The Alan Turing Institute and the British Library, together with researchers from a range of universities, have been awarded £9.2 million from the UKRI's StrategicPriorities Fund for a major new project. 'Living with Machines', which will take place over five years, is set to be one of the biggest and most ambitious humanities and scienceresearch initiatives ever to launch in the UK.

'Living with Machines' will see data scientists working with curators, historians, geographers and computational linguists with the goal to devise new methods in datascience and artificial intelligence that can be applied to historical resources, producing tools and software to analyse digitised collections at scale for the first time.

In recognition of the significant changes currently underway in technology, notably in artificial intelligence, the project will use the century following the first IndustrialRevolution, and the changes brought about by the advance of technology across all aspects of society during this period as its focus point.

Initial research plans involve scientists from The Alan Turing Institute collaborating with curators and researchers to build new software to analyse data drawn initially frommillions of pages of out-of-copyright newspaper collections from within the archive in the British Library's National Newspaper Building, and from other digitised historicalcollections, most notably government collected data, such as the census and registration of births, marriages and deaths. The resulting new research methods will allowcomputational linguists and historians to track societal and cultural change in new ways during this transformative period in British history. Crucially, these new researchmethods will place the lives of ordinary people centre-stage, rather than privileging the perspectives of decision-makers and public commentators.

'Living with Machines' will take a radical approach to collaboration, breaking down barriers between academic traditions, bringing together data scientists and softwareengineers from The Alan Turing Institute and curators from the British Library as well as computational linguists, digital humanities scholars and historians from universitiesincluding Exeter, University of East Anglia, Cambridge and Queen Mary University of London.

The research methodologies and tools developed as a result of the project will transform how researchers can access and understand digitised historic collections in thefuture.

Adrian Smith, Director of The Alan Turing Institute, commented:

To read the complete article, see:
Living with Machines: The Alan Turing Institute and the British Library awarded £9.2 million for amajor new project set to revolutionise research (https://www.bl.uk/press-releases/2018/december/living-with-machines)

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