Code the City 20

 

Over lockdown, we have been continuing to work on the Harbour Arrivals project alongside Code the City, https://codethecity.org/. After such a successful weekend at CTC19, we were delighted to be back for CTC20 to continue. As expected, the team working on the project was made up of both avid coders and history enthusiasts which brings a great range of skills and knowledge to the weekend.

A second spreadsheet was created to input adjustments, this allowed us to clean data to be more presentable whilst keeping the accurate ledger transcriptions intact; a must when dealing with archival material. This data cleaning has allowed us to create a more presentable website which is easier to understand and navigate. We also added a new column – fishing port registration numbers. These numbers have been cross referenced with https://www.naval-history.net/WW1NavyBritishShips-Dittmar6FishPortNos.htm and show us which vessels were civilian boats requisitioned by the admiralty.

 

Some of the team also looked forward to consider how the data could be used in the future. A series of graphs and charts have been created to highlight patterns such as most frequent ships and most popular cargo. We even have an interactive map to show where the in the world the ships were arriving from. As with CTC19, the weekend has been a great success. Archivists learned more about data and the coders benefitted from over 15,000 records to play with.