Project Overview

The BADEMS project investigates how the agency of early modern maritime and marginalized communities has been constructed, obscured, and preserved within the linguistic heritage of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Historically, the voices of ordinary sailors, privateers, and enslaved individuals navigating the Atlantic and Mediterranean trade routes were heavily filtered through official court records or elite colonial correspondence. However, the non-standard languages, slangs, and pidgins used aboard these vessels offer a direct linguistic fingerprint of their daily realities and social interactions.

"By digitizing and analyzing the raw lexicon of early modern sailors, we can reconstruct the social dynamics of the lower decks—a space where language was both a tool for survival and a mechanism of subversion."

Core Objectives

Our research methodology spans three primary objectives:

• Digital Corpus Creation: Transcribing and encoding over 5,000 pages of historical maritime logs, dictionaries, and port authority records into a searchable, open-access XML database.
• Diachronic Mapping: Tracking how specific slang terms, nautical expressions, and loanwords traveled and evolved across different ports between 1500 and 1750.
• Agency Recovery: Identifying instances of Black and marginalized agency hidden within linguistic innovations and examining how these groups influenced the broader European maritime lexicon.

Methodology & Institutional Support

The project employs a hybrid approach, combining traditional archival paleography with advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) and corpus linguistics. By tagging the datasets for semantic shifts, the team can visualize geographical and chronological language adoption patterns.