Journey Plotter, or an Old Weather addiction story

[This post is from Maikel, who has come up with a new way of using and viewing the information we are collecting].

The voyage of HMS Birmingham (showing a few position errors) as seen in Journey Plotter.

Having been active as an Old Weather transcriber and in editing the transcribed logs for display on Naval-History.Net, I started to be curious about the journeys of the Royal Naval ships.

Giving in to this form of Old Weather addiction, I started to create an application that could retrieve the position information for the vessels I had edited. Seeing the dry numbers being transformed into a 2-dimensional voyage on a map was such a satisfying experience, I just had to share it with others.

This resulted in Journey Plotter, a Windows application for plotting the journeys, or parts thereof, of Royal Navy ships from the World War 1 era. Journey Plotter makes use of data from original Royal Naval log-books that have been transcribed and edited by oldWeather volunteers, and then made available by Naval-History.Net. Journey Plotter also turned into a valuable tool for the log editors: Position mistakes of a vessel are easily overlooked if it’s just a number. Seeing a strange jump in a voyage makes it much easier to spot.

If you are interested in Journey Plotter, visit http://journeyplotter.ihostfull.com to learn more about it. I trust you will enjoy looking at the journeys of the Royal Navy vessels and/or have a useful tool during the editing of their voyages.

Maikel

Images from Journey Plotter are now being used in some of the ship history files we’re producing: E.g. HMS Birmingham, HMS Una.