Monthly Archives: February 2015

New Content Added for Over a Dozen Titles

Recently, I’ve been preparing a lot of new content to add to the database. The first evidence of that went into the database today. Ships mentioned in the indexes to the following resource were added to the subscription database today:

This is just a start; many more, including several multi-volume sets, will be added very soon.

Applying Old Data to New Technologies – The Quasi-War

Here is a very cool combination of early modern historical data and very modern technology. ShipIndex exhibited at the American Historical Association conference in New York City at the very start of 2015, and while there I met Abby Mullen, a graduate student at Northeastern University, studying with William Fowler.

At the conference, I learned that Ms. Mullen has an interest in maritime & naval history, as any right-minded person should, but after the conference I learned she’s done some really cool work in tracking naval battles and the taking of ships by privateers during the Quasi-War of 1798-1800. She took all of the information she’d gathered, and mapped all of it, then put it all online at http://abbymullen.org/projects/Quasi-War/.

QW_Captures

As she explains in her description of this image, “This screenshot shows most of the encounters between American and French vessels. Green is a French capture; red is an American; brown is an encounter that did not result in a capture either way.” Note the grey almost-rectangle in the left-center. That’s a separate chart, from the late 18th century, which she has adapted and stretched to reflect our improved geographic knowledge of the region.

Plus, she wrote up how she collected the data, she posted the data on her page, and talked about the challenges of converting historical data — especially the historical map/chart she chose to plot the data upon — to a modern format and with modern specificity. She also highlighted the limitations of the data she collected, and described other activities she’d like to see done, if possible.

This is a great application of historical data in a modern setting. Check it out!