Historians and data scientists are building computational tools to trawl through millions of pages of nineteenth-century newspapers and census records, searching for how ordinary people experienced the mechanisation of their work. The project addresses a gap in knowledge: while Britain’s industrial revolution is well documented in economic terms, the human and social consequences—how families, communities, and language itself changed when machines replaced hand labour—remain poorly understood. By combining the British Library’s digitised newspaper collection with event-based records from Findmypast, the team will develop intuitive interfaces that let historians pose new questions to vast datasets. If successful, the project will produce computational models that track how language and meaning shifted across time and geography, and create generalisable tools for future interdisciplinary research. The work is primarily curiosity-driven, but its methods—blending data science with archival inquiry—could reshape how cultural institutions make their holdings searchable and how scholars study large-scale social change. Outreach includes television programmes and regional exhibitions, alongside participatory crowdsourcing to let communities explore their own shared histories.
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Living with Machines is both a research project, and a bold proposal for a new research paradigm. In this ground-breaking partnership between The Alan Turing Institute, the British Library, and the Universities of Cambridge, East Anglia, Exeter, and London (QMUL), historians, data scientists, geographers, computational linguists, and curators have been brought together to examine the human impact of industrial revolution. It is widely recognised that Britain was the birthplace of the world's first industrial revolution, yet there is still much to learn about the human, social, and cultural consequences of this historical moment. Focussing on the long nineteenth century (c.1780-1920), the Living with Machines project aims to harness the combined power of massive digitised archives and computational analytical tools to examine the ways in which technology altered the very fabric of human existence on a hitherto unprecedented scale. The central theme - the mechanisation of work practices - speaks directly to present debates about how society can accommodate the revolutionary consequences of AI and robotics in what has become known as the fourth industrial revolution. To understand the fraught co-existence of human and machine, this project contends that we need research methods that combine technological innovation and human expertise. The project will utilise the British Library's National Newspaper collection, and event-based records (census, electoral registration, births/ marriages/deaths, trade directories) collected by contributing partners Findmypast. By developing intuitive computational interfaces, and adapting collaborative practices developed in the field of software development, we will enable close interaction between computational methods and historical inquiry. Outreach and Engagement will be central to the project from the outset, and will take two forms: familiar outcomes such as television programmes and regional exhibitions; and working with individuals and communities to create common understandings of their shared histories. Participatory aspects will embody best practices in crowdsourcing and citizen history. Project benefits: 1. The UK's first large-scale synergy between data science, artificial intelligence research, and the arts and humanities, building capacity and catalysing new research areas. 2. The development of new computational techniques to marshal the UK's rich archival collections (digitised and born-digital), to enable new research questions to be posed of the holdings. 3. Enriched and interlinked data holdings for the British Library, to add additional context and value to content. 4. The development generalisable tools, code, and infrastructure that can be adapted for and inspire future interdisciplinary research projects. 5. New historical perspectives on the effects of the mechanisation of labour on the lives of ordinary people during the long nineteenth century. 6. The creation of computational models to represent how language and meanings change across time and geography. 7. Research breakthroughs maintaining UK global leadership in Digital Humanities and driving large-scale international partnerships and opportunities.
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