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9. Model of Newcomen Steam Engine
at the University of Glasgow
repaired by James Watt in 1765.
A plaything to start with, but
‘everything became science in his
hands’
Not immediately disruptive.
Partnership with Boulton and move
to Birmingham was key.
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11. Development of Sheffield as a steel
city
• 1740: Huntsman’s first experiments with crucible steel
• 1770: Huntsman’s process begins to be used by other
Sheffield cutlers
• 1786: steam power first used to power hammers in the city
• 1851: less than a quarter of city’s workers in heavy
industries
• 1859: Bessemer opens his new steelworks in Sheffield
because he wanted to shock the conservative steelmakers
there
• 1891: two thirds of city’s workers in heavy industries
• The creation of a ‘steel city’ took over 150 years – perhaps
even longer
12. Sidney Pollard on the Industrial Revolution in
Sheffield and Birmingham
“a visitor to the metalworking areas of
Birmingham or Sheffield in the mid nineteenth-
century would have found little to distinguish
them superficially from the same industries a
hundred years earlier. The men worked as
independent sub-contractors in their own or
rented workshops using their own or hired
equipment … These industries .. were still
waiting for their Industrial Revolution”
13. Changes to Environment
• Wheels powered by steam
• New gadgets available to speed up tasks such as
stamping and cutting
• Workshop lit by gas and has water supply
• Railways improve distribution
• Cheap advertising increases demand
• Is much of what we are seeing similar to the
experience of the ‘small mester’ in the industrial
revolution?
14. I K Brunel on the myth of disruption
I believe that the most useful and novel inventions and
improvements of the present day are mere progressive
steps in a highly wrought and highly advanced system,
suggested by, and dependent on, other previous steps,
their whole value and the means of their application
probably dependent on the success of some or many
other inventions, some old, some new…
In most cases they result from a demand which
circumstances happen to create. Most good things are
being thought of by many persons at the same time.
Christine McLeod, Heroes of Invention, p. 267
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16. The Industrial Revolution was by no means as
‘transformative’ as the Olympic opening ceremony
might suggest:
• Impact often very localised and patchy
• Micro invention just as important as large-scale
innovation
• Social as important as technical: Lunar Society
• Economic growth hard to show: Crafts suggests
annual economic growth of just 2%
• Changes in communication, advertising, access to
markets as important as chane in manufacturing
17. What of Other Transformations?
“the Gutenberg Bible led to religious reformation
while the Web appears to be leading towards social
and economic reformation. But the Digital Industrial
revolution, because of the issues and phenomena
surrounding the Web and its interactions with
society, is occurring at lightning speed with
profound impacts on society, the economy, politics,
and more”.
Michael Brodie, Verizon
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20. When you start to unpick the nature of the historical
discipline, it is tied up with the technologies of the printed
page and the book in ways that are powerful and determining.
Our footnotes, our post-Rankean cross referencing and
practises of textual analysis are embedded within the
technology of the book, and its library.
if, as historians, we are to avoid going the way of the book, we
need to separate out what we think history is designed to
achieve, and to create a scholarly technology that delivers it
Tim Hitchcock, ‘Academic History Writing and its Disconnects’,
Digital Humanities Now, 31 January 2012
21. • Does the digital revolution (after some
decades) amount to no more than pdfs of
journal articles?
• Is linking library, archive, museum catalogues
enough?
• Do digital images offer that much more than
microfilm?
• Is being able to work faster, more accurately
and in different places enough?
• Is that truly transformative?
28. Visualisation by Mitchell Whitelaw of the series structure of a
large archive:
visiblearchive.blogspot.co.uk
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30. ParametricModeling Quantitatively MapsSingle Cell Protein
Levelsto Individual Qualitative Components
Slide from Nicole Coleman and Erica Savig, Common Design Strategies for
Exploring Intellectual Geographies in History and Cell Motility in Biology
New types of cross-over – new types of engagement and shared modelling
31. Data objects developed by Ian Gwallt, Sheffield Hallam University:
http://www.shu.ac.uk/research/c3ri/projects/data-objects
37. • The process of transformation is
more complex and incremental
than we often think
• It can be patchy in its effect and
shape
• Watt and the steam kettle is not a
safe paradigm for understanding
processes of transformation
• We may need to build new
dialogues and make new
connections particularly through
the arts
• The revolutionary and truly
transformative may take time to
percolate through
Editor's Notes
This early experiment helped pave the way for the Electronic Beowulf project, in which we used fibre optic backlighting to record hundreds of readings in the Beowulf manuscript which had been concealed by conservation work in the nineteenth century.
