History of Science and Meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (II)

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the heart of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by all the member states of the United Nations. They represent a call for action by all countries —developed and developing— to, among other aims, improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth. The RUTTER project aligns with key aspects of the Declaration, goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda, which promotes a world of cultural diversity, and its appreciation, “to foster intercultural understanding, tolerance, mutual respect and an ethic of global citizenship” (par.36).

Creating an open platform giving access to collections which preserve interconnected histories, of value to many cultures, RUTTER contributes “to accelerate human progress, to bridge the digital divide and to develop knowledge societies” (par.15).

Our digital library will be a gender-inclusive endeavour, thus furthering Goal 5, target 5.b, to “Enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology, to promote the empowerment of women.”

From a fundamental point of view, given the nature of the collections we cover, and how we will be promoting the study of different languages with scholarly equality, we will align with par. 36 of the Declaration, “to foster intercultural understanding, tolerance, mutual respect and an ethic of global citizenship and shared responsibility.”

The map above, from the project “CenterNet-An international network of digital humanities centers”, highlights the existence of teams and projects involving digital humanities all over the world. DH work tends by nature to form international networks, breaking geographic and cultural barriers, driven by the desire to learn and to share knowledge. Because our editions will be online, free to access, and with a multilingual interface, we will in fact bring languages and discourses from developing countries as equal interlocutors into the world-wide forum that the internet has become. — We’ll give details about our methods in the next post in this series. [S. Munzi and J. Acevedo]