Congruence Engine

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

By Graeme Gooday, Kylea Little and Cameron Tailford Energy really matters – in both material and immaterial ways. Since the late 19th century the abstract concept of ‘energy’ has been routinely used not only by practitioners of science and technology to calculate thermodynamic transitions in microscopic and macroscopic processes, but by humans across the planet to calculate the costs of everyday heating, lighting, travelling. The immense and often perilous labour of extracting the fuels to power such activities long pre-dated […]

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 […]