Congruence Engine was a major research project that ran between November 2021 and January 2025. It used the latest digital techniques (including AI) to connect industrial history collections held in different museums and archives across the UK.
It was one of five ‘Discovery Projects’ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under the ‘Towards a National Collection’ funding stream.
We set out to create the prototype of a digital toolbox – for everyone fascinated by our industrial past – to connect an unprecedented range of items from the nation’s collection so that they can tell the stories about our history that they want to tell; we asked: What was it like then? How does our past bear on our present and future?
Until now, historians and curators have become used to a world where it has only been possible to work with a small selection of the sources – museum objects, archive documents, pictures, films, maps, or publications, for example – potentially relevant to the history they want to explore. In Congruence Engine our team of 15 researchers, 15 investigators and project partners worked to overcome this major constraint on the histories that can be created by curators and historians, whether they do history for fun or as a job.
The project united in collaboration a unique combination of skills and interests. We established that, however sophisticated the digital techniques you use, the human factor is always essential to the creation of usable digital data and interpretations. We called this combination a ‘social machine’. In this, individuals and groups motivated by personal and professional interests can work to enable programs to work at scale on data relating to multiple collections. This makes it possible, for example, to link together similar objects between collections; to connect objects to pictures, films and archives, or to link items from any collection to the historical or contemporary literature that describe, and make sense of, them.
Through 38 months of iterative exploration of the textiles, energy and communications industrial sectors, and via 40+ individual investigations, the project applied many digital techniques – including new AI technologies as they became available, topic modelling, named entity recognition, surprising phrase detection, and digital mapping – to collections as diverse as oral histories, photographs, maps, films, archives, machines and other museum objects, and records of historical places.
The new linkages between diverse collections we created were expressed in the project’s two digital exhibits, whose first version was shown at the Discovery Museum, Newcastle 28th October - 25th February 2023, and the second at the National Science and Media Museum in the first half of 2025. More information can be found on our website, in our Journal, and in a slew of popular and academic outputs, including the forthcoming (2026) book from UCL Press, Emergent Histories: New Work in the Digital History of Industry and Collections from the Congruence Engine Project. A selection of key outputs and documents can be found on the Science Museum Group Open Access Repository. Its summative report and recommendations can be found here.
PROJECT PARTNERS
National Museum Wales, National Museums Northern Ireland, Birmingham Museums Trust, The National Archives, National Trust, the V&A, BBC History, BT Heritage & Archives, Grace's Guide to Industrial History, Isis Bibliography of the History of Science, Society for the History of Technology, Saltaire World Heritage Education Association, Whipple Museum of the History of Science (Tools of Knowledge Project), Wikimedia UK and Manchester Digital Laboratory (MadLab).
CO-INVESTIGATORS
Co-Investigators include researchers at:
Science Museum Group, The British Film Institute, Historic England, National Museums Scotland, Tyne and Wear Museums and Bradford Museums, and the Universities of Leeds, London and Liverpool, and UCL.
ENQUIRIES
Please email Tim Boon, Principal Investigator.
The Congruence Engine was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Towards a National Collection: Opening UK Heritage to the World fund.
