This site has been archived as part of King's Digital Lab (KDL) archiving and sustainability process, following background analysis and consultation with research leads wherever possible.
Project content and data has been stored as a fully backed-up Virtual Machine and can be made available on request (depending on access controls agreed with the Principal Investigator) for a period of at least 2 years from the decommissioning date indicated below.
If you have an interest in this project and would like to support a future phase please contact us by filling in this form.
At its inception, KDL inherited just under 100 digital research projects and websites. Aware of the intellectual and cultural value of many of these projects, with the support of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King’s College London, KDL took on its responsibility to the community to steward them in a responsible manner. When the options of setting up a Service Level Agreement for further hosting and maintenance with KDL and/or undertaking migration to IT Services at King’s or other institutions were deemed infeasible or inappropriate, the archiving process was initiated.
We would like to thank research leads, the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King’s College London, and partner institutions, for their support in this process.
For further information on KDL archiving and sustainability process see:
2010-2013
Richard Gartner, Information and Knowledge Specialist, Centre for e-Research, King’s College London
Michele Pasin, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London
Martin Robson, Visiting Lecturer and E+Research Assistant, The Corbett Centre, Defence Studies Department, King’s College London
16 October 2018
http://sailsproject.cerch.kcl.ac.uk/
The core of this project was a digital collection of ship’s logs from 1914-1918. Digitized by the Met Office ACRE initiative, their climatological data had been extracted to generate a series of historic weather datasets and visualisations. However, these records also had great value to the social and military history community as they included detailed information about the movement of ships, and about ship’s personnel. They had even greater value if linked to records and source materials from other collections, such as the Royal Navy Service Records in The National Archives. Linking the Service Records to the Logbooks would, effectively, ‘put sailors back in their ships’. SAILS exposed and linked the data in the ships logs with data in the Service Records. Based on this, we developed a methodology for structuring and linking data from disparate sources in order to enhance data available to researchers. Our methodology was based around specific research questions related to WW1 naval history. We made the linked materials available online as a resource and demonstration of the method used.