Introductory material
MarineLives and Dr Benjamin Redding of the University of Warwick History department are collaborating to offer facilitated skills training to Warwick graduate and committed undergraduate students in their second or final years. Participation is voluntary and is not for academic credit.
The programme will be of special interest to those with research interests in early modern global, maritime, commercial and material history.
Biweekly sessions will be held in the second half of the autumn term 2017 and for the full spring term 2018, totalling eight sessions in all.
All participating students will learn to read and transcribe C17th English notarial hands. We expect most, if not all participants, to be complete beginners and we have considerable experience of taking beginners to a good standard.
Students will also be offered skills training in quantitative history in the spring term, building on their newly acquired palaeographical skills, should they wish to pursue this.
Warwick students considering joining the MarineLives/Warwick transcription skills programme should contact Dr Benjamin Redding (University of Warwick history department) to obtain a User Name and password for the MarineLives wiki. This will give them edit privileges, and will enable them to fully explore the transcription capabilities of the wiki
Interested students are encouraged to:
(1) Familiarise themselves with the MarineLives wiki
(2) Read Introduction to the High Court of Admiralty
(3) Look at some of the manuscript images in the volume of depositions, or witness statements, we will be working with. This is HCA 13/73 and covers the years 1637 and 1638. We are still in the process of putting up the entire volume, which contains over 500 folios, so over 1000 manuscript sides, which we have imaged. However, with over 120 manuscript images that is enough to give you a feel for the nature of this volume
(4) Look at some of the transcriptions and manuscript images in another volume of depositions. We recommend HCA 13/71, which is for the years 1656 and 1657. This volume was transcribed and edited in late 2012 and early 2013 by a group of twenty-nine volunteer asociates and team facilitators.
