We have major (and exciting!) news to share with our Bluejackets Zooniverse Community. The data our Zooniverse volunteers has collected so far has paid enormous dividends, and is now allowing us to move into Phase 2 of the project. The transcriptions have now successfully trained our computer model to digitally read the wartime muster sheets—a major breakthrough for the digital transcription of nineteenth century documents. We will be using this model to digitally transcribe the musters of the remaining vessels (those whose first letters run from “C” through “Z”). But we will still need our Bluejacket Community’s help—more than ever in fact! Our computer will not always be able to precisely decipher every word on the musters. As a result, and to make sure we get the fullest dataset possible, we will soon be launching a new Zooniverse workflow. In it we will be asking our community to check some of the computer’s transcriptions for accuracy and to suggest corrections where necessary.

This new Bluejackets Zooniverse workflow will launch over the coming weeks. As part of our preparations we will be instigating a short pause of transcriptions on our Zooniverse page from the 4th March. This will allow us to prepare the new data and supporting information for you, and to make some other alterations (particular thanks are due to our Zooniverse Talk moderators, @GROBSTER and @SandyCycler for all the assistance they are providing to the project team on this!). Among the positive changes we are making to the Bluejackets Zooniverse ”frontend” will be the facility for community members to select the vessel they are working on, something we are particularly excited about.

In addition to the move towards Phase 2, our team are also busy collating the thousands of points of information the Bluejackets Zooniverse Community have gathered on men who served on vessels beginning with the letters “A” and “B.” We will shortly be showcasing some of the fruits of our volunteers’ hard work, using as an the example the crew of the famed USS Brooklyn. More on that soon, so watch this space!

While the Zooniverse project spends a couple of weeks on pause we will be continuing to share results and project details on the website at www.civilwarbluejackets.com. We will also be issuing another newsletter when we are back “live” on the Zooniverse. Stay tuned to our social media channels for more!