240129_lost_mills_investigation_proposal.docx

LOST MILLS: Reanimating the history of Textile Manufacturing in the West Riding

‘Lost Mills’ is an umbrella ‘investigation’ initiated and overseen by Alex Butterworth as one element in the Textiles strand of the project. The aim of ‘Lost Mills’ is to experiment in bringing together collections and other data relating to the Textile Mills of the West Riding, and Bradford in particular, through the use of advanced digital technologies within a ‘social machine’: a harmonisation of human and technological contribution that is itself digitally mediated.

The investigation involves the extraction of data from diverse analogue and digital sources and their construction into a prototype ‘knowledge graph’ database that is richly queryable and linkable. Included in the sources incorporated so far are print catalogues of Mill archives (1970s) and printed surveys of mill buildings (early 1990s), with diverse data from Historic England (including aerial photograph), and some handwritten documents (eg C19th order books: to survey the global reach of exports) in process.

The intention is that this data should be integrated with other social history data - trade directories of occupations mapped onto historical street maps of the environs of the mills, for example, and folk songs and oral histories that have been annotated using a combination of human knowledge and Artificial Intelligence - to suggest the possibilities of an immersive and imaginatively engaged experience of the past. Also falling under the ‘Lost Mills’ umbrella is a sub-investigation into how the historical interior of mills might be reanimated through the application of cutting edge Neural Radiance Field Imaging AI (Neural Radiance Field / Heritage Sites as Lost Mills sub-investigation)to sets of historical photographs, with which Tim Smith is assisting.