I’ve been thinking about this post for a while.
First of all, I don’t plan on GlobalMaritimeHistory going anywhere, as long as I can afford to host the site (or, people can be extremely bloody generous- as they were this year).
As I’m sure you understand, Elon Musk’s insane determination to kill Twitter has put a major spike into how this website has operated for the entirety of it’s existence- with Twitter being the primary form of communication and promotion.
We still have our Facebook page, and we’re working on Mastodon and eventually Bluesky hopefully, but there’s still a feeling like an amputated limb when it comes to connection to this website’s audience. I mean, we still use the site’s twitter account, but we have to manually post to it instead of notification automatically being tweeted when a new post is made live. This.. is an annoying extra bit of labour, to be fully honest.
The second major thing is that the three people who are responsible for this website- myself, Dr Sarah Pickman and Dr Meaghan Walker all have important changes coming up, which take important time. You may have noticed that there are substantially fewer posts per month than three have been in the past. This is not for lack of wanting to post.
Also, you will have noticed that there has been very little progress on the ADM 8 Database project since last year. This, again is not for lack of want, but rather for lack of time.
So over the next few months, we’ll be looking for more volunteers to come aboard and take on some of the tasks that have been going on. I, of course, don’t expect people to volunteer, after all extra labour is extra labour. But you get a platform to write about fun maritime (and maritime adjacent things), and pretty free rein on whatever aspect of the website you’d like to take charge of. In particular, I’d love to really push some of our a little neglected things – like the Museum Review series, and the “Discuss-A-Doc” posts. And I would love if somebody would be interested in running another online conference through our site- something about queering maritime history, perhaps?
I definitely would be interested in somebody else taking over the social media side of things and running with it and making it as good as some of the other projects at the moment. Somebody who understands Instagram and Bluesky more than I do, anyways.\
It will definitely take time to reconstruct the networks for promoting our context on Bluesky that we previously had on Twitter, but I believe it’s absolutely worth the time and the effort because we have so much cracking content. And future things to come, like the ADM 8 project marching forward this winter once I’m laid off. I’ll also be continuing to write about the Admiralty Manuals project as well, since I have a plan to write at least one research note this winter (certainly don’t feel comfortable calling it an article). I am also in the process of transcribing the BR1 catalogue of Books for Reference from 1968 that I have, and will be making that available as a special database once the whole thing is transcribed. I only have about 99 pages of entries left to go, so hopefully sometime by the new year. But it’s certainly very interesting.
We do also have some really fun stuff to come over the next few months, including more Discuss-A-Doc (and sharing of my academic research photos), book reviews, and a review of Discovery Harbour in Penetanguishene, Ontario that I’m really looking forward to sharing.
