Old Bailey and Computing

From the Bench. SentenceSpeak. sentencespeak.blogspot.com

Computing in the digital world has changed a lot over the years. Susan Hockey's "The History of Humanities Computing" takes readers on a trip through time from 1949 to the 2000s, showing the progress of programming and digitizing in the field of humanities. Hockey describes the painstaking research and labor that went into such projects as Fr. Busa's Index Thomisticus. Busa, who fortunately found sponsorship through IBM in 1949, was able to create a program that allowed users to search for words and phrases within St. Thomas Aquinas' many texts. Later, in the mid-1970s, the Oxford Text Archive (OTA) debuted. Hockey explains the goal of the OTA as follows: "The OTA undertook to maintain electronic texts and ... to make these texts available to anyone else who wanted to use them for academic purposes." They essentially created a "digital library" that is open to researchers interested in linguistics or literary topics. Of course, the most obvious advancement of the 90s was the Internet and World Wide Web. It goes without saying the impact this has had on research. Up to present, Hockey does not mention any huge, ground-breaking projects, but does believe that because the Internet is being used more widely by historians, there will be many further discoveries to make and a richer discourse for historians to work with.

A wonderful example of a more recent project is the Old Bailey Online. Created by the universities of Hertfordshire and Sheffield, the Old Bailey Online took "The Proceedings of the Old Bailey" - a __ century account of criminal court records - and created a searchable online database. As Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker (who both served as project directors) point out in  "Digitising History From Below: The Old Bailey Proceedings, 1674-1834", the Old Bailey Online is a great research tool because you can search for whole strings of words and compile useful statistics to support research. However, they also warn scholars not to overlook other resources, reminding us to look deeper into the contexts of the general information gleaned from the Old Bailey. In other words, the Old Bailey Online is a great starting point for research, but any serious scholar should rely on multiple source to get a better idea of the historical significance of the material. Similarly, Ancarett uses believes in the research possibilities of the Old Bailey, and uses the site to teach students a little about how to extrapolate statistics from historical data, and introduce "math-phobic" history students to numbers.

Dan Cohen, and a cohort of other researchers compiled Data Mining with Criminal Intent, utilizing the Old Baily Online (exclusively) as their research tool. Though they made some minor statistical discoveries (women accused of bigamy suffered less severe punishments than men as time progressed, according to the Old Bailey data), the Criminal Intent project simply reinforces Hitchcock and Shoemaker's point, that the Old Bailey Online is just one tool in a sea of other useful tools that should not be used exclusively if there is anything truly useful to be discovered. As computing in the humanities continues to progress, existing programs such as the Old Bailey will continue to improve, but, as always, researchers must consult other sources to more accurately assess historical contexts.