Transcript

Old Bailey Proceedings Online

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Michael Pidd,Humanities Research Institute

What is the Old Bailey Proceedings Online?

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The descriptive accounts of 197,745 criminal trials held at the Old Bailey from 1674-1913..An online, fully searchable edition which includes digitised images of the original documents.

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An online, fully searchable edition which includes digitised images of the original documents.

A flagship digital humanities project funded by the AHRC and directed by Prof. Robert Shoemaker and Prof. Tim Hitchcock.

A collaboration between the History Dept at Sheffield, the University of Hertfordshire, the Open University and the technical development team at HRI Digital.

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What you can do with Old Bailey Online?

Browse or search the trials by keyword, date, person name, place name, crime, verdict, punishment ...

For example: Find me everyone called “Watson” who was found guilty of coining offences.

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What you can do with Old Bailey OnlineView images of the original pages.

Perform statistical searches and have the results presented as charts or graphs.

Obtain background information and contribute to the Schools Wiki which provides resources for students.

Graph showing trends in punishment, 1674-1913

Old Bailey Online – vital statistics190,000 pages of text, approx. 38 million words.

Eight years of data development.

15 million visits since 2003 and currently 6,000 visits per day.

15 million page views in a single month during a recent re-launch.

People access the site from all over the globe, 24/7. We cannot switch it off without annoying somebody, somewhere.

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Academic and professional historians.

Family historians and professional genealogists.

Undergraduates, postgraduate researchers and schools.

Legal professionals seeking historical precedent.

The curious public.

Who uses Old Bailey Online?

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The documents were digitised and converted to computer text (OCR) by the Higher Education Digitisation Service.

Content was ‘tagged’ to make it easy to search and software created by HRI Digital helped to identify items of content.

Lots of technical design, development and testing. Lots of testing!

How Old Bailey Online was created

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Knowledge exchange opportunities with other organisations and commercial bodies.

License requests from online, commercial publishers to incorporate the data within forthcoming products.

Development of new technologies and methodologies.

Impact of Old Bailey Online

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Where next?More free, online historical resources are becoming available.

We are learning more about the use and potential use of the online research environment and asking questions about it:

How do different resources link together (i.e. ‘mash up’)?

What tools are needed to best exploit this wealth of data?

How do we sustain these resources over the long term, technologically and economically?

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