It’s been a while coming, but I think it’s owed to people to just be clear on the future of this website going forward, especially given the generosity of people making donations to this website recently, and the reality that this website will renew for another year today- September 17.
The past year has been quite transitional for this website, for a number of reasons.
First of all, the death of Twitter has radically diminished our reach and very much damaged the network of connections that we had for audience, as well as for reaching new people, and for sourcing people to write for us. Second, changes by book publishers, and changes in Academia from Covid, and reassessing unpaid labour aspects of Academia have (rightfully) disrupted the way that book reviews are considered and completed. Third, the three people who have been at the core of this website- Dr Sam McLean (myself), Dr Sarah Pickman and Dr Meaghan Walker have all in the past year undertaken new duties, completed postdocs, and in general things have changed in a way that mean that we, collectively, do not have the same amount of time to dedicated to the website that we have in the past.
I am committed to keeping this website going, because I think that it is important to provide a different, independent platform for maritime history that is broadly defined, queer friendly, and frankly not tied in with academic publishers and content aggregators.
- One major goal of this website for the next year is to do fixes and updates and really promote the ADM8 Database, now that all the Deployment Reports from Volumes 1 & 2 have been transcribed (Thank you, Dr Larry Hartzell for your very generous and tireless work there). Get everything crosschecked and working properly, get all the reports live, and all the document images up so that researchers can see both the transcribed text and the photo of the document itself
- Another goal is to get the BR1 (1968) Database live, the transcription of the BR1 1968 Catalogue, including a new research interface for that database.
- We need to bring some new people onside who would like to regularly contribute to the website, and hopefully take over some of the duties from Sarah, Meaghan and myself. I will soon be putting notices on H-Net looking for volunteers
- I would love to resurrect some of the established ‘series’ that we had going in the past- for example ‘How I Became a Historian’, and the Museum Reviews
- The Book Reviews project needs a re-think to reflect new realities, which Meaghan is already working on
- I would love to host a Bluesky/Youtube conference like we did in the past- perhaps this one about the death of twitter and what does that means for extremely online maritime historians?
- I would love to get in touch with more archives so we can help promote archives and their projects and sources
Of course, if you’re interested in coming aboard, please get in touch with me at my email.
