Birmingham Museums was a partner on ‘The Congruence Engine: digital tools for new collections-based industrial histories’. This project, led by the Science Museum Group between 2021-2025, was one of the five Discovery Projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Towards a National Collection: Opening UK Heritage to the World fund.

About the project

The project used the latest digital techniques to connect industrial history collections held in different locations. Over the project period, project co-investigators and partner organisations participated in explorations of their textiles, energy and communications collections. Through these iterative research cycles, project participants used both traditional ‘hand-stitching’ research tools and experimented with new computational and AI techniques to develop a digital toolbox for historians and curators to use to explore the connections and congruences within the distributed national industrial collection. Due to the strengths of Birmingham’s collection, our involvement in the project was focussed on the energy and communications research strands, providing data about our collections to support researchers' experimental investigations.

Links

• Article: ‘South Kensington is practically as far away as Paris or Munich’ - the making of industrial collections in EdinburghNewcastle and Birmingham – Co-Authored with Felicity McWilliams (Birmingham Museums – Curator, Science and Industry).