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August 13, 2024

Help MarineLives write history

MarineLives is a volunteer-led collaboration for the transcription and enrichment of English High Court of Admiralty records from the C17th and C17th. The records provide an immensely rich and underutilised source of social, material and economic history in a remarkably interconnected Early Modern World.

We have already 5 million words complete and freely available on the world wide web, the product of working with over 250 volunteers in the last twelve years. We are seeking to raise £20,000 to complete the remaining 25 million words by end 2025. 50,000 manucript pages in total. This latest project will vastly scale-up and accelerate our past efforts.

All funds raised will go to computational costs using the Transkribus handwriting recognition platform, and will use high quality models we have already built and used successfully.

We will take the output from these Transkribus models and further clean and perfect them using volunteers supported by a tailored GPT-4o model we have developed to assist us with cleaning up HTR output.

You can see examples of these records (both images and transcriptions) on our MarineLives wiki and the full set of text records currently available and searchable on our GitHub site. If you feel this is a cause worthy of encouragement a small donation would be highly appreciated.

You can donate by clicking on this link to our GoFundMe page.

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We currently have 27 volume of HCA 13/ data available on our GitHub site for review and to download. Several volumes are complete, but most are still ar a very early stage

You can estimate the degree of completeness of each volume by looking at their current file size, measured in KB:

HCA_13_31 = 15 KB

HCA_13_35 = 53 KB

HCA_13_39 = 448 KB

HCA_13_40 = 113 KB

HCA_13_42 = 44 KB

HCA_13_44 = 469 KB

HCA_13_48 = 20 KB

HCA_13_49 = 62 KB

HCA_13_50 = 55 KB

HCA_13_51 = 291 KB

HCA_13_52 = 682 KB

HCA_13_53 = 547 KB

HCA_13_55 = 227 KB

HCA_13_56 = 184 KB

HCA_13_57 = 1052 KB

HCA_13_58 = 123 KB

HCA_13_59 = 222 KB

HCA_13_61 = 947 KB

HCA_13_63 = 512 KB

HCA_13_64 = 172 KB

HCA_13_68 = 2550 KB

HCA_13_70 = 4215 KB

HCA_13_71 = 4086 KB

HCA_13_72 = 2884 KB

HCA_13_73 = 2563 KB

HCA_13_76 = 12 KB

HCA_13_79 = 273 KB