'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.

Journal Article Histories of Everyday Life: The Making of Popular Social History in Britain, 1918-1979 (Past & Present Book Series). By Laura Carter Get access Histories of Everyday Life: The Making of Popular Social History in Britain, 1918-1979 (Past & Present Book Series). By Laura Carter. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2021. xiv + 274 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-886833-0, £75. Jon Lawrence Jon Lawrence University of Exeter, UK j.lawrence3@exeter.ac.uk https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6561-6381 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Twentieth Century British History, Volume 34, Issue 3, September 2023, Pages 585–587, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwad013 Published: 16 February 2023

This article introduces the ‘Environmental Scan’ as answer to the question of hidden biases in digital heritage collections. Its substantive focus is digitized nineteenth-century British provincial newspapers, and in particular the JISC corpus, a popular, publicly-funded resource for scholars. While multiple papers have meticulously investigated the genesis of such newspaper collections, in the process highlighting the often unacknowledged politics of collection, preservation and dissemination via microfilm and now digitization, our aim is to explore questions of representativeness and bias in new ways by enriching computational analysis of digital corpora with the historical insights that can be derived from a contemporaneous reference source: namely, the Victorian newspaper press directories.

This chapter discusses the open access digitisation programme undertaken by Living with Machines, exploring the range of constraints that inform digitisation strategies and selection priorities. Because the landscape of digitised newspaper collections is so complex, and research and digitisation processes operate on different timelines, we have focused on opportunities to make digitisation choices both transparent and pragmatic. Working towards solutions that reflect collaborations between library staff and scholars, we introduce: a) Press Picker, our custom visualisation tool designed to support decision making about digitisation; and b) the Environmental Scan, a process of automatic metadata generation from the Newspaper Press Directories, a contemporaneous record of British newspapers.

We present a new dataset for the task of toponym resolution in digitized historical newspapers in English. It consists of 343 annotated articles from newspapers based in four different locations in England (Manchester, Ashton-under-Lyne, Poole and Dorchester), published between 1780 and 1870. The articles have been manually annotated with mentions of places, which are linked—whenever possible—to their corresponding entry on Wikipedia. The dataset consists of 3,364 annotated toponyms, of which 2,784 have been provided with a link to Wikipedia. The dataset is published in the British Library shared research repository, and is especially of interest to researchers working on improving semantic access to historical newspaper content.

The transformative impact of the railway on nineteenth-century British society has been widely recognized, but understanding that process at scale remains challenging because the Victorian rail network was both vast and in a state of constant flux. Michael Quick’s reference work Railway Passenger Stations in Great Britain: a Chronology offers a uniquely rich and detailed account of Britain’s changing railway infrastructure. Its listing of over 12,000 stations allows us to reconstruct the coming of rail at both microand macro-scales; however, being published originally as a book, this resource was not well suited for systematic linking to other geographical data. This paper shows how such a minimally-structured historical directory can be transformed into an openly available structured and linked dataset, named StopsGB (Structured Timeline of Passenger Stations in Great Britain), which will be of widespread interest across the historical, digital library and semantic web communities. To achieve this, we use traditional parsing techniques to convert the original document into a structured dataset of railway stations, with attributes containing information such as operating companies and opening and closing dates. We then identify a set of potential Wikidata candidates for each station using DeezyMatch, a deep neural approach to fuzzy string matching, and use a supervised classification approach to determine the best matching entity.

This paper proposes a new approach to animacy detection, the task of determining whether an entity is represented as animate in a text. In particular, this work is focused on atypical animacy and examines the scenario in which typically inanimate objects, specifically machines, are given animate attributes. To address it, we have created the first dataset for atypical animacy detection, based on nineteenth-century sentences in English, with machines represented as either animate or inanimate. Our method builds on recent innovations in language modeling, specifically BERT contextualized word embeddings, to better capture fine-grained contextual properties of words. We present a fully unsupervised pipeline, which can be easily adapted to different contexts, and report its performance on an established animacy dataset and our newly introduced resource. We show that our method provides a substantially more accurate characterization of atypical animacy, especially when applied to highly complex forms of language use.

ABSTRACTThis article examines surviving notes from interviews conducted by Michael Young and Peter Willmott in the London Borough of Bethnal Green and the Essex ‘overspill’ estate of ‘Greenleigh’ (Debden) in the mid-1950s to ask how far they support the central arguments about kinship, community, and place advanced in their classic 1957 book Family and kinship in East London. These interviews are used to suggest that Young and Willmott's powerful a priori models about ‘community’ and working-class kinship, and their strong political investment in the idea of a decentralized social democracy based on self-servicing, working-class communities, led them to discount testimony which ran counter to their assumptions as ‘aberrant’ or ‘exceptional’. Though it is difficult to draw strong conclusions from thirty-seven interviews, it is suggested that the snippets of personal testimony that survive in Michael Young's papers reinforce the arguments of historians who seek to question cataclysmic accounts of the consequences of working-class suburbanization in the mid-twentieth century. Culture and lifestyle changed much less with the move out to suburban Essex than Family and kinship would suggest, partly because Bethnal Green's family and neighbourhood networks were considerably less cohesive than they claimed.

This article argues that exploring the interpersonal dynamics of social-science interviews can help us recast the conclusions of classic social surveys. Its focus is the original fieldwork undertaken for Goldthorpe and Lockwood's influential anti-revisionist study of affluent workers in 1960s England. In this study, the class gulf between Luton car workers and Cambridge academics mattered more than is sometimes recognized, but its effects were subtly cross-cut by the influence of age and gender. Both interviewer and respondent tended to define themselves against an older, socially-conformist and status-conscious outlook which the interviewers called 'bourgeois' and the respondents 'snobbish'. This shared disavowal of bourgeois snobbery owed much to the presentational strategies that male interviewees pursued to neutralize social inequalities inherent in the social-science encounter. Male workers' sensitivity to questions of 'status' led them to play down its importance when talking to university professionals (although their wives were sometimes on hand to puncture the performance). But the researchers' relative indifference to questions of gender and self-presentation encouraged them largely to accept male workers' testimony at face value. One consequence was that they radically exaggerated the scope for a revivified class politics based on working-class instrumentalism. Status consciousness, individualism and social aspiration were all much stronger forces than they allowed among England's postwar 'affluent' workers.

This article develops some of the key themes in Electing Our Masters (2009). Its focus is the cultural history of electioneering, and in particular the shifting relationship between politicians and public from the late eighteenth century to the present. Elections are viewed as rituals structured around reproducing, and sometimes redefining, classed and gendered relations of power. Election rituals long pre-dated democracy and existed primarily to soften the reality of dramatically unequal power relations. Considerable licence was granted to those excluded from formal politics; within limits they were to 'have their say'. This rationale collapsed in the wake of the First World War and full-blown democratization. But the shift to a mass electorate demanded less a change of political style than a subtle recalibration of politicians' expectations about the character and role of the crowd. Britain was inching towards a more democratic understanding of the relationship between politician and public, but one still framed in a dominant patrician style. Male dress code softened, political leadership became more informal and homely, but there was no great breakthrough to demotic politics until the late twentieth century.

This paper describes the influence of American and British electoral sociology in the 1940s and 1950s over British historians. In the middle of the 20(th) century, the rise of electoral studies on American and British elections contributed to the diffusion, among specialists of political history, of a sociological model of interpretation for electoral behaviour and of a pluralist interpretation of partisan institutions. The adoption by British historians of the theoretical assumptions and methods of political sociology subsequently informed their interpretation of political behaviour in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Since the 1970s, the influence of sociological models over historians has been challenged by a new generation of historians who insist on greater theoretical autonomy for historians and on the necessary contextualisation of their objects, while recent works on political history tend to question the view of a modernisation and a nationalisation of politics in the late 19th century.