Project description
Reducing lost voices from the digital deep
The past is being rewritten – not by historians alone, but by algorithms. As archives are digitised, they promise new access to hidden histories. But biases in how we store and search data risk silencing stories of gender, race, disability, and sexuality, casting them adrift like digital flotsam. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the FLOTSAM project aims to challenge this. Specifically, it explores how 18th-century maritime records of disability and difference expose both the original archive’s biases and those imposed by digital tools. By combining critical race and gender studies with computational methods, FLOTSAM develops ethical ways to recover marginalised lives. Its goal is a fairer digital future for the forgotten past.
Objective
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.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01
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22100 Lund
Sweden
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