Living with Machines

A data visualisation featuring a symmetrical pattern of concentric circles in orange and blue on a dark background.

A multidisciplinary research collaboration between the British Library and the Alan Turing Institute with King's College London, the Universities of Cambridge, East Anglia, Exeter, and London (QMUL), the Living with Machines project aimed to investigate how the introduction of machines into the workplace and landscape changed the lives of ordinary people in the nineteenth century. It had several research strands.

King's Digital Lab worked in collaboration with members of the project team to produce three products in the form notebooks:

  1. to produce visualisations of various crowdsourcing tasks on the Zooniverse platform to provide insight into overall activity of annotation across workflows with the goal to make the code used for this project reproducible, so that others can use or adapt it to visualise data from their own crowdsourcing projects;
  2. to visualise crowdsourced data from the original digitised newspaper articles, contemporary press directories that described individual newspapers, and classifications by Zooniverse volunteers;
  3. to analyse words that changed meaning during the 19th century, examining their connection to the process of mechanisation in British society, specifically focused on terms used to describe vehicles.

Team

  • Arianna Ciula KDL Research Software Analyst
  • Kalle Westerling Researcher, FAH Department of Digital Humanities
  • Miguel Vieira KDL Research Software Engineer
  • Nilo Pedrazzini Researcher, FAH Department of Digital Humanities
  • Ruth Ahnert Principal investigator, Queen Mary University
  • Tiffany Ong KDL Research Software UI/UX Designer
  • Tiffany Ong KDL Research Software Designer