The Globe and Mail today had a story about a humanities computing project, the Old Bailey Online – The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913 – Central Criminal Court. The story is titled, A crime time machine (Tuesday, April 29, 2008, Page A2) and is really quite nice. That the story appears on the second page of our national newspaper shows how humanities computing projects are of general interest (especially if they are about criminals.) The introduction on the web site reads,
A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.
One thing that is interesting is that they have Google Ads down the left-hand side, which is unusual for an academic project.
Bravo to the team that developed it!
This is a superbly integrated approach to presentation of the trial records. It invites and engages your browsing. I was particularly impressed by the very tight and intuitive linkage between places, events and people. I wonder what would happen if you through Calais at the raw data. Would it be able to pull the same objects out? And if so, were we to take this through Weka, what patterns might me identified? What connections might we make?
What a wonderfully rich archive.