Welcome to the Congruence Engine blog. This is the place to come if you’re curious about what and how we researched in the project, which ran between late 2021 and early 2025.
We made the blog a place for discussion, not just exposition, so there are entries here with more than one voice; people in discussion about what was emerging as the project developed, and what mattered as our 40+ investigations unfolded.
This desire to expose the dialogues at the heart of what we were doing arose directly from one of the key aspects of our work: to develop the common understanding and language – between curators, historians and digital people – about collections and digital tools that was necessary to deliver our project aims. Understanding the importance of dialogue was one of the findings of our previous project Heritage Connector as you can see in that project’s final webinar.
Congruence Engine has left a legacy of assets beyond this archived blog and associated pages. Other places to look include:
- The project’s final report to the funder.
- The project’s GitHub pages, where you can find explanations and code about and from our investigations.
- Key project assets, including films, will be archived on the museum’s Research Repository.
- The special issue of our Journal published a year into the project.
- In early 2026 we expect to publish two books:
- Emergent Histories: New Work in the Digital History of Industry and Collections from the Congruence Engine Project (already in press with UCL Press)
- The UK Digital Collection: A Manifesto (working title; to be submitted to University of London Press early summer 2025.
The Congruence Engine was one of five ‘Discovery Projects’ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under the ‘Towards a National Collection’ funding stream.