Present: Patrick Russell, Will Ashworth, Kylea Little, Geoff Belknap, Bernard Musesengwe, Daniel Belteki, Stefania Zardini Lacedelli, Alex Butterworth, Jane Winters, Tim Boon, Max Long, Alex Fitzpatrick, Julia Ankenbrand, Anna-Maria Sichani, Arran Rees, Nayomi Kasthrui Arachchi, Tasha Kitcher, Jon Agar

Apologies: Graeme Gooday, Simon Popple

Location: Mary Sommerville, Dana Centre.

Agenda:

1. Recap of the potential publications (TB)
   1. Social machine book
   2. Historical book
   3. Other publications
2. Expected chapters for the historical book (all)

Comfort break

1. Emerging shape of the historical book (all)

Useful documents:

New Work in the Digital History of Industry and Collections - Towards a Book Outline upd 20240319.docx

Notes:

1. Overview:

   • 3 main forms of major output from project
     • Social Machine Book - 30,000 words, UoL Press. CE statement of methodology - how we propose a national collection should be made.
     • Historical book - UCL Press - Pat Gordon-Smith very keen on proposal of book as it fits their direction for heritage and museum publishing
     • Others - Journal articles - Not everything that the project will want to say will find its home in the 2 books. If there’s something substantial we want to say, should be published in a journal and then can be mentioned in an abbreviated form in these books
     • Jane: coding data is another form of output from project. Tim: plans for archiving the code (Github, use of repositories) a footnote type of conversation
   1. Social machine book
   • edited by ARPM members but room for contributions from different parts of project in sections
   • framed around idea of manifesto - expanding idea of that and taking it through research project
   • 5 chapters
     • intro to social machine as means to create unified digital collections
     • need for digital collections to exist as social machine
     • decentralization - social and political theory, spearheaded by Helen Graham
     • sociotechnical elements - looking at how some of the investigations and tensions/dynamics
     • implications for digital humanities research
   • each chapter around 5000-6000 words

   Questions:

   Anna-Maria - will rest of team contribute in any way

   Tim: the shape of that comes from ARPM drafting but also commissions authorship list will include everyone who contributed to the book - might use a formal taxonomy or just list all the authors as you write, it becomes clear what you need and who you need to contribute

b. Historical book

This is what this meeting is primarily about. Aim is to get a complete draft to Pat by mid-November (original end date of project). Need to ensure effort doesn’t fall unduly on any one person - nobody should be writing more than equivalent of 3 research articles

c. Others

Stef and Stefania looking at a more technical publication around the OH pipeline. Specific Action Research publications likely too.

1. Expected chapters

• Nayomi -

  • data modelling a model village (genealogies). (Alex, Colin, Felix, Max)
  • What to do when things get messy? (potentially fits in with OCR chapter that Tasha, Daniel, Max, Nayomi and Anna-Maria want to work on) (also potentially a separate chapter that looks at messy data more generally)

  Discussion: Jane: Going into detail about process of data cleaning would be helpful

  Max: One thing we’ll be discussing is the ways of doing framing + decisions you make in OCR processing dependent on historical methodology

  Jane: What’s the issue with identification around Saltaire material?

  Nayomi: Local historian’s created these datasets but issues about provenance

  • if used FindMyPast, then restrictions on what can be published

  Jane: Could turn that into a historical research problem

  Alex B: Also don’t want to expose him

  • one possibility: treat it as a hypothetical situation