A data-driven history of the coming of the machine age in the long nineteenth century, arising from one of the largest interdisciplinary projects undertaken in the humanities.

The world’s first industrial revolution in Britain resulted in an explosion in the creation and collection of documentary sources. Living with Machines harnesses the combined power of massive digitized historical collections, from maps to census returns, newspapers, and computational analytical tools, to examine how technology altered the very fabric of human existence on a hitherto unprecedented scale.

Collaboratively written and developed through open community review, this book features an innovative open-access edition enhanced with interactive maps, datasets, visualizations, digital notebooks, and multimedia content, including video, audio, and images. Its experimental approach uses easily reproducible methods based on open-source code and linked to publicly available datasets.

Historians will find in this book a wealth of accessible material illuminating the human, social, and cultural consequences of this historical moment. For digital humanists, cultural heritage professionals, librarians, and archivists, it is a rich example of the potential and methods of making collections available for digital scholarship. At once an exploration of the extraordinary impact of technology on humanity in the age of industry and a powerful digital artifact itself, Living with Machines is an essential text at the cutting edge of digital history.