Living with Machines

• 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

PDF: 9781914477669

Read Online: 9781914477652

Hardback: 9781914477638 / 220mm x 144mm

Paperback: 9781914477645 / 216mm x 140mm

Ruth Ahnert (Editor)

Ruth Ahnert is Professor of Literary History and Digital Humanities at Queen Mary University of London, UK. She has a background as an early modernist, with a particular interest in book history and epistolary culture, and her current research interests include applications of data science to humanistic inquiry. She is author of several books including, The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century (2013), The Network Turn: Changing Perspectives in the Humanities (2020, co-authored with Sebastian E. Ahnert, Catherine N. Coleman, and Scott B. Weingart), and Collaborative Historical Research in the Age of Big Data: Lessons from an interdisciplinary project (2023, co-authored with Emma Griffin, Mia Ridge & Giorgia Tolfo). She was Principal Investigator on the Living with Machines project and is co-series editor of the Text Technologies series.

Emma Griffin (Editor)

Emma Griffin is Professor of British History and Head of School at Queen Mary University of London, UK. She specialises in the social and economic history of Britain during the period 1700–1914. She has written five books, most recently Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy (2020) and is currently writing a global history of industrialisation. She was President of the Royal Historical Society, 2020–24 and has spent many years engaged in editorial work, serving as editor for History; Historical Journal; Cultural and Social History and the Camden Series.

Jon Lawrence (Editor)

Jon Lawrence is Professor Emeritus at Exeter University. He works on British social, political and cultural history from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. He has published extensively on political language and the culture of public politics and his book Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in post-war England was published in 2019. He has also worked extensively on the world of popular party politics, playing a prominent role in the development of the so-called 'new political history' with its emphasis on the systematic study of political language. Between 2019 and 2024 he was Co-Investigator on the Living with Machines project.

The Living with Machines Team (Author)

Ruth Ahnert, Kaspar Beelen, Arianna Ciula, Emma Griffin, Timothy Hobson, Kasra Hosseini, Katherine McDonough, Barbara McGillivray, Jon Lawrence, Sherman Lo, Tiffany Ong, Nilo Pedrazzini, Joshua Rhodes, Mia Ridge, Guy Solomon, Daniel van Strien, Miguel Vieira, Valeria Vitale, Kalle Westerling, Daniel C.S. Wilson and Rosie Wood.

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.

Subject: Digital Humanities, History

BISAC codes: HIS015060, LAN025000

Thema codes: GL, NHTK, UBB

Keywords: Alan Turing Institute, Britain, British Library, Urban history, Victorian, archivists, computational linguists, cultural heritage, data science, digital history, digital humanists, digitisation, industrial revolution, librarianship, machine age