[Website] The Digital Panopticon: the global impact of London's punishments, 1780-1925
- Submitting institution
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University of Sussex
- Unit of assessment
- 28 - History
- Output identifier
- 336034_82349
- 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
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- Co-led by Hitchcock and funded through the collaboration of four universities and a £1.4 million AHRC grant (2013-18), The Digital Panopticon links 4,000,000 archival records to explore the effect of punishment on the lives of working people. Based on Hitchcock’s underpinning digital architecture and expertise in reassembling lives from disparate sources, this is the first resource to systematically link fifty separate record series – including Old Bailey trial reports, criminal and transportation registers and convict indents, colony records, prison and hulks registers, and civil records such as the census and records of births, marriages and deaths – to individual lives.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Freely available at https://www.digitalpanopticon.org/ under a CC-BY-NC license, The Digital Panopticon brings together electronic versions of fifty separate record series related to policing, criminal justice and punishment in London and Australia. By making four million records cross searchable, the site evidences the lives and life course of some 250,000 individuals accused of a crime in London and either transported to Australia or committed to prison. In the process the site makes it possible to research a ‘new history from below’ and allows the creation of a comprehensive prosopography of Londoners caught up the system of criminal justice. The Digital Panopticon also includes comprehensive background material related the primary sources included, over 100 criminal biographies, and facilities for working with and visualising the underlying collection.
The site’s purpose is two-fold. First, it is designed to allow the project team to test the impact of different punishment regimes (transportation to Australia and imprisonment) on the life course and offending histories of a quarter of a million). And second, it seeks to place the experience of working men and women at the centre of a broader analysis, by enabling the rapid and effective creation of multiple biographies, that can in turn be tested for typicality.
Funded by a £1.4million pound grant from the AHRC, the site involved collaborations with four universities in both the UK and Australia, and a team of a dozen post-doctoral researchers, technical staff and PhD students.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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