A final update for May! Read on for some reflections on the Becks pollution mapping exercise, an update about the exhibit, and some more general updates.

Bradford events

It was lovely to be in the room with people for four whole days this month, tagging images, colouring historic riverways, pondering oral history, playing pollution related board games, and watching thirty textiles enthusiasts coo over images of sheep. It felt very different to be within the freelance heritage scene of Bradford, rather than just to be reading about it and virtually meeting people.

I’m interested how we have found that maps convey our message and seem to welcome people into digital work. It was great fun pinning points of interest to the 1851 OS maps with Friends of Bradford Becks on Saturday, and the rapidly produced Felt map of memories and observations does well to demonstrate the interests of those that were in the room: Bradford River Pollution Event — Felt (thank you to Daniel for creating this on the fly!)

Amusingly, the map makes little sense to those that were not there. Why is the ‘Wall of Jericho, Egypt’ pinned on this historic map of Bradford? Who enjoyed a ‘picnic lunch from school’ along the weir by Sam’s Mill? Who lived in the 1908 terrace house, and when?

There is some work we can do to make this make a little more sense. I have preserved all the interpretation cards from the day (the colourful handwritten notes in the above image), and we can integrate these into the map along with small descriptions written by members of the team. We could also incorporate images from the day itself, of the room etc., to show what we did and who we were.

This then raises questions about what we are preserving and why. Do we want to digitally recreate what it was like to be in the room? Is the goal to generate a small-scale reproduction of our shared interests for the day, or are we aiming for something more? Next, what do we do once we have preserved everything? How do we share it? If we preserve, but do not share, what was the point in the first place? That final question is in part why I write these updates at all – notes kept scribbled in my notebook do little for the historic record!

I look forward to more discussions about our physical convergence on Bradford in the next few weeks.

The exhibit

Last Friday the exhibit went out to tender – meaning design agencies have been invited to propose how they would create the exhibit we want. Below are some extracts from the exhibit brief that has been shared with potential designers, to show the sort of thing we are going for.

This will be the second Congruence Engine exhibit. It will be installed at the National Science and Media Museum in 2025.

This new exhibit will show the audience what can be achieved when we link UK collections, and the techniques that can be used to get us there. This will be shown to the audience via a map interface that leads to a layer of greater detailed examples. With a focus on stories that have been found in Bradford and by Bradford groups, the exhibit will show the potential for new digital techniques to enable us to tell new stories about our industrial heritage.

Three key themes, core to the project, will be conveyed to the audience through this exhibit. They are:

1. Spatial work – the way maps can be created through the connection of data, and used as a means of demonstrating what happened in the past and how collections, now held separately, can be reunited by digital means.
2. Taxonomy and ontology – the way words, jobs, or images can be used to enable linkage between objects in different collections.
3. Textual linkage with narrative materials – how we can link collections data to historic sources, including films, oral histories, songs, and more.

Where possible, the running theme of the ‘social machine,’ wherein which people are at the heart of all this digital work, will be showcased.

The exhibit itself will be a mapping interface:

Presented as a local instance of nationwide possibilities, an interactive map with datapoints that either 1) show what linkages can be made in specific geographical locations and/or 2) lead on to short interactives showing the technologies that we have used to make some linkages throughout the project. The map itself is an act of linkage, so demonstrates a range of data being pulled together into one map whether or not a visitor chooses to click on the points.

Once the design agency has been recruited, there will be several prototype testing stages. Team members who have work displayed or explained in the exhibit will be invited to be involved in this testing stage (which, I daresay, will be fun!).

Other work ongoing:

• I have submitted three book chapter proposals, alongside many other colleagues! I’m looking forward to the collaborative process of writing, especially after the lonely process of writing up a PhD thesis this time last year…
• I am preparing an article for the Digital Humanities Quarterly July deadline, on the topic of the researchers notes investigation