History

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 […]

Written by Jon Agar, with contributions from Tim Boon, Bernard Musesengwe, Stefania Zardini Lacedelli, Daniel Belteki and Graeme Gooday. In May 2023 a party of Congruence Engine collaborators visited the National Collection Centre in Wiltshire, home to an increasing amount of the Science Museum Group Collection. The Congruence Engine is all about using digital methods to make new links between collections of industrial heritage. But sometimes we can get a bit lost in code. Here was a chance to remind […]

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 […]

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 […]