Some of our readers may be interested in this talk by DP’s Tim Hitchcock and Juliet Lyon of the Prison Reform Trust, in London on 27 August.
Since the 18th century thousands of London’s population have lived behind bars. A myriad of terrifying gaols, lock ups, hulks, sponging houses and places of correction have been replaced by our contemporary institutions of […]
CFP: Digital Panopticon: Penal History in a Digital Age
We are delighted to announce our call for papers for the project’s Australian conference! The deadline for submissions is 30 November. We particularly encourage proposals from postgraduates, early career researchers, independent researchers, family historians and public historians. (Also, although the CFP doesn’t mention such new-fangled things, if you’d like to present at a poster session or in an alternative format to […]
Amelia Acton, a petty thief with a string of convictions
Some of Amelia’s previous convictions, 1866 (TNA PCOM 4/45/7)
Amelia Acton can be identified (with certainty) in the Old Bailey Online just once, in a trial for uttering (passing) counterfeit coin in 1854 – even though she was tried using a different name, Amelia Smith, and […]
John Camplin, a young thief transported to Tasmania
John Camplin was aged 15 when he was tried at the Old Bailey in June 1818 for stealing a watch. John’s defence in court was not terribly convincing:
I found a brooch, took it into the shop to ask if it was gold, and found the watch on the floor. I was going to knock, and the prosecutrix took me.
John was convicted […]
The Social and Spatial Worlds of Old Bailey Convicts
For my PhD I am investigating the social and spatial worlds of impoverished Old Bailey convicts to determine to what extent poverty was a cause of crime. Part of this research involves investigating whether convicts were engaging in criminal activity because they were unable to, or unwilling to obtain parish poor relief, or because parish relief was insufficient. Although the […]
Convict Tales: small stories and big data
![View near Woolwich in Kent shewing [sic] the employment of the convicts from the hulks, c. 1800. From the collections of the State Library of NSW.](http://www.dhi.ac.uk/blogs/digitalpanopticon/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2015/04/convicts_hulks_woolwich_a928944r-e1430135101689.jpg)
View near Woolwich in Kent, c. 1800. From the collections of the State Library of NSW.We’ll soon […]
Life stories and their Historians: Bridging a divide?
Most of us have at one time or another wondered about our ancestors. Even the historians whose bread and butter is the study of social, political, economic or cultural histories speculate about their own family’s part in the unfolding of the wider movements and economic changes down the ages. Many others have studied the genealogical websites, and laboured in the […]
PhD Work in Progress- Emma Watkins &The Case of George Fenby
The Case of George Fenby
You can see a video of Emma’s slides here: The Case of George Fenby
(Image courtesy of National Archives)
My PhD research explores the lives and criminal careers of convicts in the nineteenth century, specifically juveniles aged 7-14 […]
Digital Panopticon PhD Work in Progress- Aoife O’Connor
A previous blog post outlined how crime records are among the ‘most extensively digitised’ source sets. My PhD will explore the impact of this digitisation on the study of crime history.
What do I expect to measure? What is impact? Simon Tanner tells us it is not recognition, neither is it outcomes. It is change. In his Balanced Value Impact Model […]
Voices of Authority: Towards a history from below in patchwork
This post is intended to very briefly describe a project I am about halfway through – that seeks to experiment with the new permeability that digital technologies seem to make possible – to create a more usable ‘history from below’, made up of lives knowable only through small fragments of information.
