The Congruence Engine

'The Congruence Engine': Digital Tools for New Collections-Based Industrial Histories (November 2021 – January 2025)

PI: Dr Timothy Boon, Science Museum Group

Co-Is: Science Museum Group, British Film Institute, Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England, National Museums of Scotland, Universities of London, Leeds and Liverpool, University College London.

Partner organisations: BBC History, Birmingham Museums Trust, Bradford Museums and Galleries, BT Heritage & Archives, Grace's Guide to Industrial History, Isis Bibliography of the History of Science, MadLab, The National Archives, National Museum Wales, National Museums of Northern Ireland, National Trust, Saltaire World Heritage Education Association, Society for the History of Technology, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums (Discovery), Victoria and Albert Museum, Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Wikimedia UK.

The capacity to connect historical objects and sources lies at the heart of this project as it does with the everyday museum and historical practices it is designed to support. Curators creating displays often combine artefacts, images and audio-visual materials from different heritage organisations. Amateur historians connect records from diverse sources to understand their ancestors and locales. Academic historians critically connect archive sources with existing literature to create new histories. All rely on connecting different fragments as they sew the quilts of our local and national histories. But this project seeks to make such linkages at the national scale of all collections, enabling access together to significant numbers of relevant items from many GLAM organisations holding heritage in many media. We aim to model a world where users can explore data neighbourhoods where information about heritage items from many sources will be readily to hand – museum objects, archive documents, pictures, films, buildings, and the records of previous investigations and relevant activity.

The project may be characterised as a kind of ‘social machine’ (Shadbolt et al 2022), a form of socio-technical practice requiring human propulsion and intervention in conjunction with the affordances of computing (including machine learning) techniques. The project is modelling the hybrid technical-historical practices that will be necessary whenever any kind of user wishes to undertake cross-collections work for curatorial and/or historical purposes. Our outputs address three kinds of audience: for the TaNC Directorate, we will provide a ‘design specification’ of our ‘social machine’ replete with worked examples and overarching meta-considerations. For the Museum-visiting public, we are creating a digital exhibit that shows how a national collection for industrial history might be created. For the workers in our home disciplines, we will communicate via conferences and two books that advocate for the virtues of working digitally across collections.