Linked Data Search For Donors To Leopold McClintock's 1857 Franklin search expedition

Example of linking data

The Fourth Portal Lab hosts a plaque dedicated to the crew lost searching for the Northwest Passage in 1845. This PhD research uses a form of linking data to decipher the donors who paid for a search party to find the ships.

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Using the list included in the book The Voyage of the Fox, I sought out biographical detail for as many of the donors to Leopold McClintock’s 1857 expedition in search of Sir John Franklin as I could find. The list is a fascinating cross-section of Victorian society: from artists to Chartists, musicians to engineers, Navy and Army men to Bishops, all invested in the ongoing public project that was the search for Franklin. There are many rich peers and notable MPs on the list, but there are also many nigh-anonymous Esqs. and Misses who gave just a few shillings. Naturally I was able to find far more biographical detail on the wealthier and more famous donors—however, in opening this up as a Public Humanities project I hope to receive comments and input that will expand the available information to hopefully include more details about the unidentified donors.

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Full details here

The Donors of the Fox

Posted on December 7, 2022 by admin

This summer, I was the recipient of the generous Digital Humanities Fellowship from NYU. My proposed project was a broad-reaching initiative called “Visualizing the Victorian Polar Network,” but once the fellowship began I quickly realized I had to narrow my view, and ended up settling on a revised version of my project where I would create an interactive, annotated biographical database of all of the donors to Leopold McClintock’s 1857 Franklin search expedition, spearheaded by Lady Jane Franklin as a private expedition to look for her missing husband and his crew after the Admiralty had abdicated all responsibility for the continuing search.

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