Information School News

  “We often try to do multidisciplinary work, but it’s not often you work so closely with people from very different academic backgrounds”, says Dr Morgan Harvey, Senior Lecturer in Data Science at the Information School and Sheffield’s Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project ‘ Civil War Bluejackets: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the United States Navy ’. Though the Civil War Period of American history - the 1860s - is the context for this project, Dr Harvey says “it’s actually pretty much exactly a clean 50/50 split between the historical part of the project and the information science part.” Along with Postdoctoral Researcher Dr Adam Funk in Sheffield and former Sheffield colleague Professor Frank Hopfgartner of the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany, Dr Harvey is collaborating with historians Professor David Gleeson and Dr Damien Shiels at Northumbria University. Gleeson and Harvey lead the project as co-PIs, and the team is completed by Associate Professo...

  A new UK-led project will help tell the stories of British and other immigrant sailors in the American Civil War in ways never before possible. The “ Civil War Bluejackets ” Project —so named because of the distinctive uniform worn by U.S. Civil War sailors—is a collaboration between historians at the Northumbria University and information and data scientists at t he University of Sh effield and the University of Koblenz-Landau . Funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council , the project launches on 6 September 2022 with a call for citizen volunteers to help transcribe tens of thousands of Civil War “Muster Rolls”, documents that were carried on board U.S. ships and which capture the personal details of the c .118,000 men who fought on water for the Union between 1861 and 1865. The project team are making use of the online Zooniverse platform to share tens of thousands of these Muster Rolls, and are asking the public to help in revealing their contents. Princi...