NEW PROPOSED INVESTIGATION ON THE GREGS & FAMILY HISTORY
I had a meeting with Will and @Nina to start framing an investigation proposal around Will’s work on the Greg family. Will is interested in exploring the connection of the pre-Samuel Greg history with the slavery trade and the development of cotton and linen industry, and we reflected on the potential of this investigation to offer a practical approach to the decolonization work in Congruence Engine. A first question for us, which would be also a overarching question for all the investigations, is:
How can machine learning help to surface invisible stories and hidden connections with British imperialism, supporting a decolonization lens to the concept of National Collection?
In terms of digital techniques, we noticed how the historical work in reconstructing genealogies have always been undertaken by historians drawing upon different sources and manually drawing connections across families, biographies and life stories, and there is scope to apply machine learning techniques by bringing together different types of historical records. We also noticed how the expansion of family and local history has been supported by the emergence of family trees platforms, which have grown in connection with the advancement in human genetic research. A subsequent question then emerged:
How historical research can leverage the potential of family tree platforms, which combine a bottom-up approach and automatized methods to connect different family records together?
After the meeting, I worked on a first draft for an investigation proposal to share with @Alex Butterworth, in order to schedule our next conversation. I also had a further chat with Nina in the office, and we discussed about the potential of this investigation to surface hidden stories of individuals which are not considered ‘notable’ within the traditional NER approaches, for example the wives of mill owners, the mill workers or the slaves themselves. This reminded me a conversation I had with Stuart last year about the concept of ‘notable’ in Wikipedia and we discussed the opportunity to involve him in this work. We also discussed the potential to surface non-marital relationships which are not part of the official family story, and Nina shared, as an example, a knowledge graph created to visualize LGBTQIA+ relationships in the Women’s World Cup: https://wosochart.github.io/TheWosoChart/
In order to develop our pipeline, it would be fundamental to bring into the investigation a co-investigator with a technical expertise able to work with Genealogy formats such as GEDCOM, genealogy software and web-based genealogy databases. A list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genealogy_databases
Examples of historical and museum projects on genealogy & family trees:
https://www.anumuseum.org.il/upload-gedcom/
ORAL HISTORY INVESTIGATION
In my Leicester visit last week, I collected the Mines of Memory datasets from the East Midlands Oral History archive. This is the dataset Stef has been experimenting with, and we were keen to collect in our shared space in Box. The dataset includes the public available transcripts of the 23 interviews from the Oral History project, and a selection of audio recordings. Using the transcripts, I then selected a list of quotes mentioning cages that can be included in the Newcastle film, and send them to Paul and Cal to review. We chose two of them which can represent very well two different emotional responses to cages, and I will be do some work on Audacity next week to share with them the audio extracts as well.
In terms of the next stages of the investigation, I explained to Colin we would like to add the Snibston collection data into the vector space and he sent a request to the Leicestershire Museums, to explore if this dataset is available in a digital format. We hope to have an answer soon.
I also discussed the workshop proposal with Tim in our 1:1 this week, and he suggested to reduce the list of Congruence Engine participants to 5/6 key people that can help us to conclude this stage of work, and to postpone the more structured workshop to the next year, within the Bradford convergence strand. We reflected on the fact that the Oral History investigation started with Tim Smith, Simon Popple and Paul Craddock, and it would be really helpful to bring them back at this stage, so they can give their insights on the work we have done so far with Stef, helping us to reflect on the implication for the historical, curatorial and participatory work. I had a 1:1 meeting with Tim Smith last week who was excited about the work we have done and extremely interested to be involved, and would be available the first week of November for an in person session in Leicester. I will start exploring dates for the session over the next week.
FOLK SONGS INVESTIGATION
I drafted with Daniel a summary of the folk songs investigation for the investigation meetings, summarizing the work we have done so far and focusing on our key questions and next steps: