Balancing our responsibilities to communities in Living with Machines

The Living with Machines project (2018-23) was a data science and digital history project between the British Library and The Alan Turing Institute. Its focus on the impact of mechanisation in the long 19th century was in part inspired by the Library's access to newspapers digitised for The British Newspaper Archive, a long-standing public-private partnership between the British Library and Findmypast. The project not only aimed to create a 'radical collaboration' within a multi-disciplinary community, but to reach volunteer communities via crowdsourcing.

This talk will reflect on the benefits and trade-offs of using sources from public-private projects for Living with Machines' work with the public and for data science analytics and derived datasets.