Collaborative Historical Research in the Age of Big Data
Lessons from an Interdisciplinary Project

This Element describes Living with Machines, the largest digital humanities project ever funded in the UK.

Ruth Ahnert (Author), Emma Griffin (Author), Mia Ridge (Author), Giorgia Tolfo (Author)

9781009175555, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 9 February 2023

75 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 0.5 cm, 0.138 kg

Living with Machines is the largest digital humanities project ever funded in the UK. The project brought together a team of twenty-three researchers to leverage more than twenty-years' worth of digitisation projects in order to deepen our understanding of the impact of mechanisation on nineteenth-century Britain. In contrast to many previous digital humanities projects which have sought to create resources, the project was concerned to work with what was already there, which whilst straightforward in theory is complex in practice. This Element describes the efforts to do so. It outlines the challenges of establishing and managing a truly multidisciplinary digital humanities project in the complex landscape of cultural data in the UK and share what other projects seeking to undertake digital history projects can learn from the experience. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Authorship Statement
Introduction
1. Starting Up
2. Using Digitised Historical Collections
3. Infrastructure
4. Radical Collaboration
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], General & world history [HBG], History: theory & methods [HBA], Research methods: general [GPS], Archiving, preservation & digitisation  [GLP]