Mapping Ship Logs

| |

Ship logs contain a wealth of geographic data within them. Ā The Old Weather Project is building a database of historical weather information extracted through crowdsourced efforts. Ā Now,Ā Ben Schmidt, who is anĀ assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, has mapped out historical shipping routes. Ā The resulting visualization looks like a jumbled mess of human hair with continents particularly in the Southern Hemisphere discernible. The darker threads emphasis routes along the trade winds.

Schmidt created this visualization from NASA’sĀ International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS). Ā In particular, he mapped out shipping routes from ICOADS’ US Maury collection. Ā Having been injured in a stagecoach accident in 1839,Ā Matthew F. Maury wasĀ disqualified from sea dutyĀ despiteĀ his request to be assigned to the Pacific Squadron. Ā Instead, he was assigned on July 1, 1842 as theĀ officer-in-charge of the Depot of Charts and Instruments. Ā It was in that post that Maury undertook an extensive study of thousands of historical ship logs and charts. Ā Nicknamed theĀ “Pathfinder of the Seas”, Maury published “Wind and Current Chart of the North Atlantic.” Ā  At the height of his career, Maury was named theĀ Superintendent of the Depot of Charts and Instruments. Ā 

Shipping data from ICOADS US Maury collection. Visualization: Ben Schmidt.
Shipping data from ICOADS US Maury collection. Visualization: Ben Schmidt.

His legacy was a collection ofĀ ship records representing 12,336 voyages fromĀ 1784-1863Ā known as the Maury Collection and onĀ November 17, 1993,Ā Professor Hou Wenfeng, Director of the NationalĀ Marine Data Information Service of the State Oceanic Administration ofĀ China and Gregory W. Withee , U.S. Chairman for the National Oceanic andĀ Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) signed a Joint Implementation Plan toĀ digitize the Maury Collection of historical ships’ weatherĀ logs stored in theĀ National Archives and Records Administration (NARA, 1981).

Ben Schmidt has visualized data spanning from pre1860s to 2000s from ICOADS (the data is freely available for download from the ICOADS data product pageĀ and contains records spanning fromĀ 1662 to 2007). Ā This panel Schmidt created from different sampling periods shows changes in ship routes (note the opening of the Panama Canal).

World Shipping Routes, 1750-2000. Source: Ben Schmidt.
World Shipping Routes, 1750-2000. Source: Ben Schmidt.

With hisĀ research interests in the digital humanities and the intellectual and cultural history of the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, Schmidt utilizes his analysis of Maury’s digitized data to underline the importance of how “[d]igitization makes the most traditional forms of humanistic scholarship more necessary, not less.” More:Ā Reading digital sources: a case study in ship’s logs

Ā (Via Unified Pop Theory)

See Also

Share this article


Enter your email to receive the weekly GIS Lounge newsletter:

2 thoughts on “Mapping Ship Logs”

  1. This is a great dataset indeed! Let me point to the CLIWOC dataset gathered by EU program of British, Dutch, French and Spanish ships captains’ logs from 1750 – 1850 – I only mapped ships locations but it had also all the climatological data recorded then – I wonder if this data set has it too (must go look LOL).
    http://slidesha.re/KzTYTH

Comments are closed.