Research Director's report for November 2013
Posted by eldick on 03 Dec 2013 in Activity log
Most of the month of November was devoted to the following tasks:
1. Completing the identification of key Franklin Mystery documents from the United Kingdom research for transcription. These included several key pieces of correspondence from Sir John Franklin, Lady Franklin, and Captains Francis Crozier and James Fitzjames, among others. They provide significant documentation on the background to the expedition, including recruitment, provisioning, planning, and lobbying by Franklin for the command of the party, the scientific research and other objectives for the expedition as revealed in the British Admiralty's correspondence, the ships' voyage up to the last contact with the expedition in Greenland in late summer 1845, and clues as to Franklin's actual objectives for the party and his expedition's route following its disappearance, among other intriguing historical issues.
2. Setting up interviews for the Interpretations section of the web site with Jonathan Moore, Ryan Harris, and Tom Zagon of Ottawa, and Dorothy Eber of Montreal, which I plan to carry out in mid-January 2014.
3. Preparing an elaborated site plan following the approval of the Franklin site plan in early November, including proposed documents and word counts, which was submitted to the GUMICH directors in late November. The current estimate of words submitted for transcription is approximately 66,000 words, and documents comprising another 15,000 are under consideration for the documentary collection. Approximately another 10,000 will be consumed by the contextual and synthesis essays, leaving about 9,000 words to address any remaining gaps that may be identified over the next month or so.
December will be devoted to completing the selection of Franklin documents for transcription with my research associate Peter Gossage, copying the documents, preparing the associated metadata documentation and submitting the package to Stewart Arneil for his IT assistance prior to the assignment of the material to the transcribers. By 15 December I also intend to prepare the draft biographical sketches of the individuals identified as dramatis personae, and preparing the draft essays for the Context section of the Mystery. At the request of GUMICH I will also seek to increase significantly the corpus of images collected for the Franklin Mystery and to work out with Stewart a suitable metadata format for the different categories of images.
Lyle Dick, 2 December 2013