Action Research

Alex Fitzpatrick and Arran Rees When the Congruence Engine project was first launched in 2021, some of the earliest work was focused on Bradford. We held our opening conference between Salts Mill in Saltaire, and Lister Mill in Manningham, and spent time looking into the history of the textile industry that has ultimately shaped the city and surrounding areas. It was during this time that we first began thinking about the idea of a ‘social machine’, an idea that we […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Helen Graham and Arran Rees Congruence Engine is a complex project with many people involved. As a way of organising ourselves we’ve developed a working groups approach designed to enable distributed activity, with people able to initiate and lead and find the right people to work with based on time, energy and interest (not hierarchy). To facilitate this we thought we could use a shared sense of direction. To express this we drew on the work of Mike Benson, Kathy […]

Reflections from Arran Rees and Helen Graham, the co-facilitators of the action research for the project. Between 9th and 11th February 2022, we held the opening conference of Congruence Engine in Bradford. In doing this, we situated the first in-person event in a well-known hub of Britain’s historic textile industry – an industry that is also the project’s first thematic focus. Spending two and a half days between Salts Mill in Saltaire and Lister Mills in Manningham, the project partners […]

Some collaborative reflections by Arran Rees and Helen Graham, with some helpful thoughts from Asa Calow, John Stack and Tim Boon. The Congruence Engine is made up of a large team of people who are bringing a diverse range of different modes of working to the project. A key feature of the project is the flexible participatory methodology that is planned to ensure close dialogue and work planning between all project participants. As part of beginning the project therefore, we […]