Comments on: Teaching with Old Bailey Online http://ancarett.com/?p=157 Fri, 10 Sep 2010 19:54:29 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=1.5.2 Comment on Teaching with Old Bailey Online by: Tim Hitchcock http://ancarett.com/?p=157#comment-4016 Wed, 09 Aug 2006 07:59:37 +0000 http://ancarett.com/?p=157#comment-4016 I very much enjoyed your account of using the Old Bailey website as a part of your teaching. I wondered, however, if you brought to your student's attention the role of the underlying XML mark-up schema in the creation of Old Bailey statistics. The categories of crime, punishment etc., have been created by the project team and used to describe the content and outcome of each trial, and therefore represent an historical imposition of sorts on the original material. Students can, of course, check the extent to which individual trials fit the categories they think they are exploring, but there are some cases where the changing nature of the law or the Proceedings frustrate the most honest attempt at categorisation (the project team also made some errors!). In a recent complaint received by the project from an historian of crime, it was pointed out that forging Bank of England banknotes had been categorised and marked up as 'coining' and as an 'offense against the king'; but that legally (at least from 1801) this crime was a subset of fraud. The complaint suggested that the miss-categorisation fundamentally undermined the resulting statistics and made a nonsense of his analysis. In other words, being alive to the categories that were used in constructing the site, could help your students to develop an even more skeptical and sophisticated approach to historical statistics. I very much enjoyed your account of using the Old Bailey website as a part of your teaching. I wondered, however, if you brought to your student’s attention the role of the underlying XML mark-up schema in the creation of Old Bailey statistics. The categories of crime, punishment etc., have been created by the project team and used to describe the content and outcome of each trial, and therefore represent an historical imposition of sorts on the original material. Students can, of course, check the extent to which individual trials fit the categories they think they are exploring, but there are some cases where the changing nature of the law or the Proceedings frustrate the most honest attempt at categorisation (the project team also made some errors!).

In a recent complaint received by the project from an historian of crime, it was pointed out that forging Bank of England banknotes had been categorised and marked up as ‘coining’ and as an ‘offense against the king’; but that legally (at least from 1801) this crime was a subset of fraud. The complaint suggested that the miss-categorisation fundamentally undermined the resulting statistics and made a nonsense of his analysis.

In other words, being alive to the categories that were used in constructing the site, could help your students to develop an even more skeptical and sophisticated approach to historical statistics.

]]> Comment on Teaching with Old Bailey Online by: Melete Online » Blog Archive » Using the Old Bailey Online database http://ancarett.com/?p=157#comment-630 Thu, 02 Mar 2006 04:28:00 +0000 http://ancarett.com/?p=157#comment-630 [...] There’s an interesting post over at Ancarett’s Abode about how she uses the Old Bailey Online database in her teaching. The Old Bailey Online site is ‘A fully searchable online edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing accounts of over 100,000 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.’ [...] […] There’s an interesting post over at Ancarett’s Abode about how she uses the Old Bailey Online database in her teaching. The Old Bailey Online site is ‘A fully searchable online edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing accounts of over 100,000 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.’ […]

]]> Comment on Teaching with Old Bailey Online by: Ancarett’s Abode » Blog Archive » Meme of Pseudonymity http://ancarett.com/?p=157#comment-618 Sun, 26 Feb 2006 15:15:16 +0000 http://ancarett.com/?p=157#comment-618 [...] Has your blog allowed you to experiment with writing? Somewhat. Not much stylistically, but, then, I’m not a scholar of literature or creative writing. I’ve experimented in other ways: chronicling online gaming and participating in an online symposium. [...] […] Has your blog allowed you to experiment with writing? Somewhat. Not much stylistically, but, then, I’m not a scholar of literature or creative writing. I’ve experimented in other ways: chronicling online gaming and participating in an online symposium. […]

]]> Comment on Teaching with Old Bailey Online by: Janice http://ancarett.com/?p=157#comment-591 Mon, 13 Feb 2006 20:27:33 +0000 http://ancarett.com/?p=157#comment-591 Chris, that's a wonderful question and they come to the Taylor article just after they've prepared their own statistical tables from the Old Bailey Online site. Many of them find Taylor's article immediately comprehensible, contextualizing the examples there with some contemporary political or bureaucratic number-massaging. They understand the pressures and tendency to report numbers in a way that works best for your job and develop quite a bit of sympathy for the historian attempting to discern truthful from cooked statistics after the fact. What reading this article does best of all is also help them to be healthily skeptical of numbers thrown, without context, into an article they're reading. They point with some pride to their own work with the Old Bailey to show that every single case that makes up each of their statistics can be read and reviewed. Of course, I try to get them to conjecture what might have been tweaked, altered or omitted in what made it into the Session Papers. I've toyed with referring them to Gaskill, M., "Reporting Murder: Fiction in the Archives of Early Modern England", <em>Social History</em> 23 (1998), 1-30 but I probably couldn't cover that during class time. Chris, that’s a wonderful question and they come to the Taylor article just after they’ve prepared their own statistical tables from the Old Bailey Online site. Many of them find Taylor’s article immediately comprehensible, contextualizing the examples there with some contemporary political or bureaucratic number-massaging. They understand the pressures and tendency to report numbers in a way that works best for your job and develop quite a bit of sympathy for the historian attempting to discern truthful from cooked statistics after the fact.

What reading this article does best of all is also help them to be healthily skeptical of numbers thrown, without context, into an article they’re reading. They point with some pride to their own work with the Old Bailey to show that every single case that makes up each of their statistics can be read and reviewed. Of course, I try to get them to conjecture what might have been tweaked, altered or omitted in what made it into the Session Papers. I’ve toyed with referring them to

Gaskill, M., “Reporting Murder: Fiction in the Archives of Early Modern England”, Social History 23 (1998), 1-30

but I probably couldn’t cover that during class time.

]]> Comment on Teaching with Old Bailey Online by: Chris Williams http://ancarett.com/?p=157#comment-590 Mon, 13 Feb 2006 09:19:26 +0000 http://ancarett.com/?p=157#comment-590 What do you say to them about Howard Taylor's work, (which for the uninitiated could be summarised as "All the numbers are made up anyway")? It seems to me that there's difference between runs of numbers that appear to be presented fully-formed, such as the Home Office statistics that Howard criticises, and those that are constructed by by aggregrating discrete and essentially unchallengable sources, such as the ones produced by the Old Bailey stats package. What do you say to them about Howard Taylor’s work, (which for the uninitiated could be summarised as “All the numbers are made up anyway”)?

It seems to me that there’s difference between runs of numbers that appear to be presented fully-formed, such as the Home Office statistics that Howard criticises, and those that are constructed by by aggregrating discrete and essentially unchallengable sources, such as the ones produced by the Old Bailey stats package.

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