![[Screenshot 2024-02-03 at 10.48.21 AM.png]] **What is the World Salvage Project?** The World Salvage Project is an open-access, work-in-progress digital humanities initiative to advance the study of maritime visual and material culture. Powered by the writing application Obsidian, the WSP connects ship records, references, renderings, photographs, and surviving associated artifacts in one digital repository. Users can explore the media included in the project so far by navigating the menu at left or by exploring the visual maps featured on each of the main website pages. As the project grows, I hope that it will be useful to scholars and enthusiasts of all media related to maritime history. **Why did you create the WSP?** The World Salvage Project began to fill a personal research need. As I began work on my dissertation, "Worth Its Salt: Salvage in the Maritime Visual and Material Culture of America's Long Nineteenth Century," it became clear I would need to create a digital repository for the stunning amount of material accumulating in my project archive. In one place I would find a primary source record for a shipwreck; in another, its surviving ship figurehead; and in another, photographic evidence of its demise or a contemporary rendering of its activities. There was no resource - digital or otherwise - to view the all extant media associated with a single ship. With this site, in its humble beginnings as a dissertation research tool, I hope to build the foundation of a database that will unite the memory of wrecked, decommissioned, or retired ships with records of their textual, visual, and material lives. I hope you'll enjoy perusing my project archive for "Worth Its Salt" as it first iteration and discovering the threads that hold it all together. **What does the future hold for the WSP?** The WSP has the capacity to become a scholarly tool that connects institutional and archival repositories of maritime material worldwide. This could enable and aid research endeavors, encourage an open-access approach to digitized materials relating to maritime history, and perhaps even incorporate advanced data sourcing and organization programs with the help of companies like OpenAI. As our work is inherently educational in nature, scholars of the humanities should be on the forefront of utilizing these types of tools. **Be In Touch** If you have questions, concerns, or interest in chatting about the project, please reach out to: [email protected].