The National Maritime Museum invited the Naval-History.net community to join the Zooniverse citizen science platform to help extract meteorological data from historic ship logs. The data generated via the Old Weather website will be used by scientists at the Met Office to build better climate models. The project will also deliver a reusable infrastructure for distributed transcription.

The motivations of volunteers in established astronomy projects, such as Galaxy Zoo, are well understood and described in a comprehensive study (Galaxy Zoo: Exploring the Motivations of Citizen Science Volunteers). This paper will explore the - potentially - different motivations of the Naval-History.net community, paying particular attention to informal interactions between science and history enthusiasts on the forums.

It will be written in collaboration with community leaders from both Naval-History.net and the Zooniverse, and with reference to other distributed transcription projects, such as the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program and Transcribe Bentham.

www.galaxyzoo.org

www.solarstormwatch.org

www.oldweather.org (launching soon)

www.naval-history.net