Category Archives: Themes

Why collect personal information about criminals if it is not going to be used?

The reason the Digital Panopticon project is able to trace the lives of convicts in such detail is the growing tendency of British local government to collect information about the lives and personal characteristics of criminals.  From the late eighteenth century, and culminating in the registers mandated by the Habitual Criminals Act of 1869, information about places of origin, occupation, physical features, literacy, religion, previous offences, and behaviour while in prison was increasingly collected, leading to entries in the Habitual Criminals Register such as the following:

TNA MEPO 6/5

TNA, MEPO 6/5 (1893), reproduced from David Hawkings, Criminal Ancestors: A Guide to the Historical Criminal Records in England and Wales (Stroud, 2009), p. 164.

We can trace the origins of these registers back to the detailed evidence about accused and convicted criminals kept by Justice of the Peace John Fielding in London from the 1750s to the 1770s (which were destroyed in the 1780 Gordon Riots), and the Criminal Registers, kept first by the City of London and then by the Home Office from 1791, which recorded information about those committed to Newgate Prison in London.

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Home Office, Criminal Registers of Prisoners in Middlesex and the City, September 1791-1792, London Lives, 1690-1800, NAHOCR700050004 (www.londonlives.org, version 1.1, 12 December 2014), National Archives, Ms HO 26/1

For example, the last line of this table is about Benjamin Edmondson, committed in September 1791, ‘aged 16, born in Rosemary Lane, 5 feet 10 [inches tall], sallow complexion, short brown hair, by trade a rope maker’.  Accused of stealing a pocket handkerchief, he was convicted at the Old Bailey and transported for seven years.

It is information like this which makes the Digital Panopticon project possible; and the absence of such information explains why it is impossible to carry out a similar project for an earlier time period.

But if we are to understand the information collected, understand its limitations and use it effectively, it’s important to know why these details were collected in the first place.  The most straightforward and compelling explanation is the desire to take advantage of the increasing power of the state in order to control prisoners. This was what the philosopher Jeremy Bentham intended when he invented the ‘panopticon’ as a form of imprisonment in 1791, and this term was picked up by the philosopher Michel Foucault as a metaphor for the tendency of modern disciplinary societies (or states) to seek total control over their populations.  But when we examine when and by whom this information was collected, and what it was used for, this explanation is not fully convincing.  Too much of this information was collected by low-level officials, with no apparent purpose in mind, and not actually used.

For example, while John Fielding’s primary purpose in collecting information at Bow Street was to keep a record of previous and suspected offenders so that he could make arrests when crimes took place, some of the information collected does not appear to have used.  He appears to have thought that information about previous convictions should influence sentencing decisions, but there is no evidence that the evidence was actually used for that purpose.  Similarly, the information he collected about place of birth, trade and age, and even more remarkably about prisoners’ handwriting abilities, does not appear to have had a clear purpose.

Similarly, while much of the information in the Criminal Registers may have been used to detect recidivists, as in the case of Charlotte Walker in 1798 (sentenced to transportation following numerous previous trials at the Old Bailey), and in sentencing and pardoning decisions (though once again there is little evidence that the information was actually used for this purpose), why did they record information about age and place of birth?  Interestingly, in one of the few instances of record-keeping becoming less systematic, the Home Office stopped collecting much of this information in 1802, perhaps because it wasn’t being used.  (The amount of information collected in the Criminal Registers only expanded again in 1834.)

And why did the clerks decide to keep the information in the Criminal Registers in tabular form? (This is one of the first examples of this method of recording evidence.)  Perhaps this was to encourage clerks to fill in every piece of information required, though as you can see from the example above this did not always happen—often clerks could not be bothered, and there were many blanks.  A tabular form makes statistics easier to compile, but there is no indication that they were used for this purpose (the first official criminal statistics were not compiled until 1805-10, and they only counted crimes, sentences and punishments, not personal characteristics).

When imprisonment became a primary means of punishment in the nineteenth century, prison records began to keep detailed records of all those committed, including not only physical descriptions, past convictions, and records of behaviour in prison, but also in some cases marital status (of men as well as women), number of children, religion, and whether prisoners could read or write.  In the controlled environment of a prison it was easy to collect such information, but once again the purpose of collecting some of this information is unclear.  Information about literacy may have been used to determine the type of instruction the prisoner would receive in prison, but such information started to be kept in the early 1830s, a decade before such instruction was actually introduced.

It is remarkable, therefore, how much information was collected without any clear idea of how it was going to be used.  The intentions of those who created these records are often not clear to us, but perhaps few of the creators knew either. What we may have here is a classic instance of ‘bureaucratic creep’.   Sometimes the form of the records was dictated by statute, and some information had to be kept for very practical reasons, but for the most part record keeping systems were devised by local officials (such as the Sheriffs of London or prison governors), who guessed what types of information might be useful or needed.  A culture of information gathering evolved, in an apparent attempt to understand the criminal and shape punishments, but without a clear sense of how specific types of information would be used.  Perhaps Foucault was right—Britain was becoming a disciplinary society in terms of the amount of information collected—but, unlike the activities of national security agencies today, the state lacked the power (and perhaps the will) to act on such information, let alone compel its collection on a regular basis.  Significantly, as Chris Williams has recently demonstrated, in 1874. a few years following the creation of the Habitual Criminals Register, it ‘was found to be a failure’.

Record Linkage Workshop Report, Part 2

The second half of the workshop was devoted to work in progress from the Digital Panopticon –summaries of which have already appeared (or will soon be appearing) on this blog, so watch this space! As such, I’ll say less about these papers than those from Session 1.

Jamie McLaughlin — ‘How to Disappear Completely: Linking Transportation Records in the Digital Panopticon

Jamie McLaughlin presented some of the insights gained from our recent (and still very early) explorations in linking records of the trial and transportation of convicts in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London. Uncertainty ‘plagues the records’, and Jamie discussed some of the ways in which we have tried to maximize the quality of the name matches made across the records, such as the use of spelling and date variances, creating control scenarios, and the use of variant lists over general algorithms, all ultimately with an eye on computational performance — an issue which we cannot simply disregard, however much our desire for ‘perfect’ matching techniques. In short, we need to find an optimal, complementary balance of automated and manual work, allowing computers and humans to each do what they’re good at — an ideal strategy reflected in the case of the ‘robot butler’.

Lucy Williams — ‘What’s in a name? Convicts, Context and Multiple Record Linkage

Lucy Williams talked about her recent work in manually checking the automated linkage process undertaken by Jamie, particularly in identifying why good matches have failed to be made. One reason for this is simple name variance — variable spellings of the same surname are notoriously prevalent in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century records. Nor is the data from one record set (such as the Old Bailey Proceedings) carried over consistently to other records. But there is also the problem of “John Smith” — how do we prise apart and correctly link individuals tried at the same session of the Old Bailey who have the same name, spelled in exactly the same way? We can keep adding in information from other sources in order to try and verify these kind of multiple name matches, but that isn’t necessarily always the answer, particularly in terms of automated processes. Adding in all the John Smiths from the census, for instance, can simply lead to even more links. The crucial question for us then is, at what point do we draw a line under things and stop adding in contextual data?

Record Linkage Workshop Report, Part 1

In the first half of this workshop on record linkage we had three fantastic papers from guest speakers who were invited to talk about their own experiences of conducting record linkage in historical research. Each speaker offered a different perspective on the subject, allowing us to think about a wide range of issues relating to record linkage and generating ideas which will be extremely useful to us on the Digital Panopticon.

Jeremy Boulton — ‘Place, Mobility and Class Barriers: The Perils and Possibilities of Nominal Linkage in the Metropolis’

Jeremy Boulton of the University of Newcastle got the event off to a fantastic start with a fascinating and though-provoking window into his self-confessed ‘gruesome fascination’ with nominal record linkage. Reflecting on his experiences as part of the Pauper Lives in Georgian London and Manchester project, Jeremy spoke about the broader methodological (rather than strictly technical) issues associated with record linkage, highlighting both the benefits, but also the inherent dangers, of linking individuals across multiple historical records.

On the one hand, when carried out successfully, nominal record linkage can be an effective means by which to check the accuracy of our historical records. Whilst perfect accuracy is beyond attainment in historical record linkage (as E. A. Wrigley said many years ago, and which still holds true today), nevertheless the creation and collation of successful links allows us to identify the (otherwise imperceptible) lies and concealments of the people being record.

On the other hand, of course, the difficulties associated with nominal record linkage makes the successful creation of links (and thus exposing the ‘fiction in the archives’) a problematic task. Transcription errors (by both the original scribes and present-day transcribers) will defeat even the most sophisticated linkage methodologies, and confirming information can’t always be obtained.

In the latter part of his paper, Jeremy presented an absorbing case-study of the nominal record linkage of Godfrey Sykes, widely documented in sources such as pollbooks, newspapers, the London electoral database and charity subscriber registers — an apparently respectable Georgian businessman who, it turns out from further digging into the historical sources, fathered four bastards with a woman named Ann Farmer.

Gill Newton — ‘Urban Record Linkage before 1754’

Next, Gill Newton of the University of Cambridge shifted the focus onto the nuts and bolts of record linkage — a paper rich in technical detail which provided the audience with a valuable toolkit for undertaking record linkage, even for the particularly challenging context of creating re-constituted families from eighteenth-century London.

Starting with an informative background on the contents of an eighteenth-century parish register and what is meant by a re-constituted family, Gill then noted some of the key challenges which face any researcher looking to undertake urban record linkage. These include a high level of population turnover; rapid growth from migration; blurred parish and administrative boundaries; and a high risk of mistaken identities. There are, however, advantages to linking urban records, such as more detailed registers; a more diverse name base; the ability to sample viably; and the further information generated by civic administration.

Gill then treated us to a fascinating discussion of name distribution in eighteenth-century parish registers. Forenames were heavily bunched around the most common names (John, Mary, Elizabeth etc.). By contrast, whilst some surnames constituted a large proportion of the whole (such as Smith), the distribution of surnames had a much longer ‘tail’ compared to forenames. Moreover, there were stark differences in the patterns of name distribution between rural England and London.

Finally, Gill highlighted some of the most important tools for undertaking nominal record linkage, including phonetic matching and surname dictionary examples, as well as the principles of algorithmic record linkage. She offered some extremely useful tips on how to maximize the quality of the linkages created, emphasising that successful matching requires careful attention and a rigorous methodology — in other words, the cautionary mantra with record linkage should be: ‘garbage in, garbage out’.

Ciara Breathnach — ‘Irish Records Linkage 1864–1913: Big, Macro and Micro Data’

In the final paper of this first session, Ciara Breathnach from the University of Limerick talked about the approach and some of the findings from the Irish Record Linkage 1864–1913 project, on which she is the principal investigator. Funded by the Irish Research Council, and developed in partnership with the Digital Repository of Ireland, University of Limerick and Insight at NUI Galway, the project aims to provide a comprehensive map of infant and maternal mortality for Dublin from 1864 to 1913. The project will reconstruct family units and create longitudinal histories by linking records of Birth, Marriage and Death, which together include millions of name instances.

Starting with an overview of the Irish Record Linkage project, Ciara then discussed some of the forces which served to shape the recording of census and civil data in nineteenth-century Ireland, before moving on to discuss some of the differing definitions of ‘Big Data’, a term about which there is seemingly little agreement.

Ciara also provided useful information on the ontologies utilised by the Irish Record Linkage project, describing the ways in which the data has been analysed and linked, noting the necessity (in the case of such extensive numbers of available records) to sample in order to make such a project feasible.

Finally, through a case-study of Achill in Dublin Ciara presented a glimpse of the significant findings already generated by the Irish Record Linkage project. By mapping infant deaths in the parish in the 1890s, Ciara revealed the nature of the relationship between child mortality and the geography of local health care (in the form of doctors and nurses) in late nineteenth-century Ireland. As Ciara concluded, it is through these kind of detailed micro-level studies, produced by record linkage at the macro level, that we can gain a better understanding of the past.

We are very grateful to all three speakers for providing us with so much food for thought, and so many ideas to follow up!

BCHS4 presentation: Visualising Digital Panopticon Data

Abstract:

The Digital Panopticon will assemble a larger collection of datasets than any other crime history project to date (including, amongst many others, the Old Bailey Proceedings, convict transportation registers and prison records), covering hundreds of thousands of individuals. To effectively bring together this information to reconstruct the lives of offenders, we need to develop a detailed understanding of our datasets – of what information is and isn’t recorded on offenders, and how this varied both over time and across different sets of records. Traditional methods of data analysis and representation such as manual counting and tables are inadequate to this end. This paper instead highlights the power of digital technologies in identifying previously unrecognised (and otherwise unrecognisable) patterns. The techniques of data visualisation in particular have been invaluable in uncovering how extensively, and in what manner, information on offender age, occupation and crime location was recorded within our sources. By using digital technologies to step back from our datasets, and see them in their entirety, we can develop a much fuller and more systematic understanding of the sources we are working with.

Slides:

Seeing things Differently: Visualising Data on Crime and Punishment

Event: Record Linkage Workshop, Sheffield, 4 November 2014

We’re delighted to be able to announce our second project workshop.

It’s another afternoon workshop, this time in Sheffield, and the subject is Record Linkage (part of the Epistemologies research theme). We’re particularly interested in the challenges and rewards of applying automated (and semi-automated) nominal record linkage to very large-scale historical datasets, with all their variability, fuzziness and uncertainties; our work on the project starts from these questions:

How can we improve current record-linkage processes to maximise both the number of individuals linked across different datasets and the amount of information obtained about each individual? What is the minimum amount of contextual information needed in order to conduct successful large-scale record linkage of data pertaining to specific individuals?

In addition to presentations about our work from project team members, we have three guest speakers who will bring extensive experience of historical record linkage projects:

We think this will add up to a stimulating programme and discussion that will be of interest to many historians who need to link information about large numbers of individuals and using data that is continually growing in diversity and scale.

Download: Workshop Programme/Flyer (pdf).

Workshop Information

When: 2-5.30pm, Tuesday 4 November 2014
Where Humanities Research Institute, Gell Street, Sheffield

Attendance is free but numbers may be limited so you will need to register in advance: email Sharon Howard (sharon.howard@sheffield.ac.uk).

Bound for Botany Bay? Old Bailey penal sentences and their implementation

The opportunity to connect each Old Bailey convict from their trial, to the ship they sailed on, to the records of their lives in Australia is only one of the benefits of the huge data -linkage efforts currently being undertaken by the Digital Panopticon. However, as this process develops we are presented with a second opportunity – to see where data is missing, and to follow those who seem to disappear between datasets. So far, this has been most apparent in the case of those sentenced to transportation but who are absent from records of convict vessels, or convict arrivals.

Leading historians of transportation, such as Digital Panopticon partner Deborah Oxley have estimated that anywhere between one quarter and two thirds of those sentenced to transportation were never actually sent to Australia. Initial investigations indicate that between1782-1800 3,801 men, women, and children, were sentenced to transportation at the Old Bailey. Yet just over two-thirds of these convicts (2468) do not appear in the next relevant data set – the British Transportation Registers.

It seems clear that the road from arrest to Australia was rarely so straight forward as suggested by many contemporary and later popular accounts. Testimonies given by the officials who ran the transportation system tell us that it was predominantly those below the age of 50 years (45 years for women), and those convicted of the most severe crimes that were selected for transportation.  Historians have also provided evidence to suggest that it was not only the young, but also the practically skilled that were preferred for transportation to Australia. Yet the disparity between sentencing and implementation of transportation suggests that, at present, histories focussing on those transported tell only half of the story. For a fuller picture of how this penal process worked we now have the chance to start tracing those that were left behind.

Preliminary findings suggest that the missing convicts can be traced to three main groups.

The first group of convicts did not even make it to the secondary phase of transportation – that is detainment on the hulks or in holding prisons. Instead their ill health saw them detained in Newgate hospital ward until eventual death a few weeks or a few months after their trial. In the cramped and insanitary conditions of Newgate Gaol, fever was rife and infection spread quickly. Most of those who died were only recorded as having very generalised ailments. Coroners would regularly record a death with little detail, listing simply fever, decline, despondency or ‘natural causes.’

Inside Newgate Gaol

There are of course some exceptions that give us a little more detail. For example, forty-year old Thomas Kennedy was tried at the Old Bailey on 12 July 1797 for the theft of a silver watch. He was found guilty and sentenced to seven years’ transportation. He died in Newgate in April 1799.

Most of those who died in these vague circumstances were the elderly, at least in transportation terms.  These generic fevers, fits, and decline listed as causes of death for those in Newgate could be a myriad of infections that could be found in any of the densely populated areas of London. Sickness such as typhus, typhoid, dysentery, pneumonia, and tuberculosis spread quickly and fatally in the confines of the gaol. Those without strong immunity – especially the elderly or very young were especially at risk.

There were also other convicts who died in gaol as the result of pre-existing illness such as venereal disease, heart problems, and jaundice. Robert Fosgate was sentenced to seven years transportation in October 1787 for the theft of a large amount of clothing. After a year waiting in the gaol suffering from venereal disease, he died of its effects in November 1788. Similarly Peter Rock whilst awaiting transportation in Newgate but three months after of trial he succumbed to the effects of jaundice, and dropsy – a common symptom of heart failure.

A second group of missing prisoners were delivered on board the floating prison ships, the hulks. Some died after accidents on board the ships, others drowned after falling overboard or during escape attempts. Both occurrences could be common upon such vessels. Other men could have remained on the hulk either until the expiration of their sentence – the collection of new data regarding the hulks will allow us to more fully understand why this might have been – or some would have died from illness or infection in the hulks which were described as ‘the most brutalizing, the most demoralizing, and the most horrible’ of British penal history, and where the death rate was estimated to be twice as high as that of the English population in general. [1]

Inside Hulk

The third and final group that our initial linkage has shed light on are those who received pardons. At present our understanding of this process is limited. For women, pardons were complete, dissolving the woman’s conviction and setting her at liberty. However a pardon could come a substantial time into the sentence. Those awaiting transportation could wait years before their sentence was commuted or their crime pardoned. Hannah Findall was sentenced to seven years’ transportation in 1793.   It was not, however until September 1797 that she was pardoned. For male convicts, a partial pardon was more common than a full one. There could be several conditions attached to such freedom. Commonly this might be service in the army or on the high seas. On the level of individual cases it is impossible to say with any certainty what the criteria for pardons or commutation might have been. However, when the data linkage process is more complete, it will be possible to analyse these convicts in aggregate, and view the commonalities in their ages, crimes, sentences, and skills.

Making it from the courtroom to Australia, then, was not just about being young and healthy. It seems to have actually been about not already being sick, vulnerable to illness via age or an existing condition, and perhaps about not being useful to the state for something else. As the work of the Digital Panopticon continues, there will doubtlessly be other disposals we discover which will again change how we think of the transportation process. As the data-linkage on these records progresses we are hoping to produce more accurate proportions of sentence implementation – or failure – and will be able to visualise whether this changed over the convict period. We have the opportunity to gain some new perspectives on transportation that don’t just note numbers of those not eligible for transportation, but also give more of an idea about who they were and what fate awaited them.

 

[1] T. Forbes ‘Coroners’ Inquisitions on the deaths of Prisoners in the Hulks at Portsmouth England in 1817-1827’ in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (1978), 33, 3, p.358. See also B. Webb and S. Webb,  English Prison’s Under Local Government (Longmans,Green, and CO.: London), pp. 45-46.

 

Event: DP @ British Crime Historians Symposium, Liverpool, September 2014

We’re delighted that our quest to take over the entire known universe of the history of crime continues with a panel session at this year’s British Crime Historians Symposium:

The Digital Panopticon: New perspectives on criminal justice records and the practice of transportation

  • Robert Shoemaker, ‘Identifying the criminal: The state and record keeping in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’
  • Richard Ward, ‘Seeing things differently: Visualising data on crime and punishment’
  • Lucy Williams, ‘Bound for Botany Bay? Assessing the differences between Old Bailey penal sentences and their implementation’

Transportation Under the Macroscope

Computers are brilliant microscopes. They make it easy to find needles in haystacks. Want to find references to the famous lawyer William Garrow amongst the millions of words in the printed reports of trials held at the Old Bailey, for instance? A keyword search produces the results in less than a second. Without computers it would take months. Likewise, as I explained in a recent post, through the techniques of data visualisation computers can be used to spot (what would otherwise be largely imperceptible) errors within the massive datasets that we are drawing upon in the Digital Panopticon project.

But computers are also fantastic macroscopes — today’s powerful digital technologies allow us to stand back from our sources and view them in their entirety. We can see the big picture, presenting complex and large-scale patterns in simple but effective ways. Microscopes allow us to see the infinitely small. Telescopes reveal the infinitely great. Macroscopes, meanwhile, peer in to the infinitely complex, allowing us to explore combinations, relationships and interactions between multiple elements.

By visualising the information recorded in the British Convict Transportation Registers, I’ve recently put penal transportation to Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under the macroscope. This has produced some interesting insights into the relationship between Australian penal colonies, terms of transportation and how these changed and interacted over time.BCTR

The British Convict Transportation Registers database provides information on more than 123,000 offenders who were transported to Australia between 1787 and 1867. It’s a fantastic resource, and it will be at the heart of the Digital Panopticon project’s efforts to chart the criminal lives of London convicts sent to Australia. In charting these lives, we need to address some overarching starting questions. How many London convicts were actually transported to Australia for their crimes? Which parts of Australia were they sent to? How many years abroad did they face according to their sentences? Did this change over time, and what was the relationship between these different elements? Visualisations can help us to explore these questions across the long term and a large scale.

The total number of London convicts transported to Australia fluctuated greatly over the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Graph 1 below demonstrates. Relatively few convicts were transported in the years 1793–1804 when the Revolutionary War monopolised Britain’s shipping resources. With the end of the Napoleonic War in 1815 there were however large and rapid increases in the numbers of London convicts sent to Australia, reaching a massive peak in the 1830s. Thereafter, numbers gradually fell until the eventual abandonment of penal transportation in the 1860s. Interestingly, this pattern reflects a wider inverse relationship between the numbers of convicts transported and the years in which Britain was engaged in war throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Graph 1

What Graph 1 doesn’t reveal is that the places in Australia where convicts were sent to changed over time. The individual penal colonies to which London convicts were sent operated at different times. As Graph 2 below shows, New South Wales was the first penal colony in Australia, and was later used alongside the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land between the late 1820s and 1840, when transportation to Australia was at its peak. Following this, Van Diemen’s Land was used almost exclusively, until the 1850s, when Western Australia was the sole transportation location in Australia.

Graph 2

If the locations of penal transportation to Australia changed over time then so too did the lengths of time which offenders were sentenced to abroad. Between 1787 and the virtual abandonment of New South Wales as a penal colony in the late 1830s, as Graph 3 highlights, offenders were sentenced almost without exception to a term of 7 years, 14 years or life. Between 1840 and 1850, when Van Diemen’s Land was used exclusively, terms became more varied, with greater use of 10 and 15 year sentences. And especially after 1853, when Western Australia became the sole destination for transportees, an even greater variety of terms were put to use. This more nuanced tariff in transportation sentences was likely introduced to make transportation more favourable to penal reformers who increasingly viewed the practice with concern.

Graph 3

These changes in penal colony and terms of transportation were intimately linked, and the interaction between the two is clearly captured in Graph 4. The colonies operated at different times, and the law which underpinned them and the terms of transportation which could be imposed also changed in accordance. In short, the convicts who found themselves on the shores of New South Wales were primarily one of two kinds: either those sentenced to 7 years transportation; or those sentenced to a whole life abroad. By contrast, London convicts landing some 2,000 miles away on the shores of Western Australia and on the eve of transportation’s demise in the 1850s would each have had subtly different terms to serve out.

Graph 4

Through the macroscope of computer-generated visualisations, we can see these complex patterns and interactions in their entirety, spanning the breadth of Australia and the length of a century, taking in the lives of tens of thousands of individuals along the way.

Six PhD Studentships: Liverpool, Sheffield and Tasmania

The Digital Panopticon Project is delighted to announce the availability of six PhD studentships, funded by both the AHRC and the participating Universities.  These are exciting opportunities to exploit the rich resources collected by the Project while working within a large team of interdisciplinary experts in both the UK and Australia.

In each case, applications must be made to the institution at which the studentship will be held. Deadlines are as follows (please note update to Liverpool and Sheffield deadlines):

  • Sheffield: 28 July 
  • Liverpool: 28 July 
  • Tasmania: 31 July

Sheffield/Liverpool interviews will be held 11-12 August. The AHRC-funded studentship (Impact of digital history resources) is open to UK/EU students only. The other LIverpool and Sheffield studentships are also open to international students, but please note that only UK/EU-level tuition fees can be covered, and you would need to make up the fees shortfall. The studentships will also include a maintenance grant (currently around £13000 p.a.). Please contact UTAS for more details about eligibility/funding levels for the Tasmania studentship.

University of Liverpool

Longitudinal studies of the health of the poor

Using prison data (from both local prisons and national penitentiaries) this studentship will examine the height/weight and the health histories of working class men and women over the course of their lives. We have access to a huge and detailed database on the chronic and acute illnesses of thousands of prisoners in the British convict system, and they will allow the PhD researcher to examine what illnesses were prevalent, how they were treated, what impact they had over the lifetime of the prisoner, the longevity of life of the prisoner, and a range of other possible issues. This studentship will appeal to students of the history of medicine; social historians, and crime historians; and the student will be supported by an experienced team of interdisciplinary researchers and experts in convict/health history.

The lives and criminal careers of convicts in the 19th century

This studentship will follow, chart, and analyse the lives of offenders tried at the Old bailey both before their appearance at court, during their sentence, and afterwards when they were released. The PhD will examine the reasons why offenders began their criminal career, the impact that punishment in the British convict prison system had on them, and how that legacy carried over into their lives after they re-entered society. This is an exciting opportunity to study criminal careers using historical data, working with experts in the field. The studentship will appeal to researchers in nineteenth-century social history, history of crime, criminal careers, and/or desistence studies.

For more information on either of the Liverpool studentships:

  • Academic queries about the project and studentships should be addressed to Prof. Barry Godfrey, Barry.Godfrey@liverpool.ac.uk.
  • For information about applications contact Rebekah Hughes, slsjpgr@liv.ac.uk.

 

University of Sheffield

The Social and Spatial Worlds of Old Bailey Convicts, 1785-1875

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, the causes of crime, and understandings of identity in early industrial Britain.  Using evidence of origins from judicial records, the project will trace convicts from their places of origin, through residence and work in London before their arrests, to (if imprisoned) places of imprisonment and subsequent life histories.  Analysis of the language used in trial testimonies can provide an indication of how identities were shaped by complex backgrounds, and evidence of criminal and convict mobility has the potential to contribute to our understanding of geographical mobility and social integration before and after the introduction of the railroads.   This is an exciting opportunity to use newly assembled data to study the lives of non-elite people. The studentship will appeal to researchers interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social history, the history of crime, and geographical and social mobility.

For more information, and to apply, go to http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/postgraduate/research/scholarships/projects/oldbaileyconvicts

The Impact of Digital Resources in the History of Crime

This project will examine the impact of the widespread availability of digital resources on attitudes towards crime and its history.  Core case studies will include the Old Bailey Proceedings Online, Founders and Survivors (records of the 73,000 men women and children who were transported to Tasmania), and, following its launch, the Digital Panopticon website.  This project will investigate both academic and non-academic uses of internet information provided in the UK and Australia, using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies.  A wide range of sources can be used to measure the extent to which these sites have shaped how the history of crime has been written, and to assess their impact on users’ perceptions of the crimes and punishments, including individual criminal lives, documented on these websites.  It will also be possible to investigate how using these resources has shaped wider attitudes towards crime and punishment in contemporary society.  The studentship will appeal to researchers interested in the history of crime, public history, and the digital humanities. AHRC-funded.

For more information, and to apply, go to http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/postgraduate/research/scholarships/projects/digitalresources

Criminal Recidivism in 18th and 19th-Century London

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the development of the concepts of habitual  offending and the criminal class.  Taking advantage of the extensive records of both petty and serious crime digitised and linked together by the Digital Panopticon project, this studentship will investigate these phenomena from the perspective of the judicial records, by tracing the incidence and character of repeat offending.  The project will seek to understand the extent to which multiple arrests were a product of policing and/or underlying criminal activity, to identify the social and cultural factors which made some Londoners prone to reoffending and rearrest, and to examine the relationship between the chronology of recidivism and the evolution of contemporary thought about reoffending.  This research will allow the student to draw some conclusions about both the causes of crime and the background to nineteenth-century thought about crime.  It will appeal to researchers interested in the history of crime and policing, and the social history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England more generally.

For more information, and to apply, go to http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/postgraduate/research/scholarships/projects/criminalrecidivism

University of Tasmania

Labour Markets and Convict Offending

Who amongst the convicts sent to Britain’s nineteenth-century penal colony in Van Diemen’s Land were put to hard labour or ordered to work in irons? Did these patterns change over time, and if so, were they driven by convict behaviour, changes in penal administration, or the performance of the wider colonial economy?  This project will provide an outstanding opportunity for a student with a background in history, economics or sociology to explore these questions while working as part of an international team of researchers. As well as conducting their own archival research the successful applicant will be given access to an extensive existing database of convicts and associated records.

Applications for the Tasmania studentship close on 31 July.

For more information contact Trevor Scaife, Trevor.Scaife@utas.edu.au

 

Men as Wives: Visualising Errors in the Old Bailey Proceedings Data

In a recent post I talked about some of the ways in which data visualisations have helped me to see patterns in the information recorded in the Old Bailey Proceedings on things such as crimes, verdicts, punishments and the ages of defendants, patterns that might otherwise have been missed if using traditional methods of representing data such as tables. Here I just want to give a brief update on my analysis of the Proceedings, particularly the recording of defendant occupations and social status in the Proceedings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Again, visualisations have been extremely useful, especially in identifying errors in the data.

As with the recording of defendant ages, it might well be the case that information on the occupation/social status of those tried at the Old Bailey in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could be useful to us on the Digital Panopticon project in tracing offenders across different sets of records. Just as an age or a birth date might allow us to establish whether the “John Smith” tried at the Old Bailey and the “John Smith” transported to Australia was indeed the same person, likewise information on occupation or social status can help us to prove/disprove such name matches across records. But as with ages it depends on how extensively, and in what manner, such information on occupation/social status is recorded in our sources. And to this end, as with information on defendant age, the techniques of data visualisation can be useful.

Searches of the Proceedings for defendant occupation/social status can be carried out using the “custom search” page of the Old Bailey Proceedings Online.

Searches of the Proceedings for defendant occupation/social status can be carried out using the “custom search” page of the Old Bailey Proceedings Online.

However, whereas with defendant ages I was able to use the “statistics search” function of the Old Bailey Proceedings Online to generate numbers for analysis, this wasn’t possible in the case of defendant occupation/social status. In the process of digitising the original trial reports, defendant occupation was indeed tagged as a distinct category of information, and thus it can be searched for systematically in the “custom search” page of the Old Bailey Proceedings Online. But this can’t be used to quantitatively analyse the recording of defendant occupations in the Proceedings. In order to do this I needed to look at the website’s underlying data file of defendant information.

This is a large file which includes numerous fields of tagged information relating to all the defendants tried at the Old Bailey and reported in the Proceedings. Since much of this information is in the form of text rather than numbers, software such as Excel isn’t very useful in analysing the data. Instead I turned to Tableau Public, a free, web-based tool that is powerful but still easy to use. There are numerous other data visualisation tools available which are ideal for novices. All need to be used with caution, but used carefully they can be invaluable. (I’m going to talk in more detail about the actual process of using tools such as Tableau to undertake crime history in my next post, so watch this space.)

By running our file on Old Bailey defendant information through Tableau I’ve been able to create some fairly simple but nonetheless useful visualisations. For the data on defendant occupation and social status this has revealed two things in particular.

Pie chart demonstrating frequency of recording defendant occupation

Pie chart demonstrating frequency of recording defendant occupation

First of all, it has highlighted how little information we actually have on the occupational and social status of Old Bailey defendants from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Across the entire publication history of the Proceedings between 1674 and 1913, occupation or social status is recorded for only 11% of all the defendants put on trial. In the years 1755 to 1834, occupation/social status is recorded for 15% of defendants, but between 1834 and 1906 virtually no defendants’ occupations were recorded. On the whole, therefore, we have occupation information for only a small proportion of defendants, and none at all for our specific period c. 1787-1875.

The sheer variety of occupations that are recorded in the Proceedings were also made clear by visualising the data. The bubble chart below for example give an indication of this, and the relative frequency with which different categories are recorded. One of the problems is that the same occupations were recorded in the Proceedings in slightly different ways (“servant” and “servants”, for example) or with variant spelling (such as “taylor” and “tailor”). If we wanted to utilise occupation or social status labels to verify name matches across sets of records this suggests that we would need to use sophisticated forms of keyword searching.

Bubble chart showing categories of defendant occupation

Bubble chart showing categories of defendant occupation

Bubble chart of defendant occupations by gender

Bubble chart of defendant occupations by gender

But visualisations have been especially useful in highlighting some of the errors in the recording of occupations within the Old Bailey Proceedings data. One of the things that I wanted to find out was how occupation labels varied according to the gender of the defendants tried at the Old Bailey. In order to do this I used Tableau to create the following bubble chart of the most common forms of recorded occupations/social status for male and female defendants in the years when we have significant amounts of information on this. One of the things that really struck me in this bubble chart was the amount of men whose occupation label is recorded in our Proceedings dataset as “wife”. This clearly seemed to be an error in the data, but I wanted to know what the source of the problem was so I went back to the original data file and filtered it for male defendants with the occupation/social status label of “wife”. And I then looked at the trial reports in the Old Bailey Proceedings for these cases.

Trial report in the Old Bailey Proceedings in which the husband of a female defendant has been tagged with the social status of “wife”

Trial report in the Old Bailey Proceedings in which the husband of a female defendant has been tagged with the social status of “wife”

It turns out that many of these cases were due to errors in the digitisation process which resulted from the unusual nature of the trial reports themselves. The cases were actually ones (such as this example below) in which a female defendant had been named in the trial report as the wife of her husband, and thus the automated tagging process used to digitise the Proceedings had recorded both the husband and the wife as defendants and assigned them both the role of “wife”. This practice in the Proceedings of naming the female defendant as the wife of her husband largely disappeared in the nineteenth century, and therefore most of these errors in the data file tend to come from the eighteenth century. By identifying these kinds of anomalies, visualisations therefore allow us to find errors in the data. Such errors can then be rectified. This leaves us with a much “cleaner” dataset, and thereby increasing the chances of successful record linkage.

Historians of crime (particularly the history of crime in Britain) have been quick to exploit the plethora of digitised criminal justice (and associated) records that are now available online. We all make us of resources such as the Old Bailey Proceedings Online, Eighteenth-Century Collections Online and digitised newspapers. But whilst we have been quick to take advantage of the benefits offered by these digitised records – such as keyword searching to find needles in haystacks – we have been less ready to understand the full effects of the digitisation process for how we study our sources and the information that we extract from them. By using data visualisations we can better understand the implications of digitisation, including the ways in which the actual process of turning a paper record into a digital format might result in errors (relatively rare, it should be said, in the case of the Old Bailey Proceedings Online) in the information we compile.