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Living with Machines rethinks the impact of technology on the lives of ordinary people during the Industrial Revolution. The project queries metadata for large-scale newspaper collections. This poster describes the workflow of building a database infrastructure that facilitates quicker and easier humanities research on heterogeneous and complex newspaper data.

This poster was presented at theAIUCD 2023 conference in Siena (Italy)on 5 June 2023. Project website (Living with Machines):https://livingwithmachines.ac.uk/ Poster related to:Nilo Pedrazzini & Barbara McGillivray,Diachronic and diatopic word embeddings from British historical newspapers, presented atAIUCD (Convegno dell’Associazione per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale) in Siena (Italy), June 2023. Data:10.5281/zenodo.7892460

for long paper, DH Benelux 2022: RE-MIX. Creation and alteration in DH (Hybrid), 1-3 June 2022. Research in computational linguistics has made successful attempts at modelling word meaning at scale, but much remains to be done to put these computational models to the test of historical scholarship (see e.g. Beelen et al. 2021). More importantly, a lot of computational research looks at texts in a historical vacuum, 'synchronically', as linguists would say. Living with Machines is an interdisciplinary research project that rethinks the impact of technology on the lives of ordinary people during the Industrial Revolution (Ahnert et al. 2021). During this project, we decided to address a fundamental question: what did people mean by ‘machine’ and how has this meaning changed over time? This paper outlines how a simple research question like 'what was a machine?' can provide an opportunity to engage the public with our work while also generating data for analysis and new avenues of research in a radically collaborative way.