National Collection

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 […]