Category Archives: Academic Work

Defendants’ voices and silences in the Old Bailey courtroom, 1781-1880

Posted on 15 September 2017 by

This is a version of the paper I gave at the Digital Panopticon launch conference at Liverpool in September 2017. In the interests of fostering reproducible research in the humanities, I’ve put all the data and R code underlying this … Continue reading →

Posted in Academic Work, Crime/Law, Digital History, Digital Panopticon, Old Bailey Online | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Remixing and Remaking Digital History: the London Lives Petitions

Posted on 14 September 2016 by

For those of you who like such things, this post explores the rationale and methodology for my work on London Lives Petitions: it’s a revised/extended version of my paper at the Digital Humanities Congress, September 2016, in the session on … Continue reading →

Posted in Academic Work, Digital History, Early Modern, London Lives Petitions, Plebeian Lives | Tagged | Leave a comment

What can you do with 10,000 petitions? Digging deeper into the data

Posted on 21 February 2016 by

The London Lives Petitions project is exploring approximately 10,000 petitions (and petitioning letters) addressed to magistrates which survive in the voluminous records of eighteenth-century London and Middlesex Sessions of the Peace which were digitised around 2008 by the London Lives … Continue reading →

Posted in Academic Work, Digital History, Early Modern, London Lives Petitions, Plebeian Lives | Tagged | 2 Comments

“And your petitioner as in duty bound shall ever pray etc”: how an 18th-century petition works

Posted on 24 January 2016 by

What does a London Lives petition look like? Well, here is a pretty typical example, from the City of London Sessions Papers (1692), in which I’ve highlighted the structural and most characteristic elements: [1] To the right honourable the Lord … Continue reading →

Posted in Academic Work, Digital History, Early Modern, London Lives Petitions, Plebeian Lives | 7 Comments

What can you do with 10,000 18th-century petitions? 1: Counting Stuff

Posted on 24 December 2015 by

Since my last post introducing the new London Lives petitions project, I’ve released a slightly updated version of the data: I added some petitions and letters I’d missed on the first sweep and removed a few documents that were either … Continue reading →

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The humble petitioners of 18th-century London

Posted on 29 November 2015 by

I’ve spent the last couple of months on a mission to find petitions in the Sessions Papers of London Lives. The outcome of that quest is just over 10,000 petitions which I’ve made available under a Creative Commons licence, with … Continue reading →

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Our Criminal Past special issue in Law, Crime and History journal

Posted on 21 March 2015 by

A very quick post to note that I have an article in this volume, based on my presentation at the first Our Criminal Past event in 2013. But there’s plenty more there for crime historians to be interested in.

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Record Linkage: project workshop and work in progress

Posted on 19 October 2014 by

We’re holding an afternoon workshop on record/data linkage in Sheffield on 4 November. The aim is to explore the challenges and rewards of applying automated nominal record linkage to large-scale historical datasets, with all their variability, fuzziness and uncertainties, but … Continue reading →

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