The project was organized into 5 workflows: the researcher’s training & knowledge transfer with the host institution; project management; development of the project’s methodology, analysis & academic dissemination; data collection & management; and public outreach in the form of a ‘pop-up’ exhibition.
The project’s first phase involved language, palaeography and digital methods training. The researcher was thoroughly integrated within the Research Group Managing Melancholy in the host department (Church History, Faculty of Theology, UCPH), which provided a valuable supportive and stimulating environment for gathering contextual knowledge and developing the project’s methodology. This phase also involved the collection of preliminary evidence from 18th-century Danish naval medical records, giving vital insights into e.g. the types of medical diagnoses used, necessary for early comparisons with the researcher’s existing British evidence and developing a framework to understand and select cases from the project’s core evidence base: the naval criminal courts.
The project’s next phase involved the collection and interpretation of evidence of the role of religion in seafarers’ mental health, supported by the interdisciplinary knowledge exchange with the church historians in the Research Group, drawing on 18th-century seamen’s devotional literature and the published/unpublished writings of key naval priests and captains. This resulted in a public magazine article, a specialist seminar on a Master's course in the host department and an upcoming source publication. This ran concurrently with the researcher’s implementation of the AI transcription software TRANSKRIBUS, training a text recognition model on the specific handwritings used in the Danish-Norwegian navy’s criminal court records, to facilitate an effective search through the material to select cases that mentioned mental states.
The project’s final phase involved case selection, interpretation and analysis, including: the development of the search criteria & methodology; transcription cleaning; and the selection of a core set of cases for qualitative analysis. This final phase also involved the synthesis of findings, including comparative analysis with the British material and tracing individuals across the record sets to test e.g. the impact experiencing mental disorder -being treated in hospital or admitting to experiences in court- had on individuals’ lives and work, in order to understand the role of community in seafarers’ madness and the impact of environment and religion on cultures of stigma or tolerance.
The project results have been disseminated in 8 international conferences, 2 international seminars/workshops, 1 magazine article and an upcoming ‘pop-up’ exhibition Galskab til Søs/Madness at Sea at Bornholms Museum in 2024. The project has also resulted in several sole-authored manuscripts for peer-reviewed publications currently under review or to be submitted in 2024: 3 articles, 1 chapter in an edited volume, 1 source article (Danish), 1 digital methods essay. The researcher is also co-editing a volume with the project’s supervisor Tine Reeh.
