Where the idea behind Collatorium comes from: Ada Lovelace, the Jacquard loom, brocade — and the idea of an instrument.
Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) was a mathematician, the daughter of the poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabella Milbanke.
In 1843 she published an English translation of a paper by Luigi Menabrea on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine — a calculating machine Babbage designed but never built. She added her own Notes, lettered A to G, longer than the paper itself.
In them she saw that such a machine could work with symbols, not only numbers. Note G sets out how the engine could calculate Bernoulli numbers, and is often called the first published computer program.
In the early 1800s Joseph-Marie Jacquard built a loom that was guided by a chain of punched cards. Each card decided which warp threads were lifted, so even very complex patterns could be woven, card by card.
Babbage borrowed the punched cards for his engine. In Note A, Lovelace explains why that matters:
“…the introduction into it of the principle which Jacquard devised for regulating, by means of punched cards, the most complicated patterns in the fabrication of brocaded stuffs. … We may say most aptly, that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.”Ada Lovelace, Note A, 1843
The story of a straight line from loom to computer is a simplification: weavers made patterned cloth with their own systems long before punched cards. We use it as an image, not a history.
Lovelace also imagined the engine making music. In Note A she writes that if the relations of pitched sounds could be expressed in its terms,
“…the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”Ada Lovelace, Note A, 1843
An instrument is used — but not used up. It gives a musician sounds a voice can only approximate, the way a jazz singer scats a trombone line, and it does not replace the musician. Each makes the other more than it could be alone.
A weaver and a shuttle work the same way. The weaver's hand sends the shuttle across the loom; the shuttle carries the thread further and faster than fingers could. Collatorium asks people and AI models to work like that: each meeting the other's skills, and enhancing them.
Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia (1993) works the same way. Its scenes move back and forth between the early nineteenth century and the present day, in the same room of the same house; modern scholars try to reconstruct what happened there, and in the last scene both times share the stage. Each period changes how we see the other — as reading a page changes the network, and the network changes the page.
| On the loom | In Collatorium |
|---|---|
| Warp — the threads everything is woven through | The archive: the grounding of the work. Archives change, so each photograph is kept as a dated record, and Collatorium never alters it |
| Ground — the base cloth | The foundational AI model's first reading |
| Weft — threads added where needed | Supplemental AI models, called in where a reading is in doubt |
| Weavers — who choose the pattern | Your team: people decide |
| The back of the cloth | The record: every reading, ruling and check |
| The shuttle — sent across by the weaver's hand | The AI, carrying the work further where people send it; and the back and forth between transcribing and viewing |
| The pattern | The checked text, and the history it connects to |
Not master and servant, and not replacement: machine and people meet each other's skills, and the cloth needs every thread.
A warp is held taut while the cloth is woven, but an archive is not fixed. Collections grow as new papers are found and given; they are reordered and recatalogued; paper fades, tears and decays. Collatorium treats each photograph as a record of the page at one moment — dated, kept, never altered — so that later photographs, new finds and new readings can be woven in beside it, and the changes themselves become part of the record.
Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (London: Faber and Faber, 1993).
L. F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage”, translated with notes by A.A.L. [Ada Lovelace], Scientific Memoirs 3 (1843): Note A — full text (Fourmilab).
“Lovelace [née Byron], (Augusta) Ada”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography — doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/37253.
Anna Elise Anderson, “Brocade Fabric, Explained”, Architectural Digest, 27 October 2023 — article.