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The digital world
Post
Social historian Tim Hitchcock first recalls connecting with the past as a teenager in San Francisco during the 1970s. On a building site, he came across a bottle of liver tonic wrapped in a 100-year- old newspaper and, completely absorbed, sat down to read it.
The experience inspired him to study history at Berkeley. However, a quest for more politically engaging research brought him to the UK, where he attended university in Leeds and Oxford. After starting his academic career in London, in 1997 he joined the University of Hertfordshire, becoming Professor of Eighteenth Century History in 2004.
Over more than two decades Professor Hitchcock has helped to create a ‘new history from below’, which puts the experiences of the poor and of working people at the heart of our understanding of eighteenth century Britain. He has published several books on the histories of poverty, gender and sexuality. His greatest success, though, is the phenomenally popular Old Bailey Online website.
This collaboration with Professor Robert Shoemaker of the University of Sheffield created a fully- searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings, 1674 to 1913, from just after the Great Fire to just before the Great War.
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The website was made possible by grants from the New Opportunities Fund and the Arts and Humanities Council. Launched in stages between 2003 and 2008, it contains some hundred and twenty seven million words of text, and details of over a hundred and ninety seven thousand trials held at London’s central criminal court. This represents the largest body of published material detailing the lives of non-elite people ever produced.
‘Around two thousand people from all over the world visit the site every day, pursuing information about crimes from pick-pocketing and robbery to abduction and murder,’ says Professor Hitchcock.
Comments on the website underline its immense value both to family historians and academics. Now recognised as the best international exemplar of how to post historical materials on the Internet, it was named as the overall winner of the Cybrarian Awards in 2003 and shortlisted for the British Computer Society (BCS) IT Industry Award in 2008.
In building the website the team developed new digital searching techniques that are now changing the way people can extract information from digital resources.
Old Bailey Online was the first historical web resource to apply double entry rekeying and XML mark-up procedures and search facilities to a large-scale historical
Bringing together technological innovation with a scholarly agenda to develop Old Bailey Online, Professor Tim Hitchcock has found a new and global audience for social history.
resource. The material is highly accurate and also enables searching by key words or phrases; structured searches on crimes, verdicts and punishments; and statistics to be generated on both criminal justice and linguistic change.
Professors Hitchcock and Shoemaker were awarded the prestigious History Today Trustees Award in 2010 for their ongoing contribution to promoting history. Also with Professor Shoemaker, Hitchcock recently launched London Lives, the largest collection of transcribed historical manuscripts on the Web. Original parish records, workhouse records, and marvellously detailed coroners’ reports illuminate everyday life in eighteenth century London and how this contributed to the development of the modern state.
Both London Lives and Old Bailey Online form part of Connected Histories, a collection of eleven digital resources related to early modern and nineteenth-century Britain. Covering 1500 to 1900, they include British Museum Images, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers and British History Online. Innovative use of technology opens up new research possibilities for historians. All the databases can be searched by names, places and dates via a single gateway, and encompass 5.6 billion words of data.
Professor Hitchcock is breaking new ground in several other collaborations. Data Mining with Criminal Intent will provide scholars with techniques for selecting and analysing themed texts from the Old Bailey trial records. He is also developing a geo-referencing tool for mapping historical and archaeological evidence, enabling people to find out about London neighbourhoods where their ancestors lived.
When Hitchcock and Shoemaker first conceived the idea for an online academic resource in 1999, they never imagined the influence it would have. As well as broadening access to history in an engaging way and encouraging further research in the social sciences and humanities, it has contributed to formulating legal practice in the UK and USA. It even provided the inspiration and source material for both radio and television series, including the award-winning BBC legal drama Garrow’s Law.
As proof that Old Bailey Online has become part of mainstream British culture, Professor Hitchcock recently read a novel in which a character logs on to the website. He says, ‘By presenting information that is accessible from anywhere in the world, free of charge, Old Bailey Online is impacting how the past is being used in the creative economy.’
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