The Digital Panopticon: Tracing London Convicts in Britain & Australia, 1780-1925
- Submitting institution
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The University of Sheffield
- Unit of assessment
- 28 - History
- Output identifier
- 4915
- Type
- H - Website content
- Month
- September
- Year
- 2017
- URL
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http://www.digitalpanopticon.org/
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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4
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This is an interlinked collection of 4 million digitised primary source records from 50 datasets. It provides the means to answer the research question, what happened to the 109,530 defendants convicted at the Old Bailey between 1780-1868? This was the period when the principal punishments for those not executed were either transportation to Australia or imprisonment in Britain, and by collecting this data and linking together records pertaining to each convict it became possible to determine the impact of these different punishments on their life courses. The principal research findings are: 1) the massive difference, the scale of which has been hitherto unrecognised, between the sentences meted out at the Old Bailey and the punishments convicts actually received. 2) the varied impacts of punishment on convict lives. Detailed study of individual life archives (written up in convict biographies on the website), combined with visualisations of the life events experienced by large cohorts of convicts, has identified different patterns for those sentenced to transportation and those imprisoned. As co-investigator, Shoemaker contributed to the project’s conceptualisation and design. The project would not have been possible without the research he has done since 1999 in creating the digital resources Old Bailey Online and London Lives, and in developing the methodology for tracing convict lives across multiple digital records. He was principally responsible for supervising the creation of the website at Sheffield’s Digital Humanities Institute, including the work of the project manager, Research Associate, and software engineer. With the RA, he investigated in particular the disjunction between judicial sentencing and penal outcomes. The website was launched in September 2017. Due to the millions of data items and algorithms which build the data in real time it's not possible to take a copy, but we will not change or update it until after the assessment.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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