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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 […]

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 […]

Written by Arran Rees and Tim Boon As the Congruence Engine project develops, travelling through its first major cycle of action research, we have been learning more about the challenges in connecting collections data from different institutions, about the affordances of the different computational tools available to us, and about the complex interplay between technology, data, and people in articulating and undertaking historical inquiries in support of the project’s aims. On 20th and 21st June, we held our first workshop […]

Written by Stefania Zardini Lacedelli and Jane Winters. In this blog post we aim to help researchers, digital humanities scholars, museum curators, historians to better understand what the digital platform Omeka can do and cannot do – alone or in in combination with other tools – and how it can contribute to the digital curation journey. In the past decade, the range of digital curation tools available for heritage institutions has increased exponentially. These platforms have been pivotal in extending […]