Community spirit + Hackathons + Open Data = Aberdeen Harbour Ship Arrivals 1914-1920 data story
By bringing together a community of individuals with different skills, organising hackathons and making the data open, the ship arrival records for Aberdeen Harbour, UK for the period from 1914 to 1920 have been opened up for anyone to explore and use.
The Project: From Aberdeen Harbour’s physical records, the pages were photographed, the words on the images were transcribed into Google Sheets, a website was created to access the data and this data story was borne.
From the data story you can see the types of ships coming into the Harbour, the imports required to sustain the region, the ports from which the ships set sail for Aberdeen, and from comments made in the records by the staff you can feel their pride in ‘firsts’, their joy when celebrating events, and their profound sadness at the devastations of war.
Huge thanks to all the transcribers, Code the City Aberdeen, & Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives for all time, effort and work which has gone into this project.
Further work is ongoing to tidy up the data so this project is not yet complete, but meantime the achievements by a community with a shared interest coming together to make this project happen can be enjoyed.
Pauline Cairns
eyJrIjoiNjYyYjFjYjEtOGVkYS00YmI0LTg3YTgtZTEwYzc2MmMwNjM1IiwidCI6IjBlMTkwZTMwLTM3YWItNDA1My05OTY2LTg3MTAzYTdmZDRkYyJ9
