The Congruence Engine is a research project using the latest digital techniques to connect industrial history collections held in different museums and archives across the UK. It is one of five Discovery Projects supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under the Towards a National Collection funding stream.
The project is prototyping a digital toolbox – for everyone fascinated by our industrial past – to connect an unprecedented range of items from the nation’s collection. 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. We are working to overcome this major constraint on the histories that can be created by curators and historians.
The project has seen 27 months of iterative exploration of the textiles, energy and communications industrial sectors, and via some 40 individual investigations. We’re applying many digital techniques – including topic modelling, named entity recognition, surprising phrase detection, digital mapping, annotation, and generative AI – to collections as diverse as oral histories, photographs, maps, films, archives, machines and other museum objects, and records of historical places.
Co-Investigators include researchers at: The Science Museum Group, MadLab, 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.
Read more about the origins and ambitions of the programme here.
Read more about TANC here.
Further reading:
Science Museum Group Journal: The future: reflections on emerging machine-learning methods for digital heritage
Asa Calow, MadLab - author
Congruence Engine blog: Seeking Congruence and Enabling Divergence
Asa Calow, MadLab - contributor
Asa Calow is also a major contributor to Emergent Histories - a book written by Congruence Engine researchers - which looks at how digital techniques (including AI) can connect with collections held in museums and archives across the UK. (Published 2025 by UCL Press)