What is DRAW ?
DRAW, which stands for 'Data Rescue: Archival and Weather', allows volunteers to participate in the transcription of historical weather logs captured at the McGill weather observatory since 1863. The weather information contained in these logs needs to be transcribed in a digital format in order to be used for scientific research.
Your Contribution
Scientific records were meticulously and patiently kept throughout the long history of the McGill Observatory, which amounts to several tens of thousands of pages of weather logbooks, journals, letters, official reports and other historical documents.
Digitizing all the information contained in the logbooks would take upward of 45, 000 hours of work for a single person. This is why we need your help!
By transcribing the weather observations into our database, you are helping atmospheric scientists develop a better understanding of how climate has been changing over the last hundred and fifty years of record-keeping.
How do I become a citizen scientist?
Citizen scientists are members of the public who choose to contribute their time to facilitate a part of the scientific process.
By helping us transcribe McGill's historical weather records, you become a citizen scientist and help researchers in their quest to better understand our past climate.
If this is your first time on the website, you may want to take a look at our training material here before starting to transcribe.
The Team
This project is spearheaded by Dr. Victoria Slonosky from McGill University. Over 300,000 transcriptions had been done by Vicky and her team prior to the implementation of this web platform. As the project matured, her team expanded from its core of atmospheric science experts to include information science experts, archivists and programmers.
As the project grew, it became clear that a small team of volunteers would be insufficient to go through all the information contained in the weather records. As such, Dr. Slonosky and her team decided to rely on citizen scientists like you to help steer the project forward.
This project wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our dedicated team!
Contribute to the Project
This website is part of an open-source project undergoing continuous development. We welcome everyone to contribute to the project, from reporting bugs to improving functionality and look of the site. If you would like to contribute, you can find the project on GitHub. If you run into any problems or have any questions, please contact our support
On behalf of the entire team: THANK YOU FOR HELPING US!