The capacity to make strong connections between historical objects and sources lies at the heart of this project as it does in the everyday museum and historical practices that it is designed to support. Curators creating displays combine artefacts, images, audio-visual materials and histories. Family and local historians connect records of ancestors and localities to establish their genealogy or to understand the past of where they live. Academic historians patiently and critically connect a diverse range of archive sources with existing literature to tell new stories about the past. All rely on connecting different fragments of the past as they create the tapestries of narrative that constitute our local and national histories. The Congruence Engine will create the prototype of a digital toolbox for everyone fascinated by the past to connect an unprecedented range of items from the nation's collection to tell the stories about our industrial past that they want to tell. Until now, we have become acclimatised to a world of research where it has only been possible to work with a selection of the potentially relevant historical source material for any historical investigation we want to undertake. And now, in our information society, we expect to go to a search engine and find a record of anything. But so often such searches disappoint, and for two main reasons. First because the tyranny of the free-text search where ranked results lists favour the results of previous searches, and cannot be guaranteed to include the full set of what is relevant to the search. The second reason is that the records of so very many of our heritage collections are thin, inconsistent, or kept in institutional siloes hidden from outside access. This project explicitly works with these collections that are generally represented by weak data. In place of the two-dimensional ranked list of search engines, we aim, with 'The Congruence Engine', to model a world in which users will be able to explore data neighbourhoods (technically 'knowledge graphs') where a great diversity of information about heritage items that are deeply relevant to their investigations will be readily to hand - museum objects, archive documents, pictures, films, buildings, and the records of previous investigations and relevant activity. Building on the successful experimentation of 'Heritage Connector' (the Science Museum's TaNC foundation project), this major project will develop a repertoire of prototype discovery tools to access the industrial and related collections brought into the study from our investigating and collaborating organisations and partners. To achieve this breakthrough in collections accessibility, it will bring together in collaboration a unique combination of skills and interests. Here, digital researchers will work with professional and community historians and curators to address real-world historical investigations of Britain's industrial past. Through 27 months of iterative exploration of three industrial sectors - textiles, energy and communications - the digital researchers will work with the historians and curators, tuning the software to make it responsive to user needs. They will responsively use computational and artificial intelligence techniques - including machine learning and natural language processing (specifically, eg, named entity recognition) and a suite of bespoke entity-linking routines - to create and refine datasets, provide routes between records and digital objects such as scans and photographs, and create the tools by which the participants - who will not need to be digital experts - will be able to enjoy and employ the sources that are opened to them in the construction of narratives. These narratives will be expressed in the project's mobile digital exhibition space, on its website and a variety of conventional popular and academic outputs. Software will be made available via GitHub; we will produce 'how to' guides.

London is a complex environment for Knowledge Exchange and cultural and creative interactions. It faces distinctive challenges as it attempts to sustain global competiveness in the Creative Economy, particularly in terms of digital innovation. Creativeworks London builds on the London Centre for Arts and Cultural Exchange (LCACE), a seven year partnership of nine London-based Higher Education Institutions: Birkbeck College, City University, the Courtauld Institute, Goldsmiths College, Guildhall, King's College London, Queen Mary University of London, Royal Holloway and University of the Arts. We will be joined by smaller specialist organisations such as the University of London's Centre for Creative Collaboration, Central School of Speech and Drama, Roehampton, SOAS, Kingston and Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance and by major cultural organisations such as the BBC, the British Museum,the V&A and the British Library. We will be liaising with the London Mayor's office and the Tech City Investment Company (part of UK Trade and Investment), and UK-wide groups such as the Creative and Cultural Skills Council. We will also be working closely with industry partners, both large and small, including IBM, Playgen/ Digital Shoreditch, Mediaclarity and Bellemedia. This enables the Hub to provide a step-change in the multiple and often fragmented approaches to London's Creative Economy and to provide crucial Arts and Humanities interventions into the sector. Crucially, the Hub will also ensure that the importance of these interventions are widely recognised by business, policy-makers and government. To do so, it will undertake research into London's previous and current attempts to implement creative economy strategies; investigate the special requirements of London's digital economy and the relationship that London's audiences have between the live and the digital experience of performances and artefacts. The Hub's Knowledge Exchange programme focuses on 'Creative Vouchers' where Arts & Humanities researchers will offer a range of services (such as historical information that the Media would like to access, policy overviews, IP advice, digital solutions, alternative approaches to business models or practices) which can be accessed by SMEs. The scheme will also allow us to track the sector's changing needs, feeding back into our research into London's distinctive creative economy. There will also be a 'People Exchange Scheme' for both postgraduate researchers who want to experience industry and entrepreneurs who would benefit from a period of time within an HEI environment. The combination of excellent research and innovative KE will ensure that Creativeworks London provides a strategic overview and network support. This will be essential if London, and hence the UK, is to cultivate entrepreneurial capacity and facilitate new routes to markets in inter-related fields such as digital media, music, fashion and the visual arts.

More and more government data are created in digital form. Emails have replaced letters, PDFs and Word documents have replaced paper memos, and audio/visual files are stored in governmental internal archives and in various systems. Yet just a small proportion of these data is transferred to The National Archives and other archival repositories for long-term preservation, access and use. The LUSTRE project aims to unlock these data by connecting government professionals with Computer Scientists, Digital Humanists and archivists in cultural heritage organisations. It will focus on the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to digital archival records in order to make them more accessible. Indeed, AI can be used for sensitivity review (i.e., to identify sensitive documents in a mass of data), making it possible to release records that are not confidential. AI can also be used to search vast amounts of data. But it is crucial to avoid biases in the selection and processing of data, which could discriminate against certain groups and even impact the collective memory. This requires policy makers to engage with algorithms rather than treating AI as a "black box." The problem of inaccessible governmental records has become particularly acute following the digital revolution. Rigorous filing systems used to organise paper records. However, these systems are not well adapted to the digital age. In 2017, the report Better Information for Better Government (co-authored by the Cabinet Office and The National Archives) identified issues with the management of born-digital records within government - including poorly organised records, scattered across different systems and almost impossible to search effectively. This lack of organisation leads to difficulties in finding information and giving access to records that users need. The scale of born-digital records also makes it extremely complicated to search for information, particularly when data are scattered on multiple devices and systems. These data could contain confidential and sensitive materials, including materials that could potentially be useful to terrorists and other adversaries. In order to limit risk, data is often locked away and inaccessible to users - including historians, social scientists, journalists and third sector professionals. Archives are meant to be used, not locked away. Inaccessible government records lead to a lack of accountability in the short term, and risk impacting the cultural memory in the long term. How can we improve access to government archival records in digital form? The LUSTRE project aims to unlock these data by delivering the following outputs: _4 lunchtime talks at the Cabinet Office; _a total of 4 face-to-face workshops, including three workshops in London (Cabinet Office and Science Museum) and one workshop in Belfast (hosted by Public Records Office of Northern Ireland); _online survey and 50 semi-structured interviews; _open-access report and journal special issue, including one article co-authored by the PI and postdoc; _cross-sector network on born-digital archives, connecting government professionals with academics and GLAM professionals. A website, associated social media, and a dedicated LUSTRE list-serv will help us connect with interested parties - in government, academia, archival institutions and beyond.

This project is about government and the way it emerged and developed in the middle ages. Government as we would think of it today can first be recognised in western Europe during the twelfth century. But was it the natural result of increasing royal power and authority; or was it a response of kings to disorder? Understanding the emergence of medieval government has to be based on understanding the main source of evidence - charters - and it is in the twelfth century that charters begin to survive in large numbers. This project's new approach is to focus on understanding and interpreting the most distinctive features of charters -the appearance of their handwriting and the formulaic aspects of their prose. Charters are artefacts of authority: the content of their text and the style of their script is significant for understanding the authority they embody. But charters are not only artefacts of authority; they acted as models of authority too. Seeing how royal charters served as models for non-royal ones is important if we want to examine the emergence of government and the role of kingship in its development. The handwriting and prose of charters are a huge untapped resource for tracking the increasing profile of kingship as a source of social authority in relation to the growth of government. It would be a mistake to assume that this was simply a 'top down' process. Scribes were usually guided in their work by styles of handwriting and prose. At the beginning of this period there was a lot of variation in how charters were written. Later, non-royal scribes chose more and more to follow the evolving and increasingly innovative style of royal scribes. In Scotland this was not because royal administration was growing rapidly: unlike England, royal bureaucracy was limited. It was, instead, because royal charters were being adopted as a model of authority by non-royal scribes. This aspect has not been investigated before, in Scotland or elsewhere. It offers a new way to investigate the emergence of government, one that can allow us to see this process from the perspective of non-royal scribes. Digital images of a large number of original charters from Scotland will act as our case-study. Scotland is best placed to be the case-study because of its unparalleled corpus of digital images of charters from a range of medieval archives. It is a corpus small enough to be manageable but large enough for the analysis of their handwriting and prose to give significant results. Such research is now possible because new tools for the digital analysis of medieval handwriting have been pioneered in the DigiPal project by Co-I Peter Stokes. DigiPal has an online framework for analysing early medieval English bookhand by linking portions of images of handwriting to structured information about the text, context, and handwriting itself. 'Models of Authority' will break fresh ground by investigating how the DigiPal tools can be adapted in the fundamentally different environment of cursive writing, where letter-forms are inherently less stable and linked to other letters. Instead of analysing letter-forms individually, they will be investigated in the context of words and groups of words. We shall then be able not only to identify details that are shared in many charters, and when and where they were used, but also to establish how far they correlate with a specific situation. We should then be able to see how far the emergence of government was anticipated by an increasing emphasis on royal models in non-royal charters, and investigate the contexts in which this first occurred. The contexts in which non-royal scribes were prone to mimicking royal scribes are unlikely to be unique to Scotland. If the profile of kingship as a model in charters could grow in Scotland, where royal administration developed late, then we can ask whether the emergence of government elsewhere might have been as much, or more, 'bottom up' than 'top down'.

This research cluster will bring together a team of key professionals, academic researchers representing AHRC/EPSRC disciplines as well as heritage practitioners to appraise the costs and risks of current environmental guidelines for cultural heritage in response to a changing climate. This theme has a national and international dimension since climate change, energy consumption, visitation and pressures for greater access to collections will continue to make considerable demand on cultural heritage in the 21st century globally. The scale and pace of these changes are posing unique challenges to managing the long-term preservation of material culture and are the focus of discussion amongst professional communities both nationally and internationally.This research cluster will inform this debate.\n\nCurrent environmental parameters and tolerances set out in national and international guidelines and standards as well as Governmental Sustainable Development Targets play a critical role in shaping practices in the cultural heritage sector such as building construction, and environmental management. This includes the control of temperature, moisture, light and pollution - the main factors affecting the conservation of material culture. Environmental guidelines impact significantly on how collections are stored, accessed, loaned and displayed. \n\nEqually, the cultural heritage sector is not immune from the challenges posed by global responsibility: reducing reliance on fossil fuels, changing behaviours in favour of re-use and alternative energy sources, for example. It is within this context the appropriateness of current environmental guidelines designed to meet an agreed standard for managing material culture change, enable visitors to access and experience collections to a seasonal standard of comfort, and provide access to collections both locally and internationally is being questioned as the 'costs' of this are being realised. Unfortunately, there are no easy or headline-grabbing answers to this problem: the risks need to be identified, the costs understood, the options appraised. \n\nEGOR will provide the necessary framework to develop thinking in this area in order to realise an intellectual step change in understanding the risks and uncertainties of current environmental guidelines, standards and targets in a changing climate. Consideration will be largely focused on indoor environments, collections and the people who engage with and work in the cultural heritage arena, and will build on foundations established by other research projects e.g. Noah's Ark (EU), Engineering our Futures (EPSRC), Living with Environmental Change (NERC) largely focused on climate impacts outdoors. This will be achieved through 5 sequential activities: \n1. An inaugural meeting of the steering group which includes professional leaders, and named investigators to shape thinking and initiate cross fertilisation of ideas and perspectives;\n2. 3 working group meetings comprising specialists in art history, engineering, material science and conservation for coherent discussion, and lively debate to understand the implication for current environmental guidelines in a changing climate for people, their values and history, buildings housing collections (often historic structures themselves) and collections. The implications will be considered against a background of global responsibility.\n3. A two-day residential event will conclude this investigative process; the three working groups will present their findings, areas of convergence and divergence will be further debated to determine the risks and uncertainties surrounding environmental guidelines and standards in a changing climate, and the outstanding research needed to fully inform this debate.\n\nA summary of the challenges and user-led research emerging within this theme will be reached at the end of the meeting and presented at the Programme conference in July 2009.