About Unpath’d Waters
Welcome to Unpath’d Waters, a ground-breaking 3-year research project that aims to unite the UK’s maritime collections.
The UK has a rich maritime heritage, stretching back over 23,000 years. It’s impossible to tell the story of our islands without talking about our relationship with the sea.
This maritime past is becoming increasingly important. People are more aware of our exploitation of the sea and topics such as colonialism, slavery, and immigration.
Unpath’d Waters therefore 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.
Not always plain sailing
Despite its importance, it’s 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’ll publish all our methods, code and research so anyone can use it in their work and help the future of UK maritime heritage.
Reaching new audiences
We want to rock the boat when it comes to telling maritime stories – exploring innovative ways of reaching more people.
It can be difficult to interact with parts of our past – visiting a shipwreck or exploring the sunken landscapes of Doggerland under the North Sea isn’t exactly an easy day out. We will explore how we can bring bits of our history that lie deep beneath the sea to life for everyone.
It’s not just how we tell these stories, but who we tell them to. The UK’s relationship with the sea impacts everyone, not just people living on the coast. Everyone eats food and wears clothes that have had a long journey across the sea. Events like the evacuation of Dunkirk and the sinking of the Titanic are important parts of our national history.
We’ll look at ways to reach more of these audiences that aren’t usually thought about in maritime heritage.
All hands on deck
Unpath’d Waters includes the work of many different organisations. Together, we’re working to unleash the potential of maritime heritage.
We are one of five Towards a National Collection projects awarded £14.5 million by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Together these form ‘Towards a National Collection (TaNC)’, a major five-year research and development programme. The programme will take the first steps towards creating a unified virtual national collection by dissolving barriers between different collections, opening UK heritage to the world.
Our Values
We advocate for equity – between people, stories, sites, collections (local, regional, national).
We prioritise connecting with people on their own terms, always communicating with clarity and foregrounding our audiences’ needs.
We aspire to empower through collaboration – actively enabling individuals to link to wider communities and global narratives and vice versa.
We strive for reliability underpinned by sustainability, following FAIR principles and honouring relevant measures of the CITiZAN climate pledge in our activities.
We champion constructiveness – as we debate, create, explore, invent and test, we take all points of view on board constructively and sensitively.
We embrace the adventure – we are driven by curiosity, optimism and challenging the status quo with open minds and a concern for creativity. We value failure as much as success.
This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/W003384/1]
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