THE PROJECT
Help scientists recover worldwide weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I. These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes. Historians will use your work to track past ship movements and the stories of the people on board.
What we made:
- Interaction and visual design
- Front-end development
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THE CHALLENGE
The main aim of our work at the Old Weather project was to design a system able to engage users on the digitization job. The system should be easy to use, playful and enjoyable. Our future climate depends on it!
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THE SOLUTION
Old Weather design was oriented as a collaborative game, where each user earns points when digitizing. The collected points accumulate on the user profile, so he promotes from “cadet” to “captain” and so on. Who can resist to become the captain of an old vessel?
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THE RESULTS
A great example of crowdsourcing and “game with a purpose” model: an engaging game that supports an important scientific research.
HIGHLIGHTS
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Vessel travel visualization
As the logbook digitalization progress, latitude and longitude information gets incorporated. With this information the ship route can be traced on a map.
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Digitization support
The process of logbooks digitization is supported by a carefully designed system guiding the user at each task.
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User rankings
Each time a user participates in the digitization of a logbook, he promotes as ship crew. The more he digitize, the higher his rank will be.
OLDWEATHER ON THE MEDIA
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“A new project aims to use old Royal Navy logbooks to help build a more accurate picture of how our climate has changed. [...] By getting an army of online human volunteers to retrace these voyages we can re-live both the climate of the past and key moments in naval history.”
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“A bunch of British scientists needs help digitizing the weather information from World War I Royal Navy logbooks, and they’re asking anyone with a few spare minutes to help.[...] The goal of Old Weather is to make century-old weather data available to researchers.”
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“Old Weather thus manages to combine crowdsourced citizen science with climate research, naval history, a sense of narrative and vigorous competition between the crews of different virtual ships. That's a pretty impressive combination. Jump aboard!”
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"That's the amazing thing about imaging these logs [...] We're getting the weather stuff out of them, but they're going to be great sources for historians, genealogists, biologists.”
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“The writing in these logs ranges from scribe-quality copperplate to slapdash and scruffy, and computers make too many errors to be useful for transcribing them. But human eyes and brains are good at interpreting written words.”
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“Historical weather data is vital because it allows us to test our models of the Earth's climate. If we can correctly account for what the weather was doing in the past, then we can have more confidence in our predictions of the future."”
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