Royal Society Antarctic Maps

Having worked with the Royal Society since delivering Science in the Making in 2023, Cogapp has worked on a number of enhancements across the site. The latest of these collaborations tells the incredible story of the Discovery expedition. Archival photography combined with interactive maps and word-class archival research invites us into the human story of one of the most ambitious expeditions in history.

As part of the Discovery expedition, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton and Edward Wislon achieved the “Furthest South” record at the time. This journey was documented through Shackleton’s photography and diary entries.

Cogapp worked closely with the Society team to ensure they had the tools available to truly convey the nature of this journey to researchers and the general public alike.

By integrating the IIIF-powered, open source, Storiiies tool with the existing Craft CMS our work empowers the Society to tie archival items to images such as maps, allowing site visitors to follow the expedition across hand-drawn maps through rich image-led annotations. These annotations provide context enabling us to follow the expedition step-by-step in amazing detail.

The Royal Society and Cogapp have been working together for almost 5 years. The initial impetus for our work together was to publish the full collection of archival materials related to the Royal Society journal article collection, freely available online and available to all. Since then we have been working together to enhance the site with features such as a detailed Correspondence explorer, as well as extending the site to give non-Fellows equal presence alongside Fellows, adding 2,692 new person pages — nearly matching the 3,190 Fellow pages — significantly broadening the representation of contributors to the history of science.

With this first instance of these new features out there we look forward to seeing what stories the Society gets to work on surfacing next.