Digitial Humanities

Derek Ward interviewed by Colin Hyde. Audio extract from Mines of Memory, East Midlands Oral History Archive. © Stefania Zardini Lacedelli. The trepidation of a fourteen-year-old boy on his first day of work at the coal mine. The excitement of three Italian sisters who had left their home to work in a Yorkshire mill, when they reunited for the first time. A fight between an old miners’ lift cage and a new one, representing the impact of a technological innovation […]

What can we learn from visualising museum objects on a map? For example, what new insights do we get from showing the places where Parsons turbines or turbo-alternators were installed? (Turbines are more efficient steam engines used for electricity generation, which use a special arrangement of blades to control the flow of gas and steam.) Charles Algernon Parsons was the inventor of the modern steam turbine. Although the turbines were manufactured within the Newcastle district, our project shows that this […]

Photographs of historic scenes exert a compelling effect on our imagination. Even those that are fading or stained seem to draw us into the lost moment of their capture. Indeed, if the quality or resolution of the photograph makes the scene or person depicted appear somehow elusive, the effect can be even stronger. We long to get closer to the subject, to fill in the gaps and solve the mystery of the unknowability of the past. In a sense, our […]

Ethics in Digital Humanities and digital scholarship has become a vivid topic of discussion and research in recent years (Rehbein 2015; Proferes 2020). Not surprisingly, it is in the field of Digital Cultural Heritage, especially with the emergence of large, varied and complex digital datasets as well as advanced, public-facing computational systems and methods, including AI, that a new set of ethical considerations have come to the forefront, mainly focused on biases at all stages and aspects of digital cultural […]

Care, Contribution, Connection This is the transcript of a presentation given by Helen Graham at the Towards a National Collection Conference 2023 held at the British Museum on 26th April. The presentation was collaboratively developed by Tim Boon, Alex Butterworth, Helen Graham and Arran Rees and opens up the role of action research in supporting the practical and conceptual dimensions of conceptualising national collection as social machine. Congruence Engine is working on linking industrial-related archives and museum collections. We are […]

The Congruence Engine is aiming to create new collections-based industrial histories. Collection objects offer a compelling starting point for industrial histories; however, the best and most interesting such histories extend outwards, beyond the walls of the museum into the world beyond. This is where digital tools can be used to draw new connections and link museum objects to the broader material realm of past societies. Historians often talk about context as what we add to situate people, things or events […]