Living with Machines: Computational Histories of the Age of Industry

'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.