I am incredibly excited to be part of this groundbreaking initiative to tackle one of the most enduring and troubling issues in global affairs: slavery. As the lead of the Cultural Geo-Analytics Lab, I’m proud to contribute to work that not only deepens our understanding of slavery but also supports the development of tools to forecast its emergence in future conflicts and inform evidence-based policy interventions:
“The new £10 million Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War established by King’s College London in partnership with the University of Nottingham will look at how slavery has manifested in war throughout history, and how it can be forecasted and tackled in the future.”
“Led by Dr Maeve Ryan from the Department of War Studies, the Centre will galvanise collaborations between social sciences and the humanities with informatics and data science, especially for AI and Natural Language Processing, and will use King’s Digital Lab’s digital research software engineering expertise.”
(Image source: KCL website)
“Dr Andrea Ballatore, Senior Lecturer in Cultural Data Science in the Department of Digital Humanities, will design innovative forecasting methodologies that draw on satellite Earth Observation (EO) data, survivor narratives, and a range of qualitative and quantitative datasets to anticipate where and how slavery in conflict may emerge or persist.”
“As a specialist in geographic data science, Dr Andrea Ballatore will contribute to the harmonisation of data from more than 50 historical and contemporary sources—including conflict databases, journalistic reporting, and first-person testimonies—into a cohesive framework that enables interdisciplinary analysis and predictive spatio-temporal modelling.”
Cultural Geo-Analytics Lab 