Monday kicked off the week well for me, with a fruitful chat with the team at BT Archives about what we could offer to them and how we can work together for the communications strand, followed by the rather epic investigations meeting. For me, it was really helpful to learn about every single project that has been going on, and helped me see the possibility for communications to 1) take existing pipelines and investigations to a new stage with communications material and 2) start completely new investigations that explore completely different areas.

I have also taken with me from Monday a renewed awareness of the other cogs of this mammoth project – always keeping Bradford and the social machine in the back of my mind. I think there needs to be scope for some less-Bradford-specific communications investigations, but I am also keen to do work that is relevant to the city where I can. For me, Bradford is a useful sense-check for projects, and I think it is valuable to always ask “is this/could this be relevant to Bradford?” If the answer is no, then the ‘national’ of TANC seems missed.

A particular Bradford find I have enjoyed, which I shared at the Research Fellows meeting on Wednesday, is the images of the Bradford Centenary Festival held by BT Archives (@Jon Agar did a little research on this in July and shared on Twitter/X here. I am wondering if there are other images of Bradford events that can be found in surprising archival locations, as part of the project, to share with the people of Bradford in the future exhibition? It might be an easy way to show how our partners are relevant to the city of Bradford, even if they are located further afield.

A couple of the BT images are below:

After Monday, my week has been focused on my own investigation proposals of which I am now confident there are five. These will be proposed in the investigation meeting on the 6th November, and I am looking forward to discussions over the next two weeks that will refine research questions and iron out technical components. The ideas I am thinking about are the three covered last week, with the addition of 4) how computer vision can be used to combine communications collections and 5) how to turn 100 years of General Post Office circulars into a tool for archivists and researchers to use for quick query solving.

Outside of the archival and investigations work, I have been playing around on Jupyter Notebook. I haven’t been looking to do anything new myself, but instead see if I can replicate some previous work as a test for my own technical skill (for context, before this week I had never heard of a kernel). I had some success working through Daniel W’s work with KeyBERT on the BT Archives metadata, and am excited at the prospect of trying some more experiments in the near future. Any learning resources are very welcome!

Much of my time has been spent pottering through archives, playing with Jupyter, and pondering Bradford so I think I will end this diary entry there. I will just say before I go, though, that after the Bradford Centenary Festival my second most exciting discovery of the week was that you can get a £1.75 slice of gluten free Bakewell pie from the Energy café. Coeliac win!