The Centre of Maritime History is participating in the 1st Summer School of the PortADa project (Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions Staff Exchanges) 2023
Researcher Dr. Apostolos Delis and post-doc fellow Dr. Kalliopi Vasilaki from the Centre of Maritime History are participating in the 1st Summer School of the PortADa: Port Arrivals Data. Automatic data collection for a large-scale comparative history of the 19th century shipping MCSA SE project (P.I. Jordi Ibarz , Prof. University of Barcelona) which takes place in February and March 2024 in Argentina (Mar de Plata & Buenos Aires). The objective of the project concerns the automatic creation of a database of ships arrivals to the ports of Barcelona, Marseille, Havana and Buenos Aires through the use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The project aims to create an open database of thousands of 19th century trade-related records. This database will cover approximately 1.6 million ship entries for the years between 1850 and 1914 (Barcelona 330.000, Buenos Aires 480.000, Marseille 540.000, Havana 242.000). For its implementation local workgroups have been created with a mix of specialists in maritime and port history, and experts in digital humanities from Spain (University of Barcelona, the host institution and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid-UAM), Greece (Centre of Maritime History, Institute for Mediterranean Studies, IMS/FORTH and Center of Cultural Informatics ICS-FORTH), Argentina (Universidad Nacional de Entre Rios-UNER; Universidad Nacional de San Martin-UNSAM; Universidad Nacional de Mar de Plata-UNMdP and Universidad de Buenos Aires-UBA) and Cuba (Universidad de las Ciencias Informáticas-UCI).