In January, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant of $44,570 to support collaborative planning by the University of Virginia’s Center for Digital Editing (CDE), the Center for Digital Scholarship at the American Philosophical Society (APS), and the Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton University for creation of the North American Climate History project (NACH), an online free-access digital resource combining transcribed records of weather and climate before ca. 1850 from multiple repositories.

Inspiration for the project grew out of the creation of the Jefferson Weather & Climate Records, an ongoing collaboration between the Papers of Thomas Jefferson and the CDE, and digitization projects of the Center for Digital Scholarship at the APS that include the weather diaries of James Madison and David Rittenhouse. The first objective of the NACH project will be the integration of the Jefferson and APS transcriptions into a single searchable dataset. The project will also solicit transcriptions of early weather observation manuscript records held by other institutions for incorporation into this database, to be made available online through a single search portal. A second major objective is to provide access to climate and weather information that was recorded in forms other than tables of daily observations, including farm and garden diaries, agricultural records, almanacs, and notations of seasonal occurrences in the natural world (phenology).

The NACH project is committed to open data and free access to all content of its online digital resource.

The planning phase will begin with a series of meetings and workshops with expert advisers later in 2022 and early 2023. Funds for planning come in part from the NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant program. Financial support also comes from the NEH’s special initiative A More Perfect Union, which—in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the writing of the Declaration of Independence—extends funding for “documentary editing projects that make significant texts available to a wide audience.”

Support for the Jefferson Weather and Climate Records has been provided by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson editorial project also receives support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The co-directors of the North American Climate History project are James McClure, General Editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton University; Bayard Miller, Head of Digital Scholarship and Technology at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia; and Jennifer Stertzer, Director of the Center for Digital Editing and of the Washington Papers editorial project at the University of Virginia. A form for contacting the project’s collaborators is available at https://climate.centerfordigitalediting.org/.