Bradford’s work as part of the AHRC-funded Unpath’d Waters project aims to increase interaction with the UK’s maritime heritage by making it easier to research and easier for the public to discover and share stories in new ways. Despite its importance, it is not always easy to study our maritime heritage. Records, maps and objects are scattered across hundreds of different archives, museums, libraries and galleries. A large part of our work will be to develop new ways of making information across these different collections easy to search and find. This will help everyone – from researchers asking new questions to members of the public having direct access to records. We hope this will encourage more experts from all disciplines to use maritime collections in their own work. To make sure this project has a lasting impact, we will publish all our methods, code and research so anyone can use it in their work and help the future of UK maritime heritage. Unpath’d Waters will tackle the challenge through eight key activities (we have called them Work Packages). The first will aggregate and assess the character of more than 90 different maritime collections, matching their core attributes and creating a metadata framework which will allow them to be connected. The second will test artificial intelligence and machine learning opportunities to help search these connected collections in new ways. Three connected research activities will then test this framework and these new tools to try to resolve three real-world challenges. People and the Sea is looking at how people value wrecks in museums (the Mary Rose and the Holland 1) compared to some wrecks still on the seabed of the English Channel which have been surveyed and even excavated in part. Science and the Sea is using the connected collections to find the identity of wrecks in the Irish Sea and establish their stories and their management needs.
Bradford’s Lands Beneath the Sea is using collections to build a simulation of now-lost landscapes under the North Sea where prehistoric peoples once dwelled before sea level rise. Using the outcomes of this research and the collections framework and exploration tools, the project will then reach out to some key sample audiences: cross-disciplinary researchers, visually impaired people, and those who live far from the sea and have little connection with it. These audiences will help us co-design new ways of accessing this connected information so that we can create new portals for the public which are designed around what people themselves want rather than what we think they want. On top of this, we expect to be able to enhance the national inventories of all four home nations – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Read more at – https://zenodo.org/record/7152083#.Y1Z3kXbMJaR