%0 Journal Article %T History of textiles and the Congruence Engine %A William Ashworth %D 2023 %V Congruence Engine %N Autumn 2022 %X This essay briefly surveys the rich benefits a project like the Congruence Engine offers to national textile collections. Digital technology provides the means to bring dispersed material, written and oral collections together into one space. However, it also has limitations, and the following will also touch upon these. We finish with an overview of themes such a project should engage with and conclude with a mini study of the pre-Samuel Greg (Quarry Bank Mill) family context and how this links the Mill, the collections held at the Northern Ireland Record Office and West Indian Plantations together. %Z Although much more is still needed on the manufacturers of textile machines. Here trade directories are useful – for a useful digital starting point see Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History at https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Main_Page (accessed 1 November 2022). %Z For example, there were ‘slop’ shops and sellers located around Liverpool’s docks specifically selling clothes for maritime interests to clothe sailors (rough but tough ready-made textiles that were loose and unfitted). They were made from cheap wool or woollen mixes, the shirts were of linen and by the end of the century linen and cotton mixes (the latter greatly aided by its proximity of Manchester and the production of such mixes), and the trousers were made of canvas or linen twill. See Miles Lambert, 2021, ‘Check Shirts, Flannel Jackets, Canvas Trousers: The Trade in Slops from Eighteenth-Century Liverpool’, Textile History, 52:1-2, pp 78–100. %Z For copyright in general, see Kathy Bowrey, 1997, ‘Art, Craft, Good Taste and Manufacturing: The Development of Intellectual Property Laws’, Law in Context 1:15, pp 778–104. %Z The author is the academic history lead Co-Investigator for the Textiles strand in Congruence Engine (parallel with Graeme Gooday for Energy and Jon Agar for Communications – both, this issue). The work of these Co-Investigators is to bring understanding of the state of the relevant academic field and to propose investigations within the project’s concerns that may enable new kinds of research to be undertaken. %Z https://tmoi.org.uk/ (accessed 1 November 2022) %Z https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Saltaire+&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3. The following provides a range of books referring to Saltaire between 1864 and 1876 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22saltaire%22&tbm=bks&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1864,cd_max:1876&lr=lang_en. For Ngram’s history see Adam Crymble, 2021, Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age (Illinois: University of Illinois Press), p 38. %Z https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page (accessed 1 November 2022) %Z https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ (accessed 1 November 2022) %Z https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Main_Page. The need to embrace the visual and audio is emphasised in Taylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton, 2019, ‘Distant Viewing: Analyzing Large Visual Corpora’, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 34:1, pp 3–16. They apply the concept of ‘distant learning’ with ‘distant viewing’. %Z Spinning in the Era of the Spinning Wheel was a five-year European Research Council project between 2010 and 2015, led by Professor John Styles at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. See http://spinning-wheel.org/ (accessed 1 November 2022) %Z https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/. A good example that combines the written with the visual is The Pietro Lorenzetti Digital Project at https://sammlung.staedelmuseum.de/en/person/lorenzetti-pietro (accessed 1 November 2022). %Z https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/features/textiles.shtml (accessed 1 November 2022) %Z One of the most impressive HTR programmes is that hosted by the EU-funded project based at the University of Innsbruck entitled Transkribus. See https://readcoop.eu/transkribus/ (accessed 1 November 2022). See Hannu Salmi, What is Digital History? (Cambridge: Polity, 2021), p 51 and Crymble, Technology and the Historian, pp 34 and 71. %Z John Styles suggest the User tester could be utilised for this purpose see https://www.uster.com/ (accessed 1 November 2022). For the historical process of measuring quality see Norman Biggs, ‘A Tale Untangled: Measuring the Fineness of Yarn’, Textile History 35:1 (2004), pp 120–129; Biggs and Jenny Hutchinson, ‘Knowles’ Patent Yarn Balance’, Textile History 40:1 (2009), pp 97–102. For an interesting example of digitising images see Melvin Wevers and Thomas Smits, ‘The Visual Digital Turn: Using Neural Networks to Study Historical Images’, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 35:1 (2020), pp 194–207. %Z And cited in Caroline Bressey, ‘Surfacing Black and Brown Bodies in the Digital Archive: Domestic Workers in Late Nineteenth-Century Australia’, Journal of Historical Geography 70 (2020), pp 1–11. It was in the aftermath of the Second World War that the idea of using computers in the Humanities started, accelerating from the 1960s and becoming mainstream from the 1990s (coinciding with the arrival of the home PC). See Salmi, What is Digital History?, pp 6–17. %Z This is probably still best explored in Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge Ms.: Harvard, 1987), chapter 6; Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (London: Verso, 1990). %Z https://digitalbenin.org/. %Z For Queen Street Mill Textile Museum, see https://www.lancashire.gov.uk/leisure-and-culture/museums/queen-street-mill-textile-museum/ (accessed 1 November 2022). %Z Virtual Paul’s Cross Project: A Digital Re-Creation of John Donne’s Gunpowder Day Sermon at https://vpcross.chass.ncsu.edu/ (accessed 1 November 2022) and for discussion see Crymble, Technology and the Historian, pp 40–41. %Z For example, access to some newspapers (probably the most digitised source) require payment to hosts such as Gale Cencage or ProQuest, see Salmi, What is Digital History?, pp 18–19 and 22. %Z A good example of a digital project that works for both historians and the public is The Texas Slavery Project at http://www.texasslaveryproject.org/about/ (accessed 1 November 2022) and discussed in Salmi, What is Digital History?, p 80. %Z As summarised in Salmi, What is Digital History?, p 77, and greatly expanded upon in Crymble, Technology and the Historian. %Z This issue is also discussed in Salmi, What is Digital History? p 37, and Laitte, ‘The Emmet’s Inch’. %Z I am grateful to Wayne Cocroft from Historic England for taking the time to read and greatly enrich these six categories. %Z http://spinning-wheel.org/; https://tmoi.org.uk/; Halls and Martino, ‘Cloth, Copyright, and Cultural Exchange’. %Z Mixed twill, for example, manufactured in this area for sailors’ trousers is often seen as very similar to denim jeans. See https://www.readysleek.com/twill-pants-vs-denim-jeans/ (accessed 1 November 2022) %Z For details of Hertford see https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/estate/view/1191 (accessed 1 November 2022) and https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/c537155c-866a-39bb-a3eb-9d3a2e2f2866 (accessed 1 November 2022) %Z For details of Hillsborough (probably named after the area in County Down with the same name) see https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/c537155c-866a-39bb-a3eb-9d3a2e2f2866 and https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/estate/view/14141 (accessed 1 November 2022). For images see https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PH-Y-00307-H/47 (accessed 1 November 2022). I am grateful to Tim Smith for alerting me to this album of photographs containing images of the Greg family’s plantations. %Z For John Torrans see https://snaccooperative.org/vocab_administrator/resources/7324565 (accessed 1 November 2022). For the company see https://www.electricscotland.com/familytree/magazine/augsep2002/ulster_roots.htm (accessed 1 November 2022) %Z For details of Waddell Cunningham see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waddell_Cunningham (accessed 1 November 2022) and https://www.dib.ie/biography/cunningham-waddell-a2312 (accessed 1 November 2022). %Z For details of Belfast see https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/estate/view/1206 (accessed 1 November 2022). %Z For the company’s pattern book see http://spinning-wheel.org/2013/08/robert-and-nathan-hyde-pattern-book-1771/ (accessed 1 November 2022) %Z https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hibbert (accessed 1 November 2022). For the Hibbert family and slavery see https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/16092 (accessed 1 November 2022). %Z https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/DM3CZJtRPtRYRYcZlGYdg5/the-secret-slave-owners (accessed 1 November 2022) %Z https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146638523 (accessed 1 November 2022) and https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/14956 (accessed 1 November 2022) %Z https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/43422 (accessed 1 November 2022) %I The Science Museum Group %@ 2054-5770 %B eng %U https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/history-of-textiles-and-the-congruence-engine/ %J Science Museum Group Journal