Presentation given at Spatial Ignite at #wherecampdc

1. WhereCampDC
38° 53′ 42.4″ N, 77° 2′ 12″ W :: June 10th, 2011
Ignite Spatial @ National Geographic
Mapping old weather
Javier de la Torre - Vizzuality
Hi everybody
There has been a bit of change on my presentation, but I hope you will like what i am gonna talk about.

2. So we are trying to recreate how was the climate 100 years ago in the oceans. And of course at this time there
were not many observatories, but luckily sailors around the world were capturing this information in the so called
log books.

3. Log of HMS Invincible,1914-12-08
A log book is like a diary where the sailors wrote what was going on every day. Their position, the weather, etc. Only
in England there is probably more than 250.000 log books providing an incredible source of new data.

4. But interpreting those logs books is a hard task. Computers dont manage to do it. So this is the reason why
oldweather.org was created, to provide crowdsourcing of those log books.

5. And this is how it works. You get to a page of a log book of a ship and start transcribing. First the date,
the location... it could be a port or coordinates.

6. Then there is the actual weather records, temperature, wind, etc. You can basically move the window
around capturing multiple of those. And finally you can capture any other notes they might wrote on the
sides.

7. You can become a captain!
But how we convince people to help us? Well, first of all because you can promote to a captain! The more log
book you digitized from a ship the more chances. And people love that! I also believe there is a lot of people
helping here because this stuff matters.

8. “A friend rings to say she's really sorry, but
she's going to have to cancel your evening
out, and your first thought is "Great, I can get
on with my ship!"
http://forum.oldweather.org/index.php?topic=1432.0
Thats when the community aspect bright! If you look at the project forum there is some really
commited people that even put their kids to work on their ships... there is people really addicted to it.

9. And how are we doing? Not bad. Started last November and we have 68% of all log books scanned, thats
more than half a million pages!

10. And this is how it looks in a map all those annotations. Remember, for each of these points we have
the temperature, pressure, wind... it is GOLD for climatologist.

11. Philip Broham has already start visualizing the results and here you can see just a little time lapse in 1917.
The traces of the ships are colored based on the temperature. It is relly curious to see the full movie...

12. www.oldweather.org/voyages
Other visualization done by Stuart Lynn displays the voyages for each boat together with the stories
happening at the boat, so you can slide and see their trips and understand what was going on in the
boats.

13. Individual transcriptions
are about 97% accurate
Of 1000 transcribed logbook entries:
3 will be lost because of transcription errors
10 will be illegible
At least 3 will be errors in the logs http://blogs.zooniverse.org/
oldweather/2011/03/better-than-the-
defence/
And how precise is this? Well, turned that people are very accurate when transcribing, up to 97% of the time
they agree with another 3 persons transcribing the same. Which shows you the power of crowdsourcing at
its best.

14. May 1911
But all this is done for a reason. We want to recreate the weather on the oceans long time ago so that
we can understand our current and future climates. And for most areas this is the only source of
information we are gonna have.

15. http://www.seayourhistory.org.uk
burials
One side thing of the project that I love is the events going on in the boats. Like for example when people passed
away, like this sailor. There is people even looking for old relatives history!

16. also celebrations. And in terms of sports? Well is Britain, must be football, but i love that Dance was the
third!

17. 90-year-old social
graph of Old Weather
Or another type of info is captured is when boats met in the oceans. They wrote it and now we can
visualize which were the most "sociable" boats out there.

18. www.oldweather.org/team
Rob Allan Philip Brohan
Chris Lintott
Lucinda Donnachie Clive Wilkinson
Stuart Lynn Arfon Smith
Gordon Smith
This is work been done by lot of people from the MetOffice in UK, the University of Oxford and some
others like us, if you are interested on the project check out some of the really nice videos they
prepared for the launched. I promise they are great.

19. Citizen Science
Everybody is invited!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science
So if you are interested on this kind of projects they are called Citizen Science. Getting the people to
help scientist to create new data or solving problems that are complicate for computers.
So if you want to see other examples visit the page in Wikipedia where there is a lot of references.

20. Like for example PlanetHunters, a project where you can help scientist to discover new
planets outside the solar system. With over 2 million classifications already done there
already more than 60 candidates! But thats another story for a space ignite...

21. Javier de la Torre
@jatorre
WhereCampDC
38° 53′ 42.4″ N, 77° 2′ 12″ W J u n e 1 0 t h , 2 0 11
Ignite Spatial @ National Geographic
THANK YOU VERY MUCH!