Fragmented data, LOst voices and The potential Silences of the digitised Archive: The case of early modern Maritime disability.

ongoing

The digital technologies that shape our present also shape our past. Rapid advances in archival digitisation promise unprecedented access to manuscripts exposing histories of ordinary people across archives at a global scale. However, the way we digitally store, retrieve and analyse historical data can marginalise vital intersectional histories of gender, race, sexuality and disability- casting them adrift as digital flotsam on currents of algorithmic or terminological biases and our under-theorised use of computational methods. Transformative studies of race and gender have shown how we can begin to undo this bias, e.g. redesigning machine learning tools to capture people rendered nameless by the violence of the colonial archive. FLOTSAM’s core aim is to further integrate methods for recovering hidden histories with the digital methods and interoperable systems transforming the humanities and cultural heritage, balancing and raising our awareness of power inequalities and marginalisation in our use of digital technologies. It uses eighteenth-century seafaring disability, impairment and difference to: 1) interrogate the roots and action of intersecting biases –global mobility, gender, class, work and abled-ness– inscribed in the original records and imposed externally by digital tools for data organisation, retrieval and analysis, alongside, 2) developing a method to ethically model historical knowledge as interoperable data without imposing pre-existing or new problematic systems of categorisation on marginalised people. As part of DigitalHistory@Lund and the Lund Assembly for Universal and Global History, I gain critical training in computational methods, produce vital Use Cases and an annotated corpus of maritime impairment/difference, developing my new interdisciplinary method for digital hidden histories with specialists in interpreting subaltern experiences across disparate international sources sensitive to archival power structures and marginalised voices.