I’m a little behind with diary entries thanks to a short break to eat chocolate eggs, so consider this a summary of work since March 18th.

Exhibit

The brief is hopefully going to tender soon. It outlines our plans to have a mapping interface that leads to a range of different content (images, objects, stories) and interactives (examples of digital humanities work and linkage in action).

Bradford Museums have shared information relating to around 3000 objects with us, of which 1800 already have geocode data. These include pictures of mills, aerial shots of Bradford, images of the Beck, and transport photos (to name a few). We will add more images to our map through the photography geocoding workshop in May, and some of this geocode data can then be shared back with Bradford Museums to allow them to map photos they already have but do not have geocode data for.

I’ve also started to look at how we can map images of objects for the exhibit, currently focusing on the 89 SMG objects that have been photographed and have the words ‘Bradford’ somewhere in the record. This work has led to a few nice finds, such as a Bradford printing shop that printed WWII posters:

Images from a movie that was filmed in Bradford, photographed by the Daily Herald, and which now lives in the BFI:

And the list goes on, including a rain gauge that compliment the river investigation, of course some textiles machinery, images of Undercliffe Cemetery, an ‘Industrial Heroism’ certificate granted to a worker for preventing a serious collision in Bradford, and thank goodness – a telephone! I will hopefully be able to share my completed map next week, having found that geo-locating some of the related companies and names is a little harder than anticipated.

In other Exhibit related news, Tim and I had a productive meeting before Easter with Kate from NSMM about case studies she is keen to have in the Screen City exhibition, which Congruence Engine may slot into. These stories are all focused on Bradford stories of film, television, photography, and sound, which we might be able to enrich using data and then map or explain using knowledge graphs.

Investigation updates

Computer vision: it was great to share the Heritage Weaver work Kaspar and I have been focusing on at the Whole Team Meeting. As we mentioned, we will be meeting with our team of ‘communication experts’ in a few weeks to manually annotate the connections that have been made, and then we will start to look at ingesting energy and textiles datasets.

In the meantime, Daniel and I have been working on a small document summarising what a computer vision convergence (Power of Advertisements, BFI Mining Review, and Heritage Weaver) will look like.

The Circulars: Nayomi has done some great work preparing a few different RAG pipelines, which I will get to have a ‘play’ with next week querying the database. We will be sharing updates on the investigation at the next investigations meeting.

Personal researcher notes: I have had all the feedback from this investigation now, and am going to start writing up a journal article about the investigation process and outputs, with the goal to submit to the next Digital Humanities Quarterly rolling deadline in July. It’s nice to feel like this one is pretty much ‘done’!

River pollution: A few of us had a Neo4J training sprint led by Nayomi a few weeks ago, which was a great learning experience focused on the river pollution data Max and I had been extracting and cleaning. I’ll be trying to take this work further next week, and get to the point where we have some finished graphs.

Max, Julia and I also met with the Friends of Bradford Becks this week to discuss organising half a day of Becks-related activities at the Bradford Industrial Museum in May, which should feature a nature walk and a live bug display – so something a little different to our usual everyday work!

Historical book

Finally, I’ve been working on three chapter proposals with fellow collaborators, which I look forward to discussing at the upcoming book workshop. These chapters cover ChatGPT, computer vision, and the perils of the many OCR tools available. On the theme of OCR, there will be a special OCR-related digital drop-in on the 22nd April, at the usual time of 2 – 4, so see some of you there!