Authorship and Credit Statement

This is not an edited collection but a co-authored book by the ‘Living with Machines Team’. All members of the team who contributed to the writing of this book are listed in full on the title page. The cover bears the additional names of Ruth Ahnert, Emma Griffin and Jon Lawrence to acknowledge their editorial labour, shaping and overseeing the delivery of the book as a whole. However, the book is a larger collective effort, which emerges from a five-year project, Living with Machines (2018-2023), which was funded by UK Research and Innovation’s Strategic Priorities Fund, and delivered by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The book therefore sits atop a huge quantity of shared thought and labour that is hard to acknowledge in a standard model of authorship. The project team collaboratively and iteratively co-created every dimension of this project: its values of collaboration, the ways of working, the methods, and the intellectual questions and ambitions on which we set our sights. As such, the book has been shaped by all 46 members and formal collaborators that passed through during the project’s five-year duration, even if they do not appear as authors. For this reason we list all members of the project below.

A little more should be said, however, about how we have chosen to credit labour in the individual chapters. Crediting a collective endeavour is complex. We might look to The Multigraph Collective as a comparison. The Multigraph Collective is a team of twenty-two scholars at sixteen universities in Canada, the US, and the UK. In the book that they co-authored, the use of their collective name acts to share credit equally amongst its members.^[1] But a collective name can also obscure the identities of its members (sometimes intentionally as with the Xenofeminist collective Laboria Cuboniks, before the members ultimately identified themselves),^[2] and also obscure the size and nature of contributions. In some intellectual collaborations this might not matter: in the case of the Multigraph Collective, they describe their writing process, how each person contributed text (roughly amounting to a third of a chapter) and how these were then ‘winnowed’ and ‘grafted’ together into a coherent and multi-faceted text.^[3] However, what’s important to note is that their contributions were all of one kind: thinking and writing. The difference with our project is that the contributions are of very different kinds, because of the highly interdisciplinary nature of the work. These vary from ensuring we have the rights to access particular datasets, to the ingest and wrangling of data, the design of databases and data structure, the development of new analytical methods, the parsing of results, the contextualising of those results within historical context, and the construction of all this work into the texts of the chapters. We believe that all these types of labour deserve credit, and that the best way to do this is to be transparent about whose labour went where. This is also important because there are radically different conventions for crediting intellectual labour across the multiple disciplinary and professional cultures that the Living with Machines team represents. Moreover, this kind of accountability is important to those collaborators who may need to evidence their contributions, such as, for example, people earlier in their careers who are building their CVs.

This is the reason that our author lists on each chapter are longer than is the norm in history publications, or indeed those in many other humanities disciplines. Our general policy as a team is that all parts of the research workflow should be credited through either citation or an author credit.^[4] In practice this means that if there is an earlier publication by some members of the team that reports on a prior part of that workflow, this can be cited, and the result may be a shorter author list for the current publication. However, if there is no prior publication, all those who contributed (at whatever stage) will be named as authors.

We also seek to describe accurately the different types of contribution. Following the common practice in the sciences, we denote lead authorship by placing that author in first (or joint-first) place in the author-list for each chapter. However, we also wanted to make clear what kind of work that leadership denotes, as well as the size and kind of contribution of the other authors. As such we accompany our chapters with a statement of contribution. This is now standard in some journals, and even where it is not required, such transparency is often provided, for instance, in a first footnote. Chapters use either this format or another that we experimented with on the project: a ‘film-credit’ style cover page (previously added to the preprint of a publication deposited on the Arxiv repository).^[5] The cover sheet employed a version of the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy), which is a high-level taxonomy comprising fourteen roles that can be used to represent the labour typically contributed by contributors to research outputs.^[6] In our hands these became eleven roles: conceptualisation, data curation, methodology, implementation, reproducibility, interpretation, historical analysis, annotation, writing and editing, supervision, and project management. Some of these were adapted: there is no ‘historical analysis’ in the CRediT taxonomy, and we use ‘project management’ to denote the process of guiding an individual publication from inception to completion.

We also made the strategic decision to drop the category of ‘funding acquisition, so that the Principal Investigator (PI) and co-investigators were not automatically authors on all publications. This was the right decision for us in this particular context, but it is not necessarily one that works for other fields or even other digital humanities projects. Moreover, it is a decision that shows the difficulty of drawing lines around what labour does or does not count. It does, however, follow the lead being taken by various scientific journals, which are requiring that everyone listed as an author should meet their criteria for authorship. The framing of such policies seems to be designed to ward against PIs or Lab leads automatically gaining an author credit, regardless of whether they made a substantive intellectual contribution or not. This is a practice that has become fairly standard in many scientific spaces. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors’ (ICMJE) Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals is a good example of a policy that seeks to insist on a substantive contribution. It lists four conditions for authorship credit that all authors must meet:

• Substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data, and
• Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content, and
• Final approval of the version to be published, and
• Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

We have followed a similar spirit of authorship credit in this book and on the project more generally as it seemed like the fairest and most transparent policy overall. We might think of it as inclusivity without bloat.

The one downside of where we chose to draw the line is that it elides certain forms of labour that are crucial for creating the environment necessary for research and publication, even if they do not directly contribute to a specific output. In particular, there was a whole layer of labour that was required for creating the research environment in which this book could be written, and the research on the larger project could take place. This begins with grant capture but continues with financial management, project management, supervision, strategising, internal and external reporting, steering the research vision, overseeing legal data access and legal agreements - labour that was provided by our Project Manager André Piza (and his parental leave cover Karen Cordier), project coordinator Léllé Demertzi, and Principal Investigator Ruth Ahnert (and her maternity leave cover, Emma Griffin and David Beavan), and Mia Ridge and Maja Maricevic at the British Library, only some of whom bear author credits on this book. James Hetherington, Adam Farquhar, and Giovanni Colvizza shaped the project in crucial ways at inception, and in their roles as co-investigators before their departures. James in particular introduced the wider team to software engineering research practices that materially shaped the way we worked as a team, as well as making sure that the research software engineers and data scientists were equal collaborators and not merely service providers, as they are treated on so many projects. Moreover, there are various other pieces of work provided by the research software engineers (RSEs) on the project that isn’t credited here with authorship because of its foundational function (such as early newspaper data wrangling by Sarah Gibson), because the work is not featured here (such as the work on numerous NLP pipelines and outcomes by Fede Nanni, or the work on the newspaper metadata database by Griff Rees), or because the work came earlier in the pipeline and is cited in the chapters.

In other words, in a different model of credit, our author lists could have been longer still. In recognition of this, here follows a full list of all members of the project, and formal collaborators, during the period 1 September 2018 - 31 July 2023 (later entries and departures are signalled in brackets).

• Ruth Ahnert, Principal Investigator, Queen Mary University of London.
• David Beavan, Co-Investigator (research software engineer from September 2018, Co-I from June 2019, acting joint-PI December 2021-June 2022), The Alan Turing Institute.
• Giovanni Colavizza, Co-Investigator, The Alan Turing Institute (September 2018-June 2019,), now University of Bologna.
• Adam Farquhar, Co-Investigator, British Library (September 2018-September 2019).
• Emma Griffin, Co-Investigator (acting joint-PI December 2021-June 2022), Queen Mary University of London.
• James Hetherington, Co-Investigator, The Alan Turing Institute (September 2018-January 2020), now University College London.
• Timothy Hobson, Co-Investigator (research software engineer from November 2018, Co-I from February 2020 until August 2023), The Alan Turing Institute.
• Jon Lawrence, Co-Investigator, University of Exeter.
• Maja Maricevic, Co-Investigator (Co-I from September 2019) British Library.
• Barbara McGillivray, Co-Investigator, King’s College London.
• Mia Ridge, Co-Investigator, British Library.
• Sir Alan Wilson, Co-Investigator, The Alan Turing Institute.
• Claire Austin, Rights Assurance Manager, British Library (November 2018 - July 2023).
• Kaspar Beelen, Digital Humanities Senior Research Associate, The Alan Turing Institute (February 2019-April 2023), now Institute of Advanced Studies.
• Felipe Bento, British Library Labs Technical Lead, British Library (November 2021 to April 2022)
• Mariona Coll-Ardanuy, Computational Linguistics Senior Research Associate, The Alan Turing Institute (January 2019-September 2022 and March 2023-July 2023), now Polytechnical University of Valencia.
• Paul Caton, Deputy Director of King’s Digital Lab and Senior Research Software Analyst (external collaborator February 2023), King’s College London.
• Arianna Ciula, Director of King’s Digital Lab and Senior Research Software Analyst (external collaborator, February 2023-July 2023), King’s College London.
• Karen Cordier (acting Project Manager December 2020 to March 2021), The Alan Turing Institute.
• Joel Dearden, Research Software Engineer, The Alan Turing Institute (February 2019 - July 2020 - in memoriam).
• Léllé Demertzi, Project Administrator (June 2022-July 2023), The Alan Turing Institute.
• Rosa Filgueira, Data Architect, University of Edinburgh (external collaborator January 2019 - September 2019), now University of St Andrews.
• Shalen Fu, Research Software Project Manager, King’s Digital Lab (external collaborator March-April 2023), King’s College London.
• Sarah Gibson, Research Software Engineer, The Alan Turing Institute (May 2020-May 2021), now 2i2c.
• Elliot Hall, Research Software Engineer (external collaborator February 2023) King’s College London.
• Lucy Havens (Visiting Researcher at the Alan Turing Institute, June-September 2022), University of Edinburgh.
• Luke Hare, Research Data Scientist (July 2022-July 2023), The Alan Turing Institute.
• Kasra Hosseini (Research Data Scientist, The Alan Turing Institute, April 2019 - -January 2022), Zalando Technology.
• Michael Jackson, Software Architect (external collaborator January 2019 - July 2019), University of Edinburgh.
• Amy Krause, Data Architect (external collaborator June 2019 - March 2020), University of Edinburgh.
• Christina Last, Research Data Scientist, The Alan Turing Institute (July 2021-May 2022), now Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• Sherman Lo, Research Software Engineer (August 2022-July 2023), Queen Mary University of London.
• Katherine McDonough, History Senior Research Associate, The Alan Turing Institute (March 2019-July 2023), now Lancaster University.
• Pam Mellen, Software Lab Manager, King’s Digital Lab (external collaborator November 2022-July 2023), King’s College London.
• Federico Nanni, Research Data Scientist (November 2019-May 2023) The Alan Turing Institute.
• Geoffroy Noel, Research Software Engineer (external collaborator February 2023), King’s College London.
• Nilo Pedrazzini (Research Associate in Corpus-Based Digital Humanities, January 2022-July 2023), The Alan Turing Institute.
• Tiffany Ong, Research Software Engineer (external collaborator, February-July 2023), King’s College London.
• André Piza, Research Project Manager, The Alan Turing Institute.
• Griffith Rees, Research Data Scientist (June 2022-July 2023), The Alan Turing Institute.
• Josh Rhodes, Senior Research Associate, The Alan Turing Institute (November 2020-December 2022), now Durham University.
• Yann Ryan, Curator of Digital Newspapers, British Library (external collaborator, January 2009- January 2020), now Leiden University.
• Andrew Smith, Research Data Scientist (January 2022-March 2023), The Alan Turing Institute.
• Guy Solomon, Research Associate, The Alan Turing Institute (April 2022-December 2022), now University of Glasgow.
• Giorgia Tolfo, Data and Content Manager, British Library (January 2019-February 2023), now The National Archives.
• Daniel van Strien, Digital Curator, British Library (February 2019-December 2022), now Hugging Face.
• Olivia Vane, (Digital Humanities Research Software Engineer, British Library, June 2019-November 2021), The Economist.
• Miguel Vieira, Research Software Engineering (external collaborator January-July 2023), King’s College London.
• Kalle Westerling (Research Software Engineer, British Library, January 2022-June 2023), The Alan Turing Institute.
• Daniel Wilson (History Senior Research Associate, December 2018- July 2023), The Alan Turing Institute.
• Rosie Wood, Junior Research Data Scientist (January 2023-July 2023), The Alan Turing Institute.

Thank you also to our advisory board (past and present) for their guidance and input at key stages in the project: Chair, Martin Daunton (University of Cambridge), and members Melodee Wood (Loughborough University), Adam Farquhar (independent, formerly British Library), Tessa Hauswedell (UCL), Dr James Hetherington (UCL), Edward Higgs (University of Essex), Tim Hitchcock (University of Sussex), Mary McKee (FindMyPast), Paul Meller (ex officio, AHRC), Aoife O’Connor (FindmyPast), Andrew Prescott (University of Glasgow), Tom Rodden (ex officio, DCMS), David de Roure (University of Oxford), Jon Rowe (The Alan Turing Institute/University of Birmingham), James Smithies (University of Canterbury, Australia), Alan Sudlow (ex officio, AHRC), Melissa Terras (University of Edinburgh), and Jane Winters (School of Advanced Study, University of London.

1. The Multigraph Collective, Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (University of Chicago Press, 2018). The Multigraph Collective’s members are Mark Algee-Hewitt, Angela Borchert, David Brewer, Thora Brylowe, Julia Carlson, Brian Cowan, Susan Dalton, Marie-Claude Felton, Michael Gamer, Paul Keen, Michelle Levy, Michael Macovski, Nicholas Mason, Nikola von Merveldt, Tom Mole, Andrew Piper, Dahlia Porter, Jonathan Sachs, Diana Solomon, Andrew Stauffer, Richard Taws, and Chad Wellmon. ↑

2. https://laboriacuboniks.net/. ↑

3. See Interacting with Print, Preface. ↑

4. For further discussion, see Ruth Ahnert, Emma Griffin, Mia Ridge and Giorgia Tolfo, Collaborative Historical Research in the Age of Big Data: Lessons from an Interdisciplinary Project (Cambridge University Press, 2023), chapter 4.3. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009175548. ↑

5. For discussion, see Federico Nanni’s blog-post, ‘Highlighting Authors’ Contributions and Interdisciplinary Collaborations in Living with Machines’, https://livingwithmachines.ac.uk/highlighting-authors-contributions-and-interdisciplinary-collaborations-in-living-with-machines/. ↑

6. See https://credit.niso.org/. ↑