Endurance Expedition led by Sir Ernest Shackleton (1914-1917)
Exactly 100 years ago, the Endurance Expedition, known in English as the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, began under the leadership of Sir Ernest Shackleton without achieving its goal of crossing Antarctica. Due to unpredictable weather conditions, the entire crew was stranded on the pack ice before they could reach land again. A crossing of Antarctica was no longer a possibility at this point. Nevertheless, Shackleton managed to bring all members of the expedition safely back to civilisation through organisational talent and perseverance. Still a remarkable achievement today, which is why the voyage of the Endurance has already been taken up several times in literary, scientific and also cinematic works.
As part of a course in the eScience Centre's teaching programme, a group of students tried to make this journey an interactive experience. In doing so, they were guided primarily by Shackleton's descriptions of the expedition in his book South. The route of the expedition is illustrated by prominent waypoints; the photographs by F. Hurley, which are also published in the book, serve as visual material. The tool used was Neatline (http://neatline.org/), an open source project that has already been adapted and extended for the Julius Euting project of the eScience Centre.
In the version now available, you can follow the path of the Endurance via prominent waypoints and events, and learn a lot about the crew, life on board and the hardships the expedition faced through selected annotations.
Participants in the project were: Dr Dieta Svoboda, Kevin Körner and Fabian Schwabe (lecturers) and Daniela Amodio, Karin Bihler, Verena Keite, Michael Lauenstein, Timo Stösser (course participants).