Review: Old Bailey Court Records

Subject: RE: Review: Old Bailey Court Records
From: katlaughing
Date: 09 May 07 - 02:54 PM

refresh

Subject: RE: Review: Old Bailey Court Records
From: katlaughing
Date: 06 May 07 - 06:42 PM

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."

Subject: RE: Review: Old Bailey Court Records
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 06 May 07 - 06:25 PM

At Smithsonian Magazine:

Digitizing the Hanging Court.

It's a good article, and the documentation seems to be an ongoing project.

John

Subject: Review: Old Bailey Court Records
From: GUEST,.gargoyle
Date: 06 May 07 - 05:30 PM

http://www.oldbaileyonline.org

Smithsonian April 2007 has on excellent article "Digitizing The Hangin Court"

"Cutpurses! Blackguard! Fallen women! The Proceedings of the Old Bailey is an epic chronicle of crime and vice in early London. Now anyone with a computer can search all 52 million words."

Burglary=4,754 cases
Murder = 1,573 cases
Arson = 90 cases
Forgery=1,067 cases

"Oxford English Dictionary etymolgists found that the express "No way" - though to have emanated from the University of South Dakota in the 1960's - seems to have arisen during an Old Railey rape case 1787."

Perhaps, our seeker of a Masters Degree using Murder Ballads may take the challenge of real academic research now that the source material for many broadsides is in her hands.

Sincerely,
Gargoyle