Living with Machines

Introduction

‘Living with Machines’ ran 2018-2023 and was one of the biggest and most ambitious humanities and science research initiatives ever to launch in the UK. In this ground-breaking partnership between The Alan Turing Institute, the British Library, and Universities of Cambridge, East Anglia, Exeter, Queen Mary University of London, and King’s College London, historians, data scientists, geographers, computational linguists, library professionals, and curators were brought together to examine the human impact of industrial revolution. Living with Machines was funded by UK Research and Innovations (UKRI), via the Strategic Priorities Fund, and was administered by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

Living with Machines had a particular set of research interests: specifically to examine the ways in which technology altered the lives and culture of people in Britain in the long 19th century (c.1780-1918). The project marshalled a whole range of sources that have already been digitised from maps, census returns, newspapers, books and journals, as well as generating new digitisation and datasets for the community. While our data is historical, the questions are perhaps never more pertinent as AI is changing the way we live in the 21st century.

Project aims

Its ten key aims were to:

Develop new computational techniques to marshal the UK's rich historical collections to enable new research questions to be posed.
Provide new perspectives on the effects of the mechanisation of labour and associated changes on the lives of ordinary people during the long 19th century.
Develop generalisable tools, code and infrastructure that can be adapted for and inspire future interdisciplinary research projects.
Create new methods for linking heterogenous data sets via toponyms.
Deposit enriched and interlinked datasets with the British Library for the use of all.
Create computational models to represent how language and meaning changes across time and geography.
Develop methods for working with maps and located sources as proxies to understand changes to the industrialising landscape.
Develop a coherent set of methods and recommendations for undertaking data-driven research in the current UK context of mixed-rights data access.
Build UK capacity in digital humanities through the development of tutorials and code to facilitate the research of the broader community.
Generate research breakthroughs to maintain UK global leadership in digital humanities and drive large-scale international partnerships and opportunities.

Applications

The research methodologies and tools developed as a result of the project are transforming how researchers can access and understand digitised historic collections. The project not only developed a host of new software and methods for wrangling this data, but also showed how such approaches can change the histories we can write. You can find out more about software and methods on our Github organisation. Our methods and historical findings are reported in our publications, including our forthcoming book Living with Machines: Computational Histories of the Age of Industry (under contract with University of London Press).

Perhaps more importantly, we have sought to lower the bar to others trying to do this work in future in our recent open access book Collaborative Historical Research in the Age of Big Data (Cambridge University Press, 2023). The book discusses not only how to set up an interdisciplinary collaborative team, but also takes readers through the steps of getting hold of cultural heritage data and the infrastructure required. While it suggests a set of pragmatic strategies that projects can employ it also highlights some key structural issues that can only be addressed by a rethink of national policy and funding priorities in the UK.

Publications

Books

Ahnert, Ruth, Emma Griffin, Giorgia Tolfo, and Mia Ridge. 2023. Collaborative Historical Research in the Age of Big Data: Lessons from an Interdisciplinary Project. Available Open Access as part of the series Elements History and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ruth Ahnert, Emma Griffin, Jon Lawrence, and The Living with Machines Team, Living with Machines: Computational Histories of the Age of Industry (under contract with University of London Press).

Most recent articles, book chapters and conferences

Barbara McGillivray, Federico Nanni, Kaspar Beelen. Why does digital history need diachronic semantic search? Debates in Digital Humanities: Computational Humanities, University of Minnesota Press, 2023.
Katherine McDonough, Maps as Data: Computational Spatial History, Debates in Digital Humanities: Computational Humanities, University of Minnesota Press, 2023.
Kaspar Beelen, Sally Chambers, Marten Düring, Laura Hollink, Stefan Jänicke, Axel Jean-Caurant, Julia Noordegraaf, Eva Pfanzelter. Fairness and Transparency throughout a Digital Humanities Workflow: Challenges and Recommendations, Computational Approaches to Digitised Historical Newspapers, vol.7, no.12, Schloss Dagstuhl, Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, 2023, pp.145-175.
Clematide S, Coll Ardanuy M, Maurer Y, Tracking Discourses on Public and Hidden People in Historical Newspapers, Computational Approaches to Digitised Historical Newspapers, vol. 7, no.12, Schloss Dagstuhl, Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, 2023, pp.127-138.
Daniel Wilson, Mariona Coll Ardanuy, Kaspar Beelen, Barbara McGillivray, Ruth Ahnert, The Living Machine: A Computational Approach to the Nineteenth- Century Language of Technology, Technology and Culture, vol. 64, no.3 , John Hopkins University Press, July 2023, pp. 875-902.
Mia Ridge, Eileen J Manchester, Scaffolding Collaboration: Workshop Designs for Digital Humanities Projects, Digital Humanities Workshops: Lessons Learned, Routledge, London, 2023, pp. 173-189.
Nilo Pedrazzini, Barbara McGillivray, Machines in the media: semantic change in the lexical field of mechanization in 19th-century British newspapers, Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities (NLP4DH), 2022, pp.85-95.
David Beavan, Kaspar Beelen, Jon Lawrence, Daniel C. S. Wilson. “Bias and Representativeness in Digitized Newspaper Collections: Introducing the Environmental Scan.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, July 2022, p. fqac037.
Giorgia Tolfo, Olivia Vane, Kasra Hosseini, Jon Lawrence, David Beavan, Katherine McDonough, Hunting for Treasure: Living with Machines and the British Library Newspaper Collection, Digitised Newspapers – A New Eldorado for Historians? - Reflections on Tools, Methods and Epistemology, vol.3, Walter de Gruyter, 2022, pp. 24-46.

View all Living with Machines publications

Recent updates

August 2023

Publication of The Living with Machines Report.

To mark the official closure of the project on 31 July, the project published a final report summarising the successes and lessons learned from the project. You can read the full report here.

February 2023

Publication of the Living with Machines book on data, infrastructure, and collaboration

We are delighted to share with you Open Access our book ‘Collaborative Historical Research in the Age of Big Data: Lessons from an interdisciplinary project’, published by Cambridge University Press, as part of the series Elements. Co-authored by Ruth Ahnert, Emma Griffin, Mia Ridge, Giorgia Tolfo, and the LWM team, the book addresses the challenges of establishing and managing a truly multidisciplinary digital humanities project in the complex landscape of cultural data in the UK. In contrast to many previous digital humanities projects which have sought to create resources, the project was concerned to work with what was already there, by leveraging more than twenty-years' worth of digitisation projects in order to deepen our understanding of the impact of mechanisation on nineteenth-century Britain. Sharing our experience, we hope to provide tools and methods for future researchers seeking to undertake digital history projects.

Living with Machines exhibition

The exhibition ‘Living with Machines’, co-curated by the British Library and Leeds City Museum, and inspired by the Living with Machines research project, opened on July 29, 2022 and concluded on January 8, 2023 at Leeds City Museum.

The Living with Machines exhibition revealed surprising parallels between the Industrial Revolution and today’s world of ‘big tech’, from the origins of football leagues and fast fashion to the 9-to-5 working day. The exhibition reached more than 42,000 visitors in total.

Find out more about the exhibition and related events