GLASGOW (1728–89): PRIVACY, PRINT, AND TRANSIMPERIAL PERSPECTIVES

In the second half of the eighteenth century, Glasgow was one of the main port cities in the United Kingdom, serving as a major entry point into the country for Atlantic colonial goods such as tobacco, sugar and cotton. The ensuing increase in wealth led to accelerated urban and social development, all with great repercussions for privacy. Our team focuses on the effects on privacy of this development that was taking place in Glasgow from 1728 to 1789. Our research deals mainly with the following topics:

• Scottish ballads, chapbooks, and computational history methods;
• Posthumous privacy, anatomy, and murder;
• Global connections and transatlantic trade;
• Representations of slavery and enslaved women in popular print;
• Representations of sexual and reproductive mores in popular print.

The research on the Glasgow case has also been incorporated into the project Privacy Black and White, supported by the UCPH Data + Funding, in which members of the case team are researching racialized perspectives of privacy in the context of the Caribbean colonial endeavours with the help of Natural Language Processing.

PUBLICATIONS

• Nadav Borenstein, Natália da Silva Perez, Isabelle Augenstein, "Multilingual Event Extraction from Historical Newspaper Adverts." Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, accepted (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.10928.pdf)
• Nadav Borenstein, Karolina Stańczak, Thea Rolskov, Natália da Silva Perez, Natacha Klein Käfer, Isabelle Augenstein, “Measuring Intersectional Biases in Historical Documents.” Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, accepted (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.12376)

SELECTED ACTIVITIES & PRESENTATIONS

• PRIVACY BLACK & WHITE (https://teol.ku.dk/privacy/news/news-2021/new-privacy-project-privacy-black--white/)- Research Project supported by the UCPH Data+ Funding (2021-2023).
• Natacha Klein Käfer, “Privacy in early modern Europe. Rethinking research in the Humanities”, invited lecture at the Lund University with Johannes Ljungberg, February 27, 2020.
  Frank Ejby Poulsen, “Private, Public, Common to All: Private Interest and Common Good in Hutcheson’s Natural Jurisprudence”, BSECS 49th Annual Conference Natural, Unnatural and Supernatural, University of Oxford, January 10, 2020.
  • Natacha Klein Käfer and Natália da Silva Perez, “Murder, dissection, and prints: Posthumous privacy in eighteenth-century Glasgow”, BSECS 49th Annual Conference Natural, Unnatural and Supernatural, University of Oxford, January 10, 2020.
  • Jesper Jakobsen: “Markets & moralities: A site-based comparison of perceptions of private reading in Copenhagen & Glasgow”, BSECS 49th Annual Conference Natural, Unnatural and Supernatural, University of Oxford, January 10, 2020.
  • Natália da Silva Perez, grant application for the research project DIGITAL BARD: Matching Historical Melodies to Ballad Lyrics with Neural Network Models. Proposal developed in collaboration with Manex Aguirrezabal Zabaleta for a study of ballad scansion based on neural networks, using texts about Glasgow and Scotland contained in the NLS dataset “Chapbooks printed in Scotland”. Shortlisted for the National Library of Scotland Librarian’s Research Fellowship in Digital Scholarship.

GLASGOW CASE TEAM MEMBERS:

Jesper Jacobsen, Natacha Klein Käfer, Natália da Silva Perez