History

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 […]

For four weeks during June and July last year, a group of researchers in the Congruence Engine began a set of mini-investigations that had been formed during a co-production workshop held at the University of Leeds. We’ve mentioned some of the inquiries that we did and some of our findings in our blog on the reflection workshop that we held at the end of the four-week research sprint. This blog is an attempt to dig down a bit deeper into […]

Written by Stefania Zardini Lacedelli, Paul Craddock, Simon Popple, Tim Smith PART I One of the key areas of investigation that emerged from the workshop in Leeds on 20-21 June was the opportunity to explore the connective power of oral history, by focusing on the hidden stories of mill workers. This direction emerged as part of a wider reflection on the need to bring human stories to the objects and places related to textile industry, so reinfusing Saltaire and Lister […]

For the communications strand of the Congruence Engine we are still in the exploratory phase. With this in mind I wondered what some of the digital humanities packages purchased by university libraries could offer, not least because an exploration of their capabilities would serve as a measure of what Congruence Engine aims to exceed. What is already available provides a baseline against which we can judge what Congruence Engine will do. A leading digital history package is Gale Digital Scholar […]

Written by Helen Graham and Arran Rees On 27th July we met to reflect on the mini-inquiries that had developed after the Leeds workshop, on the textiles pilot more generally, and to begin planning forward for the next phase of the textiles strand that will expand to cover Lancashire and the cotton industry too. The way in which the mini-inquiries were co-produced is described in one of our previous blog posts. For this phase of the project, we decided to […]