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AHRC Historic Weather Network: Aims. Articulate and explore a series of humanities research questions to enable a better understanding of historical climatic variability and climate change which can be addressed by the use of digitized source materials and ICT research methods
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AHRC Historic Weather Network: Aims Articulate and explore a series of humanities research questions to enable a better understanding of historical climatic variability and climate change which can be addressed by the use of digitized source materials and ICT research methods Investigate e-Research approaches to integrating sources, academics and computational tools and methods for the representation and modeling of the data. Bring together key stakeholders responsible for the curation and use of historic primary research materials related to historic weather records, including maritime and terrestrial records (e.g., ships' logs, diaries) with scientists and humanities researchers Investigate how additional source materials, including travelogs, diaries, and published data, can be linked to the primary source materials and also illustrate historic weather information Facilitate collaboration between humanities scholars and researchers of climatic variability and climate change Bring about effective public engagement with primary historic source materials. Funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
AHRC Historic Weather Network A series of meetings and workshops; with a final publication Scoping humanities, climate science and information science research challenges around historic weather sources Building communities of practice finding, collecting and using historic weather data Discussing the modelling, extracting and linking content for multidisciplinary research Whether data is instrumental or non-instrumental, the data is valuable for many different purposes if it can be found and used.
SAILS: Linking data from disparate sources JISC funded Partnership with TNA, Met Office, JSCSC Ship’s logs as central to understanding of related data
Yet more historic weather:Qualitative • Ballads circulated news pre-newspapers • Ellis Roberts in 1784:“Dwy gerdd o newyddion : yn rhoddi hanes am farwolaeth fawr a fu’n Sir Aberteifi ymhlwy Llanbadarn-Fawr, fe gladdwyd yno er Calen gaia i Galmai, saith gant o’r plwyfolion …” (Two poems of news : giving news of the great death in Cardiganshire in the parish of Llanbadarn Fawr, seven hundred parishioners buried from 1 November to 1 May …). • 1783 and 1784 Laki volcano erupted, spewing vast amounts of sulphuric dioxide gas. In June 1783 the gases reached Britain and the sky was cloudy and hazy during summer and autumn and the sun looked as if it had been “soaked in blood”.Reports of exceptional weather with unusual extremes of temperature. During the winter of 1783/1784 temperatures across northern Europe dropped lower than normal. Estimates of deaths caused in the UK vary between 8,000 and 23,000. Those most at risk were people who worked in the open air. The parish of Llanbadarn Fawr covereda rural mountainous area,and experienceda higher than usual death rate. Bangor University Special Collections
Findings for discussion • How can scientists work with qualitative data? How can humanists work with remarks, etc, in qualitative sources? How can social science/humanities perspective be integrated into climatological research? • Integrating source materials and providing access is necessary, and recommendations will be made to take this forward as a collaborative international initiative. • A trusted technological infrastructure could facilitate international, inter-disciplinary access to this material by the broadest community of users, taking a collective intelligence approach. This will underpin the use of the materials for ‘big history’. • At the core is the need to model data and identify information elements; use of ontologies, controlled vocabularies, structuring data for linkage. Building a schema for describing (metadata) and annotating this data is also a component of this, as is the development of a methodological/research layer. • Need to support multiple types of use of the data, and enable existing work to be re-used. • Network will develop a research proposal demonstrating the relationship between environment and history: extreme weather events: Laki (1783-4) and Tambura(1814).
