It’s been a busy first week! Monday was my first official day as the new Research Fellow in the Textiles strand – taking over for now from Stefania, who is now on mat leave.

If you haven’t met me yet, do say hi if you see me in the office! I’ll be with you until the end of August. My background is in History, specifically the intersection of media, science and environmental history, and I’m taking leave from a Research Fellowship in Cambridge to work with the Congruence Engine.

Handing over

Stefania was able to bring me up to speed last week before she left – she was especially keen to impress on me the ‘timeline’ of how different aspects of CE – and the investigations and clusters that she has been involved in – have evolved over time. Having access to people’s diaries on notion has been so helpful in this respect – for somebody coming in from outside, it’s a fascinating insight into CE’s working process. I spent the first couple of days last week familiarising myself with these materials, arranging meetings, and reading a little bit around the Textiles strand.

Stefania also filled me in on the the Race and Decolonisation working group, and specifically the very interesting thinking around the possibilities for some of our work to address silences in the historical record. I noticed that there had been some discussion in the past of the concept of ‘critical fabulation’, which I am very interested in, and also some (in my opinion reasonable!) doubts about putting too much faith in technology to ‘resolve’ the real historical injustices present in the archive. I’m very keen to carry on these discussions as a new member of the group!

I also had some fun playing around with Tasha’s GPO GPT chatbot, with some interesting results!

Meetings

My first day at the office was on Wednesday, and after setting up my accounts, being inducted by Tejala and catching up with Tim, I was ready for my first meetings.

Will Ashworth’s ‘Gregs’ study

Will shared with me and Alex B a fascinating piece of writing which explores four inter-linked ‘micro-studies’ in the history of textiles: Quarry Bank Mill and the Greg family, the technical developments of the McConnel and Kennedy mills in Manchester, Adam and George Murray, and Titus Salt and Saltaire. Alex and I had a discussion with Will about how we might demonstrate the usefulness of digital tools for complementing and developing this type of prosopographical work.

The National Trust

We then had a very helpful conversation with Emma Slocombe and Nicola Frogatt at the National Trust, joined also by Tim and Nina. Emma is their Textiles specialist, and was able to contextualise the NT’s working practices, as well as pointing us the right direction for finding the kinds of data that we may be interested in working with. While the outcome of this may initially have been a little disappointing – in short, the NT does not have any centralised database of property ownership, for example – we did touch on some potential alternative angles, including survey work which might shine a light on the NT properties’ environmental history. They do have ‘property information packs’ which are produced locally by curators at individual properties, but it sounded like we may need to request these individually. I will be following up on some of these lines of enquiry this coming week. For instance, I think it might be possible for us to part-automate a spreadsheet of NT properties using their website, and use that to compare with public information about ownership.

Bradford Community Radio

It was great to sit in on this meeting, coordinated by Alex F. From my own previous experience working for a community radio station when I was a teenager, and my research into early BBC history, it was interesting to hear from them about the limitations on what they can preserve digitally. Mary and Jonathan seemed particularly keen to find a way to more effectively manage their sound archive, and it seems that a lot could come out of a collaboration with CE from their point of view.

Some dabbling with some tools

At the end of the week, I set myself the task of getting familiar with some of the digital tools which others in the project have put to such good use in the past. I started with ABBYY Finereader (inspired by Tasha!) and PySceneDetect (inspired by Daniel!).