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Living with Machines update
AKA what a difference a year makes!
Dr Mia Ridge, Co-Investigator, British Library @mia_out

This time a year ago…
Details of the project were still under embargo, waiting for a
governmental press release
We were recruiting via vague descriptions like ‘Seeking researchers
to work on an ambitious data science and digital humanities project
at the British Library and Alan Turing Institute (London)’
But now...

“Living with Machines represents a hugely exciting and innovative development
in arts and humanities research. The collaboration between historians and data
scientists, exploiting the remarkable growth of digital archives, will open up
dramatic new perspectives on the well-known story of the industrial revolution
and the history of society’s relationship with machines and technology since the
eighteenth century.”
Prof Roey Sweet
Former Director of Partnerships and Engagement
Arts and Humanities Research Council

Living with Machines: the headline figures
• Funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and UK Research
and Innovation (UKRI)
• £9.2 million (overall) from September 2018 to March 2023
• Aims to ‘rethink the impact of technology on the lives of ordinary people during
the Industrial Revolution’. Focusing on Britain c.1780-1918
• Sources include digitised newspapers (British Newspaper Archive); Ordnance
Survey maps (National Library of Scotland); census, birth, death and marriage
records; digitised books; other digitised sources (got an idea? Get in touch!)

The team
Kasra Hosseini,
Michael Jackson,
Amy Krause,
Federico Nanni

Living with Machines aims to:
• Generate new historical perspectives on the effects of the mechanisation of
labour on the lives of ordinary people during the long nineteenth century.
• Support the wider academic and cultural heritage sector in using digital
methods to answer historical questions.
• Create new tools and code that can be reused and built upon
• Develop new computational techniques for working with historical research
questions.
• Enrich the British Library’s data holdings for the benefit of all.
• Advance public awareness of how digital research in the humanities can
enhance understanding of history.

Benefits for the cultural heritage sector
• Provide models for research collaboration and partnership
• Enhance GLAMs reputation for leading digital innovation
• Improve working with large scale digitisation, digital content, and data:
digitisation workflows, data processing for analysis, ingesting enhanced
metadata
• Better incorporate learnings and outcomes of research projects
• Grow digital collections
• Increase understanding of and ability to apply advanced methods
• Increase awareness of data science and digital history
• Develop a coherent model for mixed-rights access to items and datasets
• Incorporate digital content and data in the exhibition programme

Results so far... exploratory data analysis

Results so far… exploring biases in
digitisation
Newspaper titles
metadata: place of
publication or coverage
Newspaper press
directories: circulation of
newspapers

Results so far… meta-visualisations

• People, Organisations, Places, Events, Artefacts
• Re-purposing of the PREMIS Agent-Event model
• Extended Date Time Format for expressing temporal uncertainty
• Proposal: model places as 2D probability distributions over
geographical coordinate system to capture two types of uncertainty
Results so far... modelling key concepts e.g.
named entities

Results so far… public participation
Launched a crowdsourcing task to find industrial accidents in
Victorian newspapers

Results so far… work on toponym resolution
Poole & Dorset Herald(November 23, 1882), British Newspaper Archives
Eastern Morning News(September 7, 1889),British Newspaper Archives

But wait! There's more...
• Lexicon expansion: automatically generating lists of terms from a
small seed list (e.g. words about machinery)
• Questions of agency: were machines assigned agency over human
affairs in the language used about them?
• Structural and semantic parsing of historical text
• Using active learning to link historical newspaper titles
• Modelling growth of regional cities based on census data
• ...and lots of reflective work on tackling a project of this size and
complexity

Thank you! Questions?
Dr Mia Ridge, Digital Curator, British Library
• Email: digitalresearch@bl.uk
• Twitter: @LivingWMachines
• Lots and lots more on the project website:
https://livingwithmachines.ac.uk
• Crowdsourcing site: http://bit.ly/LivingWithMachines