The ‘Living with Machines’ is a research project hosted at The Alan Turing Institute, the national research institute for artificial intelligence and data science. The project funded by UK Research and Innovations (UKRI), via the Strategic Priorities Fund and administered by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is a bold proposal for a new research paradigm. In this ground-breaking partnership between The Alan Turing Institute, the British Library and Universities of Cambridge, East Anglia, Exeter, Queen Mary University of London and King’s College London, historians, data scientists, geographers, computational linguists, library professionals and curators come together to examine the human impact of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.

By analysing and comparatively looking into newly digitised newspaper collections by the British Library, map collections by the National Library of Scotland, and numerous other textual sources, the researchers aim to harness the combined power of historical sources and computational analytical tools to examine the ways in which technological innovation altered the very
fabric of human existence on a hitherto unprecedented scale.

A series of short videos in documentary form (directed and produced by Léllé Demertzi) seeks to make visible the collaborative underpinnings of the project by highlighting the team’s experiences, research objectives, challenges, and lessons learnt. In an attempt to create transparency between the academic world and society, the researchers break down the thinking and decision processes that led to their respective findings and provide invaluable insights around the ways in which new technologies can empower new research methodologies.