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Living with Machines is a data-driven history of the coming of the machine age in the long nineteenth century, arising from one of the largest interdisciplinary projects undertaken in the humanities. The world’s first industrial revolution in Britain resulted in an explosion in the creation and collection of documentary sources. This book harnesses the combined power of massive digitised historical collections – from maps and census returns to newspapers – and computational analytical tools to examine the ways in which technology altered the very fabric of human existence on a hitherto unprecedented scale.
Collaboratively written, and developed through open community review, the book features an innovative open access edition enhanced with interactive maps, datasets and visualisations, digital notebooks, and multimedia content including video, audio and images. Its experimental approach uses easily reproducible methods based on open source code and linked to publicly available datasets.
Historians will find in this book a wealth of accessible material illuminating the human, social and cultural consequences of this historical moment. For digital humanists, cultural heritage professionals, librarians and archivists it is a rich example of the potential and methods of making collections available for digital scholarship. At once an exploration of the extraordinary impact of technology on humanity in the age of industry and a powerful digital artefact itself, this book is an essential text at the cutting edge of digital history.
Living with Machines stands as one of the most ambitious collaborations yet undertaken between historians and computational researchers. Beyond the historical interpretations offered here, it leaves an enduring legacy of tools, datasets, workflows, and methodological reflections that will shape how future generations of historians are trained. Anyone interested in bringing historical scholarship into the age of AI—without abandoning the discipline’s commitment to critical interpretation and source criticism—will find this an indispensable resource.
—Jo Guldi, Historian and Professor of Data and Decision Sciences at Emory University, USA.
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Introduction: working with machines
Ruth Ahnert, Emma Griffin, and Jon Lawrence -
1 The Environmental Scan as a method for digital source criticism at scale
Kaspar Beelen, Ruth Ahnert, Jon Lawrence, Katherine McDonough, Daniel van Strien and Daniel C.S. Wilson -
2 MapReader: software and principles for computational map studies
Katherine McDonough, Ruth Ahnert, Kaspar Beelen, Kasra Hosseini, Jon Lawrence, Valeria Vitale, Kalle Westerling, Daniel C.S. Wilson and Rosie Wood -
3 Beyond the tracks: re-connecting people, places and stations in the history of late-Victorian railways
Joshua Rhodes, Jon Lawrence, Kaspar Beelen, Katherine McDonough and Daniel C.S. Wilson -
4 Links in the chain: workers in the British bicycle boom, as seen from the England and Wales census, 1881–1911
Guy Solomon, Joshua Rhodes, Jon Lawrence, Emma Griffin, Timothy Hobson, Sherman Lo and Daniel C.S. Wilson -
5 Analysing the language of mechanisation in nineteenth-century British newspapers
Barbara McGillivray, Nilo Pedrazzini, Arianna Ciula, Jon Lawrence, Tiffany Ong, Mia Ridge and Miguel Vieira -
Afterword
Ruth Ahnert