end of the weekend almost 4,000 records had been transcribed and checked. At the time of writing (2nd May 2020) that has now grown to over 7,000 records transcribed.

When an image has been transcribed, and checked, we lock off the entries to preserve them form change.

The data which had been transcribed was used to create a website, set up by Andrew Sage of CTC, where we could see information in a collated an organised way – this was extremely useful to inform other transcriptions. So far we have managed to fully complete 1914 and are working through the rest of the years.

The arrivals transcription project started as a great way to highlight an important time in the history of the Harbour, which has always been a big part of Aberdeen. However, given current circumstances, it has also become a great opportunity to give people something to focus on.

The project remains open – and you can still get involved by contributing just an hour or two of your time. Start here.

Tag: harbour

1914 – 1920 Aberdeen Harbour Arrivals Transcription Project – CTC20 update