HMS NHS: The Nautical Health Service

What's so special about the records of the Dreadnought Seaman's Hospital?
The Dreadnought records are special because for over a hundred and fifty years, the hospital only treated sailors. Even during the First World War, the hospital treated 'soldiers' of the Royal Naval Division who had been wounded fighting in the trenches of the Western Front. The records are therefore a case study of health, medicine and welfare in the maritime world. Digitising and transcribing these records will make them available for research and mean they can be analysed as a whole, to study patterns in illness and 'workplace' injuries and how these evolved in response advances in medical knowledge.

How much time should I allow to complete a transcription Workflow?
It's important to consider how much time you have and chose a workflow accordingly. The column workflows have been developed with this in mind. These vary between 5 minutes to 40 minutes, and allow you to plan your time accordingly. See the Tutorial to each workflow for more information.

Which Workflow is the best?
It depends on what you like and how much time you have. The workflows for 'Quality', 'Under what Circumstances Admitted' and 'How disposed of' are quickest, where you choose from a 'drop down' menu and don't have to type anything. When you're more familiar with the tasks and hand writing, 'Name', Place of Birth', 'Port Sailed Out Of' or 'Last Services' are a good step up, where you need to read and copy exactly or 'transcribe' the entry, sometimes expanding abbreviations used by hospital clerks, to help the entries make more sense to today's audiences.

Why can't you transcribe across the page?
We tried very hard to develop a workflow that allowed transcription across the page, line by line, as you would read the records. This would allow transcribers to follow the 'human interest' and see all the information about each patient. However, transcribing a whole page is time consuming, with greater risk of losing your work, before you could complete a page and hit 'DONE' (if you took a break and your PC went into standby for example). Also, unlike a column workflow (which can be edited easily), a Line workflow is difficult to edit, to accommodate even minor changes in structure of the records over time. This would mean several versions of the same workflow in use at once, which would be very confusing!

There is a lot of panning and zooming to read the writing. What's the best way to do this?
The original hospital registers are large, heavy ledgers, with all the information for each patient going across a double page spread. As an image, this makes for more frequent panning and zooming than a single page. The best way is to use a mouse with a scroll wheel- this is MUCH quicker than using a laptop touch pad! With practice you can line up the column you are transcribing with the right hand edge of the image pane. Having done this, you can line up the part of the image you are transcribing, with the task boxes you are working on. This helps to prevent losing your place!

I can't read an entry, it's blank or says ". What should I do?
The golden rule is 'transcribe as seen'. The only exceptions are names and place names, which are abbreviated with 'superscript' letters, and don't make sense if not expanded. If you can't read an entry, transcribe what you can see and use [...] square brackets to indicate a letter or letters that are unreadable. For example, if you couldn't read a ship name beginning with G, you should enter G[...], for the letters you cannot read. If you can see a name ending in est, enter [...]est. With practice you will be amazed how quickly you can 'tune in' to the handwriting and read it with increasing fluency and accuracy. If the word DITTO, or ditto marks " are shown, this means 'as above', so we transcribe from the entry above. If a box is blank, enter 00 to denote there is no entry to transcribe.

Are there any online resources to help me look up names, places of birth, ports or ship names?
Yes! There are links to look up names, qualities (ranks) and both merchant and naval ships. These can be found in the FIELD GUIDE.

I'm a new transcriber and am likely to make errors.
Don't worry. Slow and steady is the name of the game at first. With a bit of perseverance, increasing familiarity with the tasks and hand writing come very quickly and your speed will pick up.

Can I check the number of transcriptions I have carried out?
Yes. These are displayed on the Home Page when you log in. Among the Project statistics, you'll see both your own contribution, and the overall progress of the HMSNHS project.

Why are some of the columns not being transcribed?
Not all the columns contain data of real research value. For example, almost all the heights range from 4 ft 10 to 5 ft 6, almost every man was 'an orderly man' and the Slops column (clothes supplied) is rarely filled in ...

I've made a really interesting discovery. How can I contact the Research Team?
Use TALK! Talk is a great way to ask questions and share thoughts- and we're not pretending every answer is here! It's also a great place to contact the Research Team, share discoveries and ask other volunteers what they think.

I know someone who would like to join the project. How do they do this?
Ask them to go to zooniverse.org and register with a username and password. They can then choose this or any other exciting Zooniverse project!

Can I check on the overall progress of the project?
Yes! See the Project Progress thread in the Announcements part of TALK. This will be updated on a monthly basis. The Project Home Page also contains project statistics and progress.

Why is there no DSH/6?
When the records were transferred to the National Maritime Museum in the 1970s, volume 6 (covering 1837-9) was not received. Sadly it does not seem to have survived the 130 year intervening period between its creation and the records' arrival into archival preservation at the Museum.

Is the project stand-alone, or is it part of a wider programme of work?
HMS NHS: The Nautical Health Service is one of three Citizen Research Projects, that together make up the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded research project Engaging Crowds: Citizen research and heritage data at scale. You can read more about Engaging Crowds here.