Congruence Engine proposals for the Digital Festival for the History of Science (3-7 July 2023) https://digicon.bshs.org.uk/call-for-proposals/

SESSION 1

National Collection as a verb. Social Machine Round Table

This round table will explore how the investigations of the Congruence Engine project support, criticise, and offer new insights to the concept of ‘social machine’. Congruence Engine is one of five multi-partner Discovery projects supported by the Towards a National Collection (TaNC) programme, a major five-year £18.9 million investment which aims to make steps to create an unified virtual collection. One of the key concepts explored by the project is the creation of a National Collection by means of a ‘social machine’, an engine which places people and technology in an equal and dynamic relationship. Therefore, the project is experimenting with multiple investigations which bring together humanities scholars, historians, data scientists, curators and archivists exploring intersections across different collections. Each participant of the round table will be invited to reflect how different aspects of their investigations bring together the social and technical dimension and what challenges they encounter. The session will also investigate how the concept of social machines can be applied to the digital history of science, while also reflecting on how the practicalities of its application are shaped by the current socio-political climate.

Chair: Arran Rees, Research Associate, University of Leeds  (tbc)

Panellists to be selected from:

Tim Boon, Head of Research and Public History, ****Science Museum Group & Helen Graham, Associate Professor, University of Leeds - the National Collection as a Verb

Alex Butterworth, Digital History Lead, Science Museum Group - the interaction of human and machines in the development of the Congruence Engine pipelines

Kunika Kono, Senior Developer and Technical Lead, School of Advanced Studies & Jane Winters, Professor of Digital Humanities, School of Advanced Studies - the scope of technical knowledge and the training needs for a National Collection

Kylea Little, Keeper of History, Discovery Museum – how the social machine enable the participation of museum institutions in large, interdisciplinary digital humanities projects

Stuart Prior, Programme Coordinator, Wikimedia UK ****– Wikimedia as a Social Machine

Simon Popple, Senior Lecturer in Photography and Digital Culture, University of Leeds - the role of communities and digital participatory projects within social machines

Graeme Gooday, Professor of History of Science & Technology, University of Leeds**; Will Ashworth**, Reader in History, University of Liverpool; Jon Agar, Professor of Science and Technology Studies, UCL – the role of universities in the social machine

SESSION 2

The Congruence Engine toolbox. Demonstration of digital techniques to connect historical datasets and museum collections.

This session will offer a live demonstration of the digital tools and techniques that the Congruence Engine project is exploring to connect different types of historical datasets, showing the new type of historical research and curatorial knowledge that working across collections is enabling. Congruence Engine is a three-year research project supported by  the AHRC’s Towards a National Collection (TaNC) programme, which explores the latest digital techniques to connect industrial history collections held in different locations. The project aims to develop a ‘digital toolbox’ which will allow everyone fascinated by our industrial past to connect an unprecedented range of collection items to tell the stories that they want to tell. The Congruence Engine team is working across a wide range of analogue and digitised historical sources (e.g. handwritten material, photographs, objects, pictures, films, oral history, folk songs), experimenting with a combination of machine learning techniques to convert this material into structured digital data that is machine readable and thereby able to be richly connected. The session will allow attendees the opportunity to take part in the initial design of these digital tools by reflecting on the types of historical questions that they would explore with them.

Chair: Alex Butterworth, Digital History Lead, Science Museum Group (tbc)

Panellists to be selected from:

Alex Butterworth, Digital History Lead, Science Museum Group – Recreating Lost Mills through Computer Vision

Stef De Sabbata, Associate Professor of Geographical Information Science, University of Leicester & Stefania Zardini Lacedelli, Research Fellow, Science Museum Group ****– Visualizing Oral History