The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #101414   Message #2044829
Posted By: katlaughing
06-May-07 - 06:42 PM
Thread Name: Review: Old Bailey Court Records
Subject: RE: Review: Old Bailey Court Records
Impressive:

So the researchers hired someone to take digital photographs of all 60,000 microfilm pages, then sent the images on CD-ROMs to India. There, in a process known as double re-keying, two teams of typists typed the entire manuscript independently, then fed the copies into a computer that highlighted discrepancies, which had to be corrected manually. That took two years and cost nearly half a million dollars. Then Shoemaker and Hitchcock assembled a team of researchers to embed the entire manuscript with over 80 different computer "tags," permitting searches by such categories as first name, surname, age, occupation, crime, crime location, verdict and punishment.

and,

Meanwhile, the team has obtained enough new grant money to digitize the proceedings of the Old Bailey's successor, the Central Criminal Court, whose 100,000 trial records begin in 1834 and go to 1913. These should come on-line in 2008. The two also plan to digitize an additional 30 million words of 18th-century records—among them, the records of the carpenters' guild, Bridewell Prison and the insane asylum known as Bedlam—to be integrated into the original project. "It will allow us to trace people through the system," says Hitchcock, "to create a kind of collective biography of working people in 18th-century London."