Changes to OW Whaling

[arboggs]

Good afternoon, OW Whalers.

If have not yet heard, our dear Joan Arthur a.k.a. AvastMH died in the early hours of July 31st in Oxford, UK after a short illness. We are sharing remembrances of her on the forum here

For those of you wondering what's to become of OW Whaling now, I can assure you that the project lives on. My name is April a.k.a. arboggs and I am taking over as the project lead for Whaling. Some of you already know me, as I've been with the project since 2019, but for those of you who don't here are some facts about me: I'm in my 30s. I currently live in Northern Virginia. I have degrees in Media Analysis & Criticism and Popular Culture Studies. I have years of experience in curation and transcription of museum archival collections. And I love to bake.

If you have any questions, you can ask on the forum or you can private message me if you like. I look forward to sailing with all of you!

[arboggs]

Greetings and Happy New Year, fellow whalers!

It is with sadness that I must inform you that the Whaling section of the OldWeather Project is currently on hold for the foreseeable future. As some of you know, last year we lost our lead scientist and the project as a whole has been in a state of transition ever since. We have been in negotiations with scientists to take over housing the whaling data, but things have been moving very slowly. It was decided that it would not be fair to our volunteers to continue assigning whaling logs when we don't have a definitive home for the data and we aren't even sure if our transcribing will continue in the current format when we re-start.

I greatly appreciate all of the work you have done and I know Joan appreciated it, too. I encourage everyone who wants to continue to volunteer with the project to check in with Michael or Randi in the Federal Ships section to see what assignments are available.

I will still be collecting work from those with current assignments, so please contact me and let me know how you are progressing.

I wish you all joy and good thoughts for this new year,

April

[Michael]

That is such sad news! I know that many of you have been working long and hard on that project. I also know that Kevin Wood was making excellent use of the data you collected.

However, as April pointed out, we could use people transcribing the US Navy logs, and Caro and her team of editors could use more help on the editing project.

[pommystuart]

Michael forgot to add, we use a spreadsheet and some logs are typed. Even the ones not typed are reasonably legible (ish).

[espross]

For my own part, I'm very remiss in responding to the loss of Joan (oh, man!), and I'll be sad to leave Whaling. Thank you, April, for taking over.

But I have time, interest, and by now the experience to do more transcription. Federal logs would be fine with me! Do I contact Randi to get an assignment?

[Randi]

I'll send you a PM

We'll be delighted to have you, although I wish it had not happened like this

[Caro]

I hope you can get Whaling back in operation one day, April. Good luck!