It is day five of my time on the Congruence Engine project, and with a turn to full-time next Monday I thought I would jot down some questions I have been thinking about over the past month. These notes also serve as my slightly nervous first steps into posting on Notion, and a general hello to anyone I haven’t had a proper conversation with yet!

I have managed to slot in some fruitful conversations over my month part-time on the project, reflecting on NMS’ potential involvement in the communications strand, what we can do with BT Archives’ metadata set as well as with individual pieces in their collection, how to link other collections and partners into the communications strand, and the role of the Communities and Crowds approach. I was also very grateful for the first in-person digital drop-in coinciding with my second day in the office, and look forward to more of those in the future.

In my own early steps into archival searching I have been focusing on Bradford, mostly as a case study that could be used to test an idea and then scale-up nationally. While I was initially sceptical about the role BT’s collection could play in a Bradford story, I am seeing how this could take shape quite nicely. Today I was particularly bolstered by a file on the Ipsophone, an early answering machine, which lives in SMG’s collection and is discussed in BT’s files as it was installed in Bradford, leading to a trail of newspaper articles about the object.

I have been mostly jotting down questions for myself, and reflecting on how these could become potential investigations over the coming months. Some early questions are:

• Can researcher notes be used to create catalogue descriptions OR tag lists of unread archival material to improve accessibility of the files?
  • I think the answer to this is a clear ‘yes,’ and the next step is to look at creating a way for notes to be stored in a format that speaks to the requirements of a CMS.
• Can we trace how far and how fast communications from a location in Bradford could reach other locations (perhaps one in Yorkshire, London, Europe, Asia)?
  • Thinking towards next year’s exhibition: can an interactive be made from this?
  • Could we show how many people were involved in communication through the ages? 2 for Teams call today, 4 for exchange telephone call of the 1960s, many more for telegraph message of the 19thc. Would this be a good way to put the people back at the centre of a very technical story?
  • General Post Office circulars are a good place to start with this.
• How much can we already do with one video in an archival collection? Would it be beneficial to take a video, and show how many potential ways we could process it, to prompt conversations with archives about how DH techniques can help their video collections?
  • On the topic of videos: what if we took three videos from three institutions (perhaps BT, BFI, and one other) to show what linkages could be made?
  • Just a few suggestions are: speech to text work, reconstruction of historic sights (I am particularly interested in Goonhilly), extraction text on screen, characterising what is happening on screen, extracting or recognising entities.
  • BT have a good selection of videos from advertising and marketing material to educational documentary-style pieces that could be used.
• Can we use photography as an example (or as evidence) of how museums and archives speak to each other?
• How are women represented in BT Archives (hypothesis: not well) – can we prove their situation in the archive and make proposals for how to change this?
  • I’m imagining we can easily search the metadata for relevant terms, or locate women in authority records.

I am excited about what this communications strand might become, and also interested to further explore how it will link into the other already running strands of energy and textiles in the coming weeks. I’m looking forward to switching to full-time mode, although working one day a week over the past month has been a welcome opportunity to think a lot!