Our Criminal Past AHRC Network – third network event
Date: 31 January 2014, 10am-4.30pm
Venue: Galleries of Justice, Nottingham
Free event but registration is required: more details here.
Prof. Barry Godfrey will be talking about ‘Conceiving the Digital Panopticon’ and other DP suspects team members will almost certainly be lurking. It promises to be an enjoyable and thought-provoking day.
Would you like to work with us?
We are looking for two highly motivated individuals to join our research team on the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded Digital Transformations project, ‘The Digital Panopticon: The Global Impact of London Punishments, 1780-1925’, a collaborative project between the Universities of Liverpool, Sheffield, Oxford, Sussex, and Tasmania. …
The project will assemble large and complex bodies of criminal justice, genealogical and biometric data and use sophisticated visualisation and data-linking methodologies to map and analyse convict lives at both the collective and individual level. The project has seven research themes: Epistemologies; Voices of Authority; Penal Outcomes; Intergenerational Inequalities; Biometrics; Digital Dark Tourism; and Ethics and Digital History. In addition to a wide range of publications, project outputs include an electronic resource which will provide an integrated publicly available search engine for searching conjoined datasets containing life course data for 66,000 Londoners who experienced the two penal regimes…
As Research Associate you will undertake core duties on the project: checking the quality of archival documents which have been digitised, undertaking some manual transcription of archival documents, creating and checking semantic tags’ in electronic datasets, analysing processed data, checking the outcomes of record linkage processes, and assisting in the researching, writing up and communication of project outcomes.
The two posts are fixed-term (1 January 2014 to 30 September 2017). One is based at Sheffield (0.75 fte) and the other is based at Liverpool (1.0 fte).
Deadline for applications is 13 December 2013.
More information at jobs.ac.uk. or via Sheffield jobs website (search for ref UOS007546).
Summary information (pdf)
This is a very quick report from the Transforming Research through Digital Scholarship event at the British Library. I really liked both the BL Labs competition winners – really fascinating ideas. (Read more about one of them, the Sample Generator for Digitised Texts, at the BL Digital blog – perhaps there’ll be more about the Mixing the Library project soon.) Andrew Prescott gave a characteristically entertaining and thoughtful keynote, and Bill Thompson rounded off the event brilliantly. James Baker of the BL has posted his notes on the whole event.
It was great to learn more about the two other Digital Transformations projects – so take a look for yourselves:
Fragmented Heritage “aims to revolutionize landscape, site, and artefact analyses by bringing new transformative digital recording methods and computed analysis to fields that are traditionally labour intensive”.
Transforming Musicology “seeks to explore how emerging technologies for working with music as sound and score can transform musicology, both as an academic discipline and as a practice outside the university”.
Finally, here are my slides with notes for the DP presentation.
A showcase event for British Library Labs and AHRC Digital Transformations Projects
Monday 11th November 2013 11.45-16.00, The British Library, St Pancras, London (free, including lunch, but booking is required)
Audience: “Anyone who is interested in Digital Scholarship, research which involves the use of digital content, collections, data, particularly using digital methods for investigation.”
I’ll be attending and talking about what the Digital Panopticon project is about and what we’re hoping to achieve.
More information here. (The booking form is still open at the time of writing, although it mentions a deadline of 7 November…)
In order to facilitate a range of discussions among different groups likely to be interested in the Digital Panopticon’s themes, we have created a discussion forum using Google Groups:
https://groups.google.com/a/sheffield.ac.uk/forum/#!forum/digitalpanopticon
The purpose of the forum is to provide an informal community space and an online space for the project team and our audiences to share knowledge and learn from each other. We welcome discussion relating to any of the research themes, for example:
Joining should be straightforward (though I’m still getting used to how it works myself so I might have got something wrong: email sharon.howard@sheffield.ac.uk if you have any problems!): see the Google Groups Help for more information.
This is the first of a number of PhD studentships attached to the project, which will be spread between the Universities of Liverpool, Sheffield and Tasmania. This one is based at Sheffield.
The doctoral project will constitute an independent piece of research on a topic related to the overall project. The student will be able to use evidence and electronic resources generated by the project; attend project meetings, workshops and conferences; benefit from working closely with the investigators and Research Associates; and be given the opportunity to co-write publications. Nonetheless, in consultation with the supervisors, s/he will be given the latitude to shape their own direction of research.
Studentship Description
The studentship will investigate the social and geographical origins and destinations of men and women convicted at the Old Bailey between 1785 and 1875, in order to shed light on patterns of mobility and understandings of identity in early industrial Britain. Using evidence of origins from convict registers and social/occupational and place labels in the Proceedings, the project will trace convicts from their places of origin through residence and work in London before their arrests, to places of imprisonment and subsequent life histories. Analysis of the language they used in trial testimonies will provide an indication of how identities were shaped by complex backgrounds.
The studentship will cover full UK/EU fees and a maintenance grant, to commence in February 2014.
Application deadline: 2 December 2013, with interviews in December or early January.
Any academic enquiries should be directed to Professor Robert Shoemaker: r.shoemaker@sheffield.ac.uk.