'How did machines change accidents?'

We present a dataset of text from English-language newspaper articles that describe some sort of accident involving machinery. The articles were annotated by volunteers on the Zooniverse crowdsourcing platform between 2019 and 2023. The articles were selected from over 20 newspaper titles published between 1835 and 1920.

Researchers on the Living with Machines project wanted to understand how machinery changed everyday life in 19th-century Britain. We identified stories about accidents published in historical newspapers as a promising source of insight: the stories are immediately relatable, accidents involving machinery generated substantial newspaper coverage, and the language used to describe them could reveal a great deal about contemporary attitudes to machines, workers, blame, and responsibility. We hoped that looking at the language used to describe accidents - and how it changed over time - would provide a sense of what it was like to live through more machines appearing in workplaces, homes, streets and more.

Please be aware that some of the content in this dataset contains potentially distressing details about injuries and deaths.

Some articles from the Cotton Factory Times are in Lancashire dialect.

This dataset has three files:

• A full description of the ‘Language of Accidents’ research project, crowdsourcing annotation tasks and CSV dataset • A plain text file in comma-separated value format which contains text from original newspaper articles with information about the article source and categorisation on Zooniverse • A sample of six images of newspaper articles from a representative range of dates, titles and locations – a readme is included in the zipped file