We’re shore you’ll love this!

It’s been a while since my last post, but we’re launching a new project, UK Tides, with Zooniverse, asking volunteers to help digitise sea level measurements from historical handwritten ledgers (https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/psmsl/uk-tides). The project focuses on two sites near Liverpool in the North West of England: Hilbre Island and George’s Dock – two of the longest records we have. The data will be used to study climate change and sea level rise and will be included in the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) dataset, which is used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Handwritten ledger from Hilbre, 1853

Back in 2011, the British Oceanographic Data Centre at the National Oceanography Centre, won funding under the Jisc Mass Digitisation programme to preserve historical ledgers by scanning them. At the time, we investigated how we might actually digitise the data (https://historicsealevel.wordpress.com/2012/08/16/citizen-science-power-to-the-people/) but it wasn’t until Zooniverse launched their project builder in 2015 that we thought it might be possible.

Over the past 5 years, we’ve kept trying to rescue data but our efforts really were focussed in 2020 by the UNESCO sea level data rescue workshop (https://en.unesco.org/news/recovering-historical-sea-level-data-help-assess-risk-extreme-sea-level-events). One of the recommendations of that workshop was to “explore the feasibility of a pilot project for the Zooniverse platform for citizen science research” and UK Tides is the outcome!

At the Summit

Last month I was at the Citizen Cyberscience Summit in London. This is a yearly event that brings together scientists and IT experts from different areas in order to discuss and advance citizen science (public participation in scientific research).

Citizen science is something that’s really taken off in the last few years. The natural sciences seem to have benefited most from it so far, through wildlife reporting projects. One area where mass public participation (via the internet) has proven very useful is in areas where large volumes of data need to be eyeball-checked. An example would be Snapshot Serengeti. Plankton Portal is a similar project in the marine sciences. One of the most successful mass participation projects involved classifying astronomical data.

Royal Geographical Society, where part of the summit was held
(photo credit: _sarchi, flickr)

If the research doesn’t involve animals or outer space, researchers need other strategies to get the public involved. Gamification is a very popular approach – neuroscientists mapping the human brain and researchers developing quantum computing have both had success using online games as a way to get the public to participate.

Other talks discussed: citizen science in environmental activism; the importance of building and keeping a user base; the creation of citizen science apps for (Android) mobile phones; the difficulties of citizen science in extreme environments and areas of low literacy and connectivity.

Some of the more evangelical citizen science boosters believe future developments will involve greater public involvement – giving the citizen scientists more say in the research objectives and outcomes (as one person put it, “if it’s just collecting data, it’s not citizen science, it’s just science”), rather than just crowdsourcing data.

One negative was that there was almost no mention of *metadata* during the two days.

Citizens on Patrol

We’re currently working on a Citizen Science scoping project, with the aim of transcribing the data from historical tide gauge ledgers we had scanned last year. A couple of weeks ago I decided to make a trip down south to visit the Met Office and the UK Hydrographic Office (UKHO), where I could discuss Citizen Science and sea level data archaeology.

At the Met Office, I met with some of the team behind the Old Weather project and also the Met Office Weather Observation Website. I received some really helpful advice about starting up a Citizen Science project, some of which can be found in The Citizen Science guide available from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH). They also recommended someone from the team attend the Citizen Cyberscience Summit in London at the end of February.

The view from the train between Exeter and Taunton

After the visit to the Met Office in Exeter, I went to Taunton to meet the Tides group at the UKHO to discuss what data in their impressive archives might be recoverable. Among other wonderful historical data I saw tide gauge charts from Valetta, Malta, dating back to the 1870s and tide gauge measurements made at Kerguelen by James Clark Ross in the 1840s. The UKHO archives are open to the public, by appointment, but we hope to scan some of the tide gauge records to make them freely available.

The meetings gave me lots of things to think about and also uncovered lots of data. It was great to meet with people that were so enthusiastic about the work they do and very keen to be helpful and share their knowledge.

Get on Board

While trying to identify new sources of historical marine data I came across some interesting records. They are part of the collection of the Board of Longitude, which is currently held in Cambridge University Library and can be viewed online.

The Board of Longitude was set up by the British Government in 1714 to solve the problem of ships not knowing where exactly they were when out at sea (latitude could be calculated at sea, but not longitude). Some of the content in the Cambridge University Library collection was digitised using funds from the Jisc Content Programme 2011-13, which also funded some of our content digitisation.

There are several observations of tide levels in the collection, including some made in May 1773, in Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand. The astronomer William Bayly was on board HMS Adventure, but spent some time ashore taking the tidal measurements.

Glad Tide-ings

The 2013 International Data Rescue Award in the Geosciences was held at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) 46th Annual Fall Meeting in San Francisco, California in December 2013.

San Francisco (picture by Adam Leadbetter)

Organised by Integrated Earth Data Applications (IEDA) and Elsevier Research Data Services, the award was created to help improve preservation of and access to research data, particularly dark data (information that organisations collect, process and store during regular business activities but don’t use for other purposes). Participating organisations were encouraged to discuss the varied ways that these data are being processed, stored and used.

Among the submissions is BODC’s, titled “Rescue of historical UK sea level charts and ledgers“, based on the work done on the project and discussed in this blog. The prize winner was the NASA-funded Nimbus Data Rescue Project. It is intended that there will be a special journal issue and BODC plan to submit a paper.

Putting up a Poster

This week the International Conference on Marine Data and Information Systems took place in Lucca, Italy. We had submitted a poster for the session ‘Services for Users and Education’.

To quote the conference organisers:

“The IMDIS series of Conferences promotes the meeting of different communities working in informatics, data management, research, environmental protection, etc. It is focused on online access to data, metadata and products, communication standards and adapted technology to ensure platforms interoperability. IMDIS 2013 aims at providing an overview of the existing information on marine environmental data, and showing the progresses on development of efficient infrastructures for managing large and diverse data sets.”

The poster discussed the production of Open Educational Resources (OERs) for historical sea level data from tide gauges and explained our motives for creating the resources.

“We wanted to raise awareness in the wider community of the existence of the new data and to help users understand the data, so we worked with three Ocean Sciences undergraduates to create OERs from the digitised and scanned resources. The students were able to incorporate their own learning styles and methods in the OERs, and use their experience to show us where observational data could be used in their courses. The OERs are documents which use the scanned and digitised data to explain and test understanding of an idea.”

Of using the data, the students said:

“Any time you use real data, it just feels more applicable… its real data so you’re doing more real experiments.”
“It makes the theory more real.”

Radio Waves

This week saw the highest equinoctial spring tides of the year around the UK. Professor Philip Woodworth of the National Oceanography Centre appeared on Radio Lancashire and Radio Merseyside to explain what causes tides and also talk a little bit about why predicting future tides and calculating historical sea levels is important. For instance, tides played an large role in Julius Caesar’s decision to attempt a landing in Kent in 54BC and also the timing of the battle of Hastings.

A very large equinoctial spring tide will occur in September 2015, which should make for a powerful tidal bore in the Mersey Estuary.

Tidal bore on the River Mersey. Photo by Colin Bell.

Tidal bore on the River Mersey. Photo by Colin Bell.

You can hear Prof Woodworth using the listen again feature at the BBC Radio Lancashire website (02:41:00) and the BBC Radio Merseyside page (02:50:39).

Finalising OERs

As mentioned in an earlier post (“Students at work”), we have created Open Educational Resources (OERs) based on the digitised historical sea level data, our aim being to publicise the recovered data. We each created an OER based on a specific area of interest; these were

• Sea level data and its uses (focusing on the principles, perception and mathematical uses of the data)
• Extreme events (focusing on principles of storm surges and how to use historical data to identify them)
• Tidal formation (focusing on the physical principles and using the data to identify tide trends)

These OERs have been made accessible to everyone so that anyone interested in sea level, history, etc, can learn the basic principles, which they can then build upon if they choose to. Creating OERs has been interesting and we have learnt a lot through doing this. It has been enjoyable to have free reign over the subjects chosen within this area. Each OER is very different from the next even though they tie together.

Being students ourselves we have first-hand experience and current knowledge of how students like to study. We know there are a variety of ways to learn and have tried to incorporate these into the OERs. We are grateful for being involved in this project with the British Oceanographic Data Centre and hope that what we have created will be helpful to the public in enhancing their interests.

The Sea Level Necklace

Inspired by the waveform jewellery mentioned in this post and also by other pieces I’d seen on the internet, I decided to have a go at making my own, based on some of our historical tide gauge data. I decided to make a necklace and use high and low water values, as I thought the measurements would make a visible contrast and also still show some variation in a small piece.

 

I took the high and low water values from George’s Pier for 23-31 July 1891 and converted them from feet to inches, and then to metres. To do this, I multiplied the number in the ‘Ft.’ column by 12, then added to it the number in the ‘Ins.’ column. I then converted the values to metres by multiplying by 0.0254.

This would’ve made a rather large piece if I’d left it in metres, so I decided to scale it down by treating the metres as centimetres. I then used a drawing programme to draw circles with diameters in centimetres that matched the height in metres.

I printed out the circles on to paper. I then took some shrink plastic (available from craft stores and internet retailers – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinky_Dinks) and traced the circles using a blue alcohol ink pen (I frosted the plastic on one side first using fine grade sandpaper to give it a key).

When I drew the circles I’d made a mark in the centre of each, so I knew where to make a hole, and I just copied this mark on to the shrink plastic. I then cut each of the circles out. I punched a hole in the centre of each using a hole punch.

Now here’s the fun bit. When heated, shrink plastic shrinks by about 60%, and also gets thicker. You can do this in the oven, but I used a crafting heat tool.

After I’d shrunk each circle (taking care to keep them in the correct order!) I then threaded each one onto some nylon beading thread.

Even though that looked quite nice, and you could see the change in disc size easily (especially if you look at the smaller circles that represent low waters, they get teeny towards the end) I thought it didn’t really work as a piece of jewellery. I took the discs off the thread again, and then put them back on, but this time with some small plastic silver coloured beads between each disc.

I then put a crimp bead at either end of the necklace, after the last disc and silver bead, and squished it to clamp the thread in place, and prevent the beads from moving. I took a spring ring closure and tied the nylon thread through the loop on it. I secured the thread with another crimp bead. The other side of the nylon thread I tied onto the hoop piece of the spring ring closure and secured the thread with a crimp bead.

And here’s the final necklace! George’s Pier high and low water values, July 1891.

Shoot first, ask questions later

Recently we began filming our end of project case study video. We decided to start by interviewing the students who worked on the Open Educational Resources about their experiences. We also spoke to their supervisor, Senior Lecturer Dr Harry Leach from the University of Liverpool. We asked him to tell us why he thought saving historic sea level data was important.

We put our newly developed filming skills to use – we used two cameras, a video camera and a digital single-lens reflex (DSLR), to capture the interviews from two different angles.

Our colleagues at the National Oceanography Centre had filmed in a room in our building recently and created a diagram for others to use, showing where to put the camera, lights, interviewer and interviewee in order to make the best use of the natural light. This made it quick and easy for us to set up. We had to deviate from their instructions slightly as they’d designed a setup for filming one person, while one of our interviews was with three people.

We’d planned our interview questions beforehand and managed to film about 15 minutes of footage, which should give us plenty to edit down into a five minute video. The only problem we had was some very noisy seagulls outside, but I think they’ll lend a suitably maritime atmosphere to the piece!