Good Wind and Good Sea: Navigating Beyond Text, Illustrations, and Physical Artifacts

“Good wind and good sea” was a common sentence uttered to sailors and seamen—during the Age of Exploration—before departing on a voyage. It was intended to indicate that wind and sea currents were the two most important elements of nature for reaching a destination. In a metaphorical way, the same words describe the often unknown journey scholars embark on today in digital humanities initiatives due to copyright, software, encodings, standards, policies, practices, and properties of the collections and materials. My current research and past work in digital humanities illustrates some of these issues. In my presentation I will report on the Nautical Archaeology Digital Library (NADL), including the objects in the collection, the goals of the project, lessons learned, the infrastructure created, and some ideas for future work.