Goals

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.

Students interested in the programme are invited to look at the MarineLives wiki and specifically at a new volume of witness statements from 1637 and 1638 - this will be the volume that we will be working on with Warwick students.

Students wanting to get a hands on feel for the process should contact Dr Benjamin Redding, who will issue them with a username and password to get edit privileges on the MarineLives wiki.