{"id":3823,"date":"2011-08-18T11:53:10","date_gmt":"2011-08-18T16:53:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoreti.ca\/?p=3823"},"modified":"2011-08-18T11:53:10","modified_gmt":"2011-08-18T16:53:10","slug":"old-bailey-trials-are-tabulated-for-scholars-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=3823","title":{"rendered":"Old Bailey Trials Are Tabulated for Scholars Online"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Times now has an article on the Criminal Intent<\/a> project I was part of. See, Old Bailey Trials Are Tabulated for Scholars Online<\/a>. They quote a historian who is sceptical of the results of mining, though he appreciates the resource.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Old Bailey Online project has done a great service in making those sources widely (and costlessly) available,\u201d Mr. Langbein wrote in an e-mail. But he complained that the claims about data mining have \u201ca breathless quality: \u2018you can expect big things from us,\u2019 but as yet it\u2019s all method and no results.\u201d He said that the new findings belittle the work of a generation of scholars who focused on the 18th century as the turning point in the evolution of the criminal justice system.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Alas, he seems didn’t read our report, but the summary in the Chronicle<\/a>. It is easy to use cute phrases like “breathless quality”, but is he right? Time will tell, but I think the historians on our team have backed up the results found with mining and they never belittled the work of previous scholars – we saw ourselves building on it.<\/p>\n

What can mining do? I think mining can give you a big picture so that you see the forest rather than trees in a way that no one could before. Conclusions about the shape of the forest have to be checked against other evidence, but the results of mining is evidence that is not breathless even if it takes your breath away. As Bill Turkel put it,<\/p>\n

Mr. Turkel, who developed some of the digital tools, said that data mining reveals unexpected trends and connections that no one would have thought to look for before. Previous scholars \u201ctended to cherry-pick anecdotes without having a sense that it was possible to measure all of that text and treat the whole archive as a single unit,\u201d he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, if you then leverage traditional evidence to buttress your argument then the mining is forgotten or trivialized.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times now has an article on the Criminal Intent project I was part of. See, Old Bailey Trials Are Tabulated for Scholars Online. They quote a historian who is sceptical of the results of mining, though he appreciates the resource. \u201cThe Old Bailey Online project has done a great service in making … Continue reading Old Bailey Trials Are Tabulated for Scholars Online<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,45,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-methods","category-supercomputing","category-text-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3823"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3823\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3824,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3823\/revisions\/3824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}