This is the text of my keynote for the Digital Humanities Congress at the University of Sheffield, 6 September 2012.
Made
in Sheffield: Industrial Perspectives on the Digital Humanities
It is a great honour to be asked to
inaugurate this first Digital Humanities Congress at the University of
Sheffield. My connections with digital humanities at Sheffield go back to 1995
when the remarkable portfolio of projects in the Humanities Research Institute
at Sheffield caught the attention of the British Library, and I was asked as
one of the library’s curators to foster links with the pioneering work at
Sheffield. Since that time, it has been both a pleasure and an education to
watch how Sheffield has produced a stream of imaginative and forward-looking
work in the digital humanities. I’m going to suggest that the ‘little mesters’
of the Humanities Research Institute form part of a tradition of innovation in
Sheffield which reaches deep into the history of the town, but I’ll start a
long way from Sheffield, with the recent uprisings in the Middle East and North
Africa known as the Arab Spring.
An aspect of the Arab Spring which has caused
particular comment in the West has been the use by protestors of social media.
One protestor tweeted ‘We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to
coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world!’ A prominent Egyptian blogger, Wael
Ghonim, named his book on the Egyptian uprising Revolution 2.0, and declared that ‘Our revolution is like Wikipedia
… Everyone is contributing content, [but] you don’t know the names of the
people contributing the content’. Western media quickly labelled the risings in
Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere the ‘Twitter Revolutions’. It was even claimed
that an Egyptian couple named their baby ‘Facebook’. For some commentators,
these events proved that new communication technologies were a force for
democracy. Phillip Howard and Muzammil Hussain of the University of Washington
have argued that whereas in the past protest movements in this region had been
suppressed,
The Internet,
mobile phones, and social media made the difference this time. Using these
technologies, people interested in democracy could build extensive networks,
create social capital, and organize political action with a speed and on a
scale not seen before. Thanks to these technologies, virtual networks
materialized in the streets. Digital media became the tool that allowed social
movements to reach once-unachievable goals…
However, it seems that such a cyber-utopian
reading of these events is misplaced. It has been pointed that there does not
appear to be a correlation between internet penetration and the extent of Arab protests.
Thus, there were widespread protests in the Yemen, where rate of internet
penetration is low, but few protests in the Gulf States where there was greater
access to the internet. An analysis of clicks on links in tweets relating to
the protests indicates that much of the internet traffic generated by the
risings came from outside the countries affected, suggesting that the chief
role of social media was not to coordinate protests but rather to alert the
outside world to what was happening. When the internet was switched off in
Egypt, the protests actually grew in size, suggesting that social media was not
essential to the co-ordination of protests. New media did not simply supplant
traditional sources of news. Indeed, it seems that much of the impact of new
media was a result of its use as a source of information by traditional news
outlets. For example, it has been suggested that much of the mainstream media’s
coverage of events in Tunisia was derived from Tunisian Facebook pages which had
been repackaged for a blog maintained for Tunisian exiles and then passed onto
journalists via Twitter (Cottle p. 652). There appears to have been a
realignment in which old and new media remediated each other in a complex
interplay.
Anne Alexander and Miriyam Aouragh in an
important recent study have used interviews with Egyptian activists to
contextualize the role of new media in the Egyptian uprising. They describe how
activists including representatives of youth movements, workers’ groups and the
Muslim Brotherhood, met for weeks beforehand to plan the protests. Alexander
and Aouragh emphasise that ‘the Egyptian activists we interviewed rightly
reject simplistic claims that technology somehow caused the 2011 uprisings, and
they say it undermines the agency of the millions of people who participated in
the movement that brought down Hosni Mubarak’. But Alexander and Aouragh remind
us that there is also a risk of falling into the opposite trap by assuming
that, if social media did not cause the Arab Spring, then they were of no
significance. A million and half tweets from Egypt at the time of the rising suggest
this is wrong, and Alexander and Aouragh insist that we need to move away from
false polarisations and place the internet activism of the Arab Spring in the
context of wider developments in media and the public sphere. The Arab Spring saw
a profound realignment of the relationship between new and old media, in which
new media emerged as an important additional space for dissent and protest. In
past revolutions, it has often been difficult to recapture the voices of the
insurgents; social media now gives us unparalleled opportunities to explore
these textualities of revolt.
However, what I am interested in here is
the cyber-myth, the idea that Facebook and Twitter allowed the Arab protests to
succeed when previously they had easily been suppressed. This is a myth that
has gained a firm hold in the popular imagination, and it reflects a deeply
held belief that the digital revolution will not simply alter our working life
and give us new forms of leisure but will also lead to major political and
social upheaval, on a par with such great historical movements of the past as
the Reformation. This widespread belief in inexorable technological progress
has been well expressed by Michael Brodie, the Chief Scientist of Network
Technologies for Verizon, the American telecommunications company, who suggests
that we are about to see a digital revolution which will make the Reformation
or the Industrial Revolution seem low-key. Brodie declared that:
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.
There is a common assumption in the West that
changes in digital technologies will inexorably generate major transformations
in social, political and economic structures. The American business guru
Clayton Christiansen introduced in 1995 the idea that business success was
associated with the development and adoption of ‘disruptive technologies’.
Christiansen subsequently adopted the wider term ‘disruptive innovations’ to
reflect the idea that business models could also be disruptive. In coining the
term Web 2.0, Tim O’Reilly picked up on the disruptive zeitgeist and disruption
has consistently been seen as a feature of Web 2.0. The strapline for one of
the first Web 2.0 conferences in 2008 was ‘Design, Develop, Disrupt’.
New technologies of communication have been
seen as particularly disruptive and likely to produce major social and
political upheaval. Among the most influential media theorists have been the
Toronto school of Harold Innes, Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, who suggested
that major epochs in human history were marked by the appearance of new
communication media. They proposed that the shift from an oral to a literate
society was one such shift. The appearance of printing in the West is seen as
another major transformation precipitating great upheaval. In this analysis, the
impact of the printing press is a pointer towards the type of social and
cultural disruptions which will be produced by the emergence of electronic and
digital forms of communication. The idea that the printing press was a major
agent of social, religious and political change has become widely accepted as a
result of the work of Elizabeth Eisenstein. In a monumental study, Eisenstein suggested
that the role of printing had not been given sufficient weight in accounts of
the Renaissance, Reformation or Scientific Revolution and that printing was
‘the unacknowledged revolution’. Eisenstein argued that there were two major
means by which printing acted as an agent of change. First, she suggested that
print standardized texts which had been fluid during periods of oral and
manuscript circulation. This enabled knowledge to become more settled and
easily transmitted. Second, Eisenstein argued that, by making large numbers of texts
available, their contradictions and mistakes became more evident, so that readers
became more critical and sceptical of authority.
The circulation of digital information alters
once again these two key characteristics of information. Texts have perhaps ceased
to become fixed, so that it could be suggested we have reverted to the fluidity
of oral and manuscript culture. In a recent presentation at MIT, the folklorist
Tom Pettit proposed the Gutenberg thesis, ‘the idea that oral culture was in a
way interrupted by Gutenberg's invention of the printing press and the roughly
500 years of print dominance; a dominance now being challenged in many ways by
digital culture and the orality it embraces’. If Eisenstein was right, then it seems
reasonable to expect that we will shortly see new historical movements
comparable to the Renaissance and Reformation, disruptions and transformations
on a cataclysmic scale. Yet a growing number of historical bibliographers are
expressing doubts about Eisenstein’s thesis. There were states which were to
resist the printing press. The church and state ensured that the printing press
was kept out of Russia and when a press was set up in Moscow in 1564 it was
soon destroyed by a mob. The Ottoman Empire was likewise able to keep printing
at bay, with the first Turkish press only being established in the eighteenth
century. Moreover, the printing press did not kill off the manuscript. David
McKitterick has described how a manuscript of a treatise by Walter Hilton was
copied at Sheen in 1499, despite the fact that the owner of the manuscript had
a copy of the printed version of the same treatise produced by Wynkyn de Worde
five years previously. Although the production of printed gazettes flourished
in seventeenth-century England, manuscript newsletters were equally important
in the dissemination of news. Indeed, many regarded manuscript news as more
reliable than the printed version and the Duke of Newcastle warned Charles II
that the pen was actually far more dangerous than the press, since opponents
might be bolder in a letter than in print. John Donne and Andrew Marvell were
suspicious of print and believed that manuscripts might prove to be more
durable.
The survival of a mixed media economy after
Gutenberg is perhaps not surprising, but a more substantial objection to
Eisenstein’s work is that there is substantial evidence that printing did not
standardise texts. Printing was a craft activity and just like manuscript
copying there were many points in the processing of printing in which
accidents, errors and mistakes could be introduced. As David McKitterick has
pointed out:
From the 42-line
Bible onwards, thousands of books [printed in the fifteenth century] exist with
different type settings for reasons that are not always clear but that always
emanate from some adjustment found necessary in the printing house or the
binder’s bench … Of three dozen copies
surviving of Fust and Schoeffer’s Durandus
(1459), no two copies are exactly alike.
Examples of printed books which differ as
much as manuscripts can be multiplied endlessly. Famously, no two copies of
Shakespeare’s First Folio are exactly the same. William Aldus Wright compared
ten copies of the 1625 edition of Bacon’s Essays, and found that none were the
same. Wright observed that:
The cause of
these differences is not difficult to conjecture. Corrections were made while
the sheets were being printed off, and the corrected and uncorrected sheets
were afterwards bound up indiscriminately. In this way the number of different
copies might be multiplied to any extent.
In other words, it is likely that no two
copies of this edition of Bacon’s work are the same. The implications of this
for online presentation of early printed books are fundamental and have not I
believe been sufficiently discussed. Early English Books Online presents us
with images of just one copy of the 1625 edition of Bacon’s work from Cambridge
University Library, so we have no way online of investigating the other variant
copies. Far from making the text of Bacon’s work more fluid, the online
presentation destroys our awareness of the fluidity and variation of the
printed text.
The picture which emerges from historical
bibliographers such as David McKitterick, Adrian Johns and Sabrina Baron is
that Gutenberg’s introduction of the press marked one stage in the long process
of the evolution of printing. As Raymond Williams pointed out, the rise in
literacy and access to information was a long revolution in which the
appearance of the steam-driven printing press in the nineteenth century was
just as important as the work of Gutenberg. Moreover, this process was not
technologically driven. Political struggles over issues such as censorship and
taxes were just as important as technological innovation in opening up access
to printed information. As David McKitterick has pointed out: ‘the printing
revolution itself, a phrase which has been taken to heart by some historians,
was no revolution in the sense that it wrought instant change. The revolution was
part technological, and part bibliographical and social. It was prolonged, and
like many revolutions its process was irregular, and its effects were variable,
even erratic.’
The picture painted by McKitterick and
other historical bibliographers of the impact of printing recalls the
description of the Arab Spring by Anne Alexander and Miriyam Aouragh. The
process was a complex and extended one, involving the realignment and repurposing
of media rather than a simple disruptive transformation. In the light of these
types of analysis, it becomes very difficult to accept the technologically-led
disruptive model of media history proposed by the Toronto school of Innes,
McLuhan and Ong. Moreover, the Toronto school privileges technologies of
communication, which make it sound as if technologies like the printing press
dropped from the sky. The history of media reflects a much broader
technological base. Printing presses only became capable of mass production
when they began to be powered by steam engines in the early nineteenth century.
To feed the new steam-powered presses, it was necessary to devise new methods
of making paper. Even then, the new machine-made books would not have been
widely distributed without canals and railways. All these technologies were
necessary to make printed books everyday objects.
In recent discussion of disruptive
innovations, the focus is frequently on the history of the media, and
comparatively little attention is paid to one of the most disruptive moments in
Western history, the profound economic changes which began in the late
eighteenth century and are known as the Industrial and Agricultural
Revolutions. This period is conventionally taken as marking the rise of
modernity, and in a wide range of scholarly literature across many disciplines
is seen as a major watershed in human history. In contemplating the digital
revolution, it may seem as if there is little to learn from looking back to the
Industrial Revolution. The clean, hi-tech electronic world of the digital seems
utterly opposed to the smoky, muscle-driven factories of early
industrialization. The digital is frequently represented as a means of escape
from the industrial. Yet our digital world is largely a creation of many of the
key technologies of that industrial world. The development of the telegraph was
closely linked to the growth of railways, and the concept of the digital was
the creation of engineers seeking to improve the performance of telegraph
wires. One of the great icons of the Industrial Revolution, Brunel’s steamship
the Great Eastern, was used to lay
the first transatlantic cable, thereby effectively laying the foundations of
the internet. Some of the fundamental concepts behind the computer programme as
a sequence of logical instructions were developed in the 1820s from punch card
mechanisms used to control mechanical looms. Moreover, it was the machines created
by the Industrial Revolution which provided the technological infrastructure to
create computers – to create the turbines, valves, transistors, silicon,
cathode ray tubes which makes the computer one of the most sophisticated
products of Western industrialisation.
The industrialization of the late
eighteenth century was a process which first gained momentum in various regions
of Great Britain, such as South Yorkshire. There can be no better place than
Sheffield, one of the great centres of the industrial revolution, to consider
the industrial dimensions of the digital and contemplate the Industrial
Revolution as a disruptive moment. Does the Industrial Revolution, and the
associated developments of the Agricultural Revolution, have anything to teach
us in considering potential digital transformations? This was clearly a period
when technological innovation was important. It felt like a period of
transformation. Tourists travelled from Europe to admire such wonders as the
Ironbridge at Coalbrookdale and artists such as Joseph Wright and Phillip
Loutherbourg celebrated these new technologies. In works of literature such as
Thomas Love Peacock’s Headlong Hall, the rights and wrongs of the manufacturing
system were earnestly debated, with one character praising the profound
researches, scientific inventions and complicated mechanisms which had given
employment and multiplied comfort, while another denounced the innovations:
‘Wherever this boasted machinery is established, the children of the poor are
death-doomed from their cradles. Look for one moment into a cotton mill, amidst
the smell of oil, the smoke of lamps, the rattling of wheels, the dizzy and
complicated motions of diabolical mechanisms’. Wide-ranging cultural and social
transformations have been attributed to these technological changes, such as regular
working hours and standardized timekeeping.
Sheffield has an industrial tradition as a
centre of cutlery manufacture which goes back to the middle ages. It was partly
the specialized skills available in Sheffield which prompted Benjamin Huntsman
to establish himself in Sheffield to undertake his experiments in the production
of crucible steel which laid the basis of Sheffield’s steel industry. Sheffield’s
light trades remained important even after Thomas Bessemer’s inventions allowed
the production of steel in bulk from the middle of the nineteenth century. As, thanks to Bessemer, huge steel plants appeared
in the city, making rails, steel plates and armaments, the transformative
effect of the new technologies was evident in the physical fabric of the city
itself. As early as 1768, a visitor commented that ‘Sheffield is very large and
populous, but exceedingly dirty and ill paved. What makes it more disagreeable
is the excessive smoke from the great multitude of forges which the town is
crowded with’. By 1842, the social reformer Edwin Chadwick declared that
‘Sheffield is one of the dirtiest and smokiest towns I ever saw. One cannot be
long in the town without experiencing the necessary inhalation of soot…There
are however numbers of persons in Sheffield who think the smoke healthy’. The importance of industry in the history of
Sheffield in the Victorian town hall, which is surmounted by a statue of Vulcan
and incorporates statues of figures representing electricity and steam who hold
scrolls with the names of such great technological pioneers as Watt, Stephenson, Faraday and Davy.
In this Victorian view, the Industrial
Revolution was the achievement of technological genius and enterprise. If this
was indeed the case, then perhaps the digital world does have something to
learn from its industrial great-grandparents. This view still holds sway, as is
suggested by a recent comment of the Sheffield MP Nick Clegg that it was the
likes of Brunel not the bankers who made Britain great. However, since the
Great Western Railway cost 6,500,000 million pounds (over 300 million pounds in
modern value, and twice the original estimate), presumably the bankers were of
assistance in facilitating this technological revolution at some point. For
politicians, it is convenient to hope that genius and inventiveness can quickly
bring prosperity and wealth. But the history of industrialization suggests that
this process of change can be amorphous, patchy in impact and above all subject
to long timescales. Just like the printing revolution of Gutenberg, the
industrial revolution dissolves under closer examination and become very
difficult to pin down.
The term industrial revolution was not
used as a shorthand for the changes which began in Britain until the late
nineteenth century. It expressed the idea that Britain had gone through changes
at this time which comparable in scale and importance to the political
revolutions in France and Germany. Clearly something of profound importance had
happened in Britain towards the end of the eighteenth century, but economic
historians have struggled to get a clear view of the nature and structure of
the process. The period from 1760 to 1830 was characterized by a wealth of
disruptive innovation, yet most recent research suggests that economic growth during
this period was not particularly marked. It appears that productivity growth
and technological progress were confined to a few small sectors such as cotton,
wool, iron and machinery in remote regions such as south Yorkshire, whereas
much of the rest of manufacturing remained stagnant until after 1830. For some
historians, the important features of early industrialization were not so much
economic developments or technological changes as the social and cultural
changes introduced by the growth of factory working and changes in farming.
Just like the printing revolution or the Arab Spring, the Industrial Revolution
proves to closer examination to be a much more complex and amorphous process
than is suggested by the use of the word revolution.
This is vividly illustrated by the
story of industrial development in Sheffield, which has been described by such
distinguished historians from Sheffield University as Sidney Pollard and David
Hey. Like other major industrial cities such as Birmingham and Glasgow,
industrialization did not take place in Sheffield by accident. The availability
of water power had made Sheffield a centre of craft production of cutlery since
the middle ages. It was partly the availability of skill and expertise in metal
working which encouraged the scientific instrument maker Benjamin Huntsman to
move from Doncaster to Sheffield to undertake his experiments in creating
crucible steel. However, despite Huntsman’s innovation in steelmaking, the
initial industrial growth in Sheffield was in its historic light trades such as
the making of tools, cutlery and silver plate. The techniques in Sheffield’s
light trades changed very slowly. Before 1850, the only major change was the
use of steam instead of water to drive the wheels used by grinders. The light
trades remained dominated by the ‘small mesters’ who hired rooms in works with
steam-powered wheels. It was only in the 1850s that factory production and
mechanization began to be introduced in the light trades. Similarly, steel
production and heavy industry only began to dominate Sheffield from 1850, chiefly
as a result of the establishment by Henry Bessemer in 1859 of a steelworks
using his new method of bulk steel production. The creation of heavy industry
in Sheffield was a product of the third quarter of the nineteenth century.
Between 1851 and 1891, employment increased over 300% in the heavy trades,
compared with 50% in the light trades. In 1851, less than a quarter of the
workers in the city were employed in heavy industry; by 1891, two thirds of the
city’s workers worked in heavy industry.
We assume that new digital technologies
will very rapidly bring major cultural and social transformations in their
wake, but the lessons of industrialization suggest that the process may be
longer and more complex than we generally imagine. Huntsman first produced
crucible steel in the 1740s and steam power arrived in the city in 1786, yet it
took nearly a hundred years for Sheffield to become a steel city. The history
of industrialization suggests that the process of digital transformation may be
both more extended and more complex than is often assumed. The model of disruptive
innovation is not a helpful way of imaging the process of industrialization. It
was actually the ability of industrialization not to disrupt but instead to support
sustained change which was important. In Joel Mokyr’s words, ‘The Industrial
Revolution was “revolutionary” because the technological progress it witnessed
and the subsequent transformation of the economy were not ephemeral events and
moved society to a permanent different
economic trajectory’. (p. 3) If industrialization is seen in this way, as a
sustained trajectory of economic change, it is a process which still continues,
and the digital world can simply be seen as an extension of a process which
began in the eighteenth century. Indeed, this continuity can be seen as
stretching further back. As we have noted, Sheffield’s growth reflected skills
developed since the Middle Ages, and such long-standing commercial traditions
fed into the early development of industrialisation.
The Industrial Revolution suggests that
the model of disruption and transformation we use in thinking about the digital
world may be over-simplistic. Are there other ways in which thinking about
industrialization can help us in understanding the digital world? I would like
to suggest that there are. In thinking about the digital humanities, we tend to
focus our attention on tools and methods, but it is striking that in cities
like Sheffield and Birmingham at the time of industrialization, tools and
working methods often did not greatly change, but environment did. Sidney
Pollard has pointed out how ‘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’. Yet, as Pollard emphasized, the
environment in which these workmen operated had been completely transformed.
Their wheels were now powered by steam and there were other gadgets which
speeded up minor operations such as stamping and cutting. The workshop might be
lit by gas and have a water supply. Railways made distribution easier and
cheaper and gave access to a larger labour market. Cheap printing would assist
in advertising products. While the ‘small mester’ may have been working in an old-fashioned
way, his environment had been completed transformed. Likewise, it may be that
the most important changes in the digital humanities will be in the environment
in which researchers into the humanities operate, and we should perhaps be
giving more attention to this.
The fascination of the digital lies in
its immense variety: 3D printing, multispectral imaging, mobile technologies,
RFID: these all have their part to play in humanities scholarship as well as more
familiar methods as linked data, geo-spatial visualisations, text encoding and
many others. This need for a pluralistic outlook in dealing with the digital is
one that is reinforced by the history of industrialization. While developments
such as steam, telegraph and steelmaking were important, they only formed a
part of an enormous spectrum of technological developments. It is striking how the
interests of such celebrated figures of the Industrial Revolution as James Watt
were very wide. Watt was as preoccupied with the making of musical instruments
or the copying of sculpture as he was in the application of steam power.
Likewise, among Thomas Bessemer’s inventions were an early type-composing
machine, new methods of making pencils, machines for making plate glass and an
(unsuccessful) ship to avoid seasickness, as well as his new method of steel
manufacture. The examples of men like
Watt and Bessemer remind us of the importance of an eclectic approach to the
digital humanities, of embracing an approach that affirms that there is no
single answer, no single piece of kit or method which will unlock the digital
humanities. Digital transformations will involve a variety of
approaches, embracing both risky short-term
experimentation and support for sustainability, embracing both mash-ups
made in bedrooms and experiments with synchrotrons, as
well as digital art works and huge
quantitative visualisations. The digital humanities will not only be a critical
and theoretical debate but will also code.
It encompasses both data and materiality.
While we tend to associate the
Industrial Revolution with such major inventions as the steam engine, a key
driver of industrialization was the small improvement or adjustment – tinkering
with and progressively improving technology. The first steam engine was built
by Thomas Newcomen at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Watt’s invention
of the separate steam condenser was a microinvention which made steam power
economically viable. Watt’s low pressure steam engine was not suitable for locomotives,
and it was further refinements by many others which eventually made a high
pressure steam engine practicable. It is tempting to assume that economic
transformation is associated with the paradigm shifting macroinvention, but
this is not necessarily the case. Two of the great macroinventions of the
eighteenth century, the hot air balloon and the smallpox vaccine, had limited
economic impact, whereas Henry Cort’s invention of puddling and rolling was
technically modest, but by allowing the production of wrought iron had enormous
economic impact. We are regularly urged by research councils and others to
deliver the macro-invention, to demonstrate the paradigm shift. Yet the history
of industrialization suggests that the small improvement, the micro-invention,
can be more important. Moreover, it is perhaps precisely this kind of
micro-improvement that the digital humanities is particularly well placed to
deliver.
Some of the technical developments of the
Industrial Revolution were linked to new scientific theories. Watt’s separate
condenser was influenced by the theory of latent heat proposed by Watt’s mentor
at the University of Glasgow, Joseph Black. However, for the most part, as Joel
Mokyr has observed, ‘The inventions that set the British changes in motion were
largely the result of mechanical intuition and dexterity, the product of
technically brilliant but basically empirical tinkerers, or ‘technical
designers’’ (p. 75). The late eighteenth century was a period of scientific and
technological ferment, but this took place outside any formal academic
structure. This is illustrated again by James Watt in Glasgow. James Watt is
one of the outstanding names associated with the University of Glasgow, but he
was never a member of the University’s academic staff. He was employed to
repair scientific instruments. It was in the process of repairing a model of a
steam engine owned by the University that Watt hit on the idea of a separate
condenser. Although Watt wasn’t a lecturer but a mere craftsman, his workshop
became the intellectual hub of the University. His friend John Robison, who afterwards became
Professor of Chemistry at Glasgow, recalled how: ‘All the young lads of our
little place that were any way remarkable for scientific predilection were
acquaintances of Mr Watt; and his parlour was a rendezvous for all of his
description. Whenever any puzzle came in the way of any of us, we went to Mr
Watt. He needed only to be prompted; everything became to him the beginning of
a new and serious study; and we knew that he would not quit it till he had
either discovered its insignificance, or had made something of it’.
Watt was not exceptional. In Sheffield,
Benjamin Huntsman was also a scientific instrument maker. Sheffield plating was
accidentally discovered in 1743 by a Sheffield cutler Thomas Boulsover while
repairing a customer’s knife. Henry Bessemer received only elementary
schooling, preferring to gain practical experience in his father’s type
foundry. When Bessemer was invited to describe his steel process to the British
Association, he protested that he had ‘never written or read a paper to a
learned society’. Stainless steel was developed in Sheffield in 1913 not in the
University but in the research laboratory of the steel firms Firth and Brown by
Harry Brearley, a self-taught metallurgist who had never received any formal
education. One of the great challenges which digital technologies present us is
the need also to develop spaces which allow theory, making and tinkering to collide
– a digital equivalent of Watt’s workshop at Glasgow. Ideally, this would be
precisely what a digital humanities centre should be like, but sadly we have
rarely achieved this. The pressure of university funding structures means that
most digital humanities centres are soft-funded and are on a treadmill of
project funding which restricts the ability to act as centres for innovative
thinking. Moreover, in Britain at least, universities are increasingly making a
stronger distinction between academic and professional staff. This is without
doubt a retrograde development, but the political and administrative drivers
behind it are formidable. In this context, it is difficult to see how digital
humanities centres can become more like Watt’s workshop or Harry Brearley’s
laboratory at Firth and Brown, yet I think we must try.
Such new spaces of making and
collaboration of course need not necessarily be physical spaces, but they must
embrace different skills, outlooks and conversations. We need to create spaces
which would embrace the digital equivalent of a James Watt or a Harry Brearley.
The creation of such spaces was a fundamental feature of early
industrialization. Economic historians are increasingly emphasizing the role of
social capital as fundamental to understanding early British industrialization.
Historians have frequently been puzzled as to why the first industrialization
occurred in Britain. There were other more technologically advanced countries
such as France. It seems that an important part of the reason for Britain’s
early lead was that it had social structures which facilitated the spread of
ideas and the making of contacts and partnerships. The multitude of clubs and
societies in eighteenth-century Britain helped spread expertise and encourage
new enterprises. A celebrated example is the Lunar Society, based in the West
Midlands, which include many of the mos famous names of the period such as
Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin. Such
friendships were vital to the new enterprises. Watt had struggled to develop
his team engine in Glasgow, but Boulton in Birmingham had access to the
necessary precision craftsmanship which allowed the successful manufacture of
steam engines. Moreover, while the specializations of the Lunar Society were
distinct, their fascinations overlapped tremendously--so they were able to
support each other's ideas and endeavors well outside their own field proper in
a kind of early inter-disciplinarity. The Lunar Society was not exceptional.
Britain contained hundreds of philosophical clubs, masonic lodges and
statistical societies which were essential in encouraging that hands-on,
tinkering culture which encouraged early industrialization.
We may feel that in learned societies
like ALLC or ADHO we have the equivalent of a Lunar Society in digital
humanities. But the model of something like ALLC is that of a
nineteenth-century learned society, and the Lunar Society was more flexible and
informal than that. Bodies like the ALLC or ADHO are designed to affirm the
respectability and seriousness of their members, to show that they are worthy
professional people. But the informal, drunken societies of the eighteenth
century show the value of using much looser and informal arrangements to
generate social capital. We need to think about how we can recreate that kind
of eighteenth century social excitement in the digital sphere. What is
particularly important about these eighteenth century clubs is that they
operated a particularly big tent. There was not set view in the eighteenth
century as to whether the engineer or the money man should take the lead. It
has been suggested that the key skill was ‘to identify a need or opportunity,
then cooperate with others who possessed a different skill to take advantage of
it’. This description of the skills
necessary for success in the eighteenth century is, I would suggest, equally
applicable to the digital world. However, in the eighteenth century this also involved
an appetite for risk. Watt was constantly terrified by what he saw as Boulton’s
imprudence. Two of the greatest engineers and entrepreneurs of the Industrial
Revolution, Richard Trevithick and
Richard Roberts, died penniless. I wonder whether, in the dot.com age, we have
the same appetite for risk.
But what is particularly striking about
industrialization is the passion for making. John Robison described how for
James Watt, ‘everything
became to him the beginning of a new and serious study; and we knew that he
would not quit it till he had either discovered its insignificance, or had made
something of it. No matter in what line – languages, antiquity, natural
history, - nay, poetry, criticism, and works of taste; as to anything in the
line of engineering, whether civil or military, he was at home, and a ready
instructor’. According to Robison when Watt was asked to repair the University
of Glasgow’s model steam engine, it was ‘at first a fine plaything to Mr Watt…But
like everything which came into his hands, it soon became an object of most
serious study’. The mixture of play, tinkering, science and hands-on
experimentation is the most powerful legacy of the Industrial Revolution and it
is in that art of making, that materiality, that perhaps the most potent legacy
of industrialization lies.
For
Watt and the others, this making was an aspect of data. One of Watt’s earliest
inventions was a perspective machine to assist artists. One great contribution
of the Soho Manufactory was the production of the first precise slide rules,
essential to calculate boiler pressures. Watt envisaged the production of a
mechanical calculating machine, but felt that the engineering techniques of the
time could not produce sufficiently precise parts – a problem that Babbage was
later to encounter. Towards the end of
his life, Watt became preoccupied with developing a sculpture copying machine
and his workshop was littered with busts and casts associated with this
project. The creation of this machine required both accurate data and methods
to make the sculpture – as a mixture of issues of data and making, it was very
characteristic of the Industrial Revolution. When the contents of Watt’s
workshop were recently moved into a new display at the Science Museum, a mould
of an unknown bust was found there. It was realized that the mould could be
imaged and the resulting 3d model could be used to print out the bust. The work
was done by a team from Geomatic Engineering at UCL, and when the bust was
printed, it was found to be a previously unknown bust of James Watt (For more on this, see: www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/9892)
This
exercise seems to me to bring the story full circle, and the way in which new
methods of fabrication are giving use new approaches to data seems to me to
bring the story full circle. Industrialisation and making will, it seems to me,
become more pertinent than ever as digital fabrication becomes increasingly
important. I’d like to conclude my lecture by quickly sharing with you some
video clips that seem to me to make this point very well. The first is a news
report on an exhibition last year at the V&A called, appropriately enough,
Industrial Revolution 2.0:
From
this it is a short step to using fabrication machines to replicate objects in
museums, and this clip shows the Makerbot, an affordable 3d fabricator, used to
replicate objects in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. I hardly need to point
out the parallekls with James Watts’s sculpture copying machine:
The
Makerbot was recently used for a hackathon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York in which artists used fabrications of objects in the Museum’s
collection to create new works of art. Here’s a short glimpse of the evenr in
Bew York in June:
It
is striking how in these clips there are frequent references to revolutions and
disruptions. What I think we have seen is that in fact these new methods echo
deeper continuities. The Arab Spring, the arrival of printing and the
Industrial Revolution all show us how change is not necessarily revolutionary
or disruptive. The processes we think of as revolutionary can be lengthy, patchy
in character, amorphous, difficult to measure and unpredictable, and there is
no reason to think that the digital will be any different. It’s the
continuities and the parallels that are often as striking as the disruptions.
Let me end with one last quick clip which shows the Fab Lab in Manchester which
to my mind inescapably recalls James Watts’s workshop in Glasgow, and points us
towards one digital space of the future which is deeply rooted in the past:
