At Monday’s extended investigation meeting, we discussed some of the practical and theoretical challenges that we’re likely to face with over the next few months, before we set our sights on the writing stage. A lot of the discussion revolved around overlaps between the three principal areas of work that have been identified, namely ‘Spatial Bradford’, ‘Narrative Linkage’, and ‘DataResourcesTaxonomyAlignmentOntologyBigBlueBlob’.

I don’t think that anyone went into the meeting expecting these overlaps to be ‘resolved’ by the end of the day. However, I do think that the meeting provided some real clarity about the different areas of work that we are prioritising across the project, and how each of these fits together.

For my part, I have agreed to take responsibility for the following:

• Within the data resources package, I will be creating and consolidating lists of terms relating to individual companies, especially in relation to textiles.
  • I am also keen to explore some materials that I collected from C. F. Mallet’s Weekly Wool Chart and telegram service, and will be meeting with Denice next week to discuss further. There is also an opportunity to explore some of this material from a geospatial perspective, which I will be discussing with Daniel also next week.
• As part of the textual & narrative materials package, I am going to draw together the work done so far on documentary films, with a view to exploring opportunities for applying computer vision methods to this area of work. There will be some overlap here with Tasha and Daniel’s work with Heritage Weaver and the Power of Advertisements, and hopefully some opportunities to pool resources and technical knowledge. I would so love to be able to produce a library of short clips showing textile processes which could be fed into an ML model, but I the more I look into this, the more I think this may need to be an ambition for a future project!
• I have also offered to lend a hand under the Ethics package, collaboraring with Tasha and Anna-Maria on the environmental impacts of our research.

Last week I promised that I would provide some updates on Once Upon A Sheep. I will have to delay a more detailed discussion one more week, but I thought I would share a couple of highlights here to whet the appetite:

Although our contacts at Bradford Movie Makers believe that a sound version of the film was made, the intertitles (together with the fact that it’s an ‘amateur’ film from the late 1940s) would suggest that it’s more likely that there has only ever been a silent version.

As the caption above suggests, the film was keen to emphasise that, while the sheep shown at the beginning and end of the film were local to Yorkshire, the majority of wool used in the Bradford textile industry came from much further afield. The film even included an animation showing the trade routes connecting Bradford to Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India, among other places.