Historyonics

Playing around with colour on Locating London's Past

2011-12-13T01:45:00.000-08:00

Just in a spirit of playing around, and exploring large data sets without any preconceived questions or assumptions, I thought I would throw a few words at Locating London's Past and the Old Bailey dataset, and see if any patterns emerged. And it occurred to me that words for colour, when mapped on to eighteenth-century London, might come up more frequently in some parts of town over others - perhaps 'white' in neo-classical areas, and 'brown' or 'green' at the more rural boundaries.I am not sure that anything actually emerged, but it was fun to think about.The base measure against which you would want to compare these colour distributions would be all crime locations (34,000 or so) mapped by street.

ALL CRIME LOCATIONS, BY STREET

RED

BLUE

GREEN

BROWN

YELLOW


WHITE

BLACK

Is there a pattern there? I have not really got a clue, so I thought I would put together some combinations, just on the off chance, and following a naive assumption about how colour might work in an eighteenth-century urban context (where bright colours were expensive).

RED, BLUE, YELLOW

BLACK, WHITE

GREEN, BROWN

I was still not quite convinced, but thought I should have one last go with the data displayed as 'Large Blocks', and by further combining 'manufactured colours' and 'natural' ones.

RED, BLUE, YELLOW, BLACK, WHITE - LARGE BLOCKS

GREEN, BROWN - LARGE BLOCKS

Or finally, the same sets of results with the sets of colours subtracted from one an another.


RED, BLUE, YELLOW, BLACK, WHITE, MINUS GREEN AND BROWN- LARGE BLOCKS

GREEN AND BROWN, MINUS RED, BLUE ETC - LARGE BLOCKS

THE TWO COLOUR SETS MINUS THEIR OPPOSITE OVERLAID ('MANUFACTURED' VS 'NATURAL)

Does this prove that 'manufactured' colours were more common in the West and East End, while 'natural' colours dominated in the northern and north-western suburbs. No, it does not. But it made me wonder.

Playing with Locating London's Past

2011-12-12T04:30:00.000-08:00

With colleagues at the Universities of Sheffield and the IHR, we launched a new web resource this morning that allows you to map some seventeen different large scale datasets related to 18th century London on to a GIS compliant version of John Rocque's 1746 map of the capital - all in a Google Maps environment. See www.locatinglondon.org I think it is very pretty and intuitive, but what I find most interesting about the site is that it allows you to explore a component of these datasets that we have hitherto done very little with - the spatial. I don't know what is there yet, but I suspect I will have a good time finding out.

My first thought was to play with a nice dichotomy in the data for the Old Bailey Proceedings - the published trial accounts for London, 1674-1819 (they continue to be printed up till 1913 but only the 18th century elements are currently available for mapping).

One aspect of the tagging we imposed on the Proceedings was a distinction between 'Crime Location' and 'Defendants' Home'. This information is pretty consistently given in the text and tagged in the XML, and the 18th century trials include around 34,000 crime locations, and around 12,000 defendants' homes.

A quick search for all 'Crime Locations' (34,427), when mapped on to 'Street' and displayed on to a blank screen, looks like this:

And an equally quick mapping of 12,031 Defendant's Homes looks like:

When placed over the warped version of John Rocque's 1746 map of London, the result is:

I don't have an argument about this data, or even much of an observation. The predominance of 'Defendants' Home' in the eastern part of the city, seems pretty compelling, and could form the basis for an analysis of the relative access to justice in eighteenth-century London, or when mapped against wealth, part of an argument about the nature of crime, and its motivation. But more importantly, the process of 'playing' with this data strikes me as central to a very different kind of research narrative than I am used to. I am not formulating questions, and then using the data to answer them - I am throwing together visualisations in search of contrasts that stand out, and look weird.

I am very much looking forward using the interactive elements of the Locating London's Past site to find anomalies and confusions that allow me to reformulate the questions I am asking.

Academic History Writing and its Disconnects

2011-10-23T08:05:00.000-07:00

This is the rough text of a short talk I am scheduled to deliver at a symposium on 'Future Directions in Book History' at Cambrdige on the 24th of November 2011.

I am on the programme as talking briefly about the ‘OldBailey Online and other resources’ (by which I assume is meant London Lives,Connected Histories, and Locating London’s Past, and the other websites I havehelped to create over the last ten or twelve years). But I am afraid Ihave no interest whatsoever in discussing the Old Bailey or the otherwebsites. The hard intellectual workthat went in to their creation was done between 1999 and 2010, and for the mostpart they have found an audience and a user base and will have their ownimpact, without me having to discuss them any further. We know how to do this stuff, and anyone canread the technical literature, and I very much encourage you to do so.

Instead, I want to talk about how the evolution of the formsof delivery and analysis of text inherent in the creation of the online,problematizes and historicises the notion of the book as an object, and as atechnology; and in the process problematizes the discipline of history itself as we practise it in the digital present.

The project of putting billions of words of keywordsearchable stuff out there is now nearing completion. We are within sightof that moment when all printed text produced between 1455 and 1923 (when the Disney Corporation has determined that the needs of modern corporate capitalism trumped the Enlightenment ideal), will be availableonline for you to search and read. Thevast majority of that text is currently configured to pretend to be made up of‘books’ and other print artefacts, But,of course, it is not. At some level itis just text – the difference between one book and the next a single line ofmetadata. The hard leather covers thatused to divide one group of words from another are gone; and every time youchoose to sit comfortably in your office reading a screen, instead of going toa library or an archive, while kidding yourself that you are still reading a ‘book’,you are in fact participating in a charade. We are swimming in deracinated, Google-ised, Wikipedia-ised text.

In other words, and let’s face it: the book as a technologyfor packaging and delivery, storing and finding text is now redundant. The underpinning mechanics that determinedits shape and form are as antiquated as moveable type. And in the process of moving beyond the book,we have also abandoned the whole post-enlightenment infrastructure of librariesand card catalogues (or even OPACS), of concordances, and indexes and tables ofcontents. They are all built around thebook, and the book is dead.

If this all sounds rather doom laden and apocalyptic – andno doubt we could argue about the rosy future and romantic appeal of the hardcopy book – it shouldn’t. At least asfar as the ‘history of the book’ is concerned these developments have beenentirely positive

First, it has allowed us to begin to escape the intellectualshackles that the book as a form of delivery, imposed upon us. If we can escape the self-delusion that weare reading ‘books’, the development of the infinite archive, and the creationof a new technology of distribution, actually allows us to move beyond the linearand episodic structures the book demands, to something different and morecomplex. It also allows us to moreeffectively view the book as an historical artefact and now redundant form ofcontrolling technology. The 'book' is newlyavailable for analysis.

The absence of books makes their study more important, moreinnovative, and more interesting. Italso makes their study much more relevant to the present – a present in whichwe are confronted by a new, but equally controlling and limiting technology fortransmitting ideas. By mentally escapingthe ‘book’ as a normal form and format, we can see it more clearly for what itwas. And to this extent, the death ofthe book is a fantastic and liberating thing – the fascism of the format is beaten.

At the same time, I think we are confronted by a profoundintellectual challenge that addresses the very nature of the historicaldiscipline. This transition from the‘book’, to something new, fundamentally undercuts what we do more generally as‘historians’. When you start to unpick the nature of the historicaldiscipline, it is tied up with the technologies of the printed page and thebook in ways that are powerful and determining. Our footnotes, our post-Rankean cross referencing and practises oftextual analysis are embedded within the technology of the book, and itslibrary.

Equally, our technology of authority – all the visual andtextual clues that separate a CUP monograph from the irresponsible musings of aknow-nothing prose merchant – are slipping away. While our professional identity – the titles, positions and honorifics – builtagain on the supposedly secure foundations of book publishing – is ever less compelling. So the question then becomes, is history – particularly inits post-Rankean, professional and academic form - dead? Are we losing that beautiful disciplinarycharacter that allows us to think beyond the surface, and makes possible complex analyses that transcend mere cleverness?

And on the face of it, the answer is yes – the renewed roleof the popular block buster, and an every growing and insecure emphasis onreadership over scholarship, would suggest that it is. In Britain we shy away from themetrics that would demonstrate ‘impact’ primarily because we fear that we may not have any.

Collectively we have put our heads in the sands, and ourarses in the air, and seemingly invited the world to take a shot. A single and self-evident instance thatevidences a deeper malaise is our current failure to bother citingwhat we read. We readonline journal articles, but cite the hard copy edition; we do keywordssearches, while pretending to undertake immersive reading. We search 'Google Books', and pretend we are not.

But even more importantly, we ignore the critical impact ofdigitisation on our intellectual praxis. Only 48% of the significant words in the Burney collection ofeighteenth-century newspapers are correctly transcribed as a result of poor OCR. This makes the other 52% completelyun-findable. And of course, from theperspective of the relationship between scholarship and sources, it is alwaysthe same 52%. My colleague Bill Turkel,describes this as the Las Vegas effect – all bright lights, and an invitationto instant scholarly riches, but with no indication of the odds, and no exitsigns. We use the Burney collectionregardless – not even bothering to apply the kind of critical approach thathistorians have built their professional authority upon. This is roulette dressed up as scholarship.

In other words, we have abandoned the rigour of traditionalscholarship. Provenance, edition,transcription, editorial practise, readership, authorship, reception – the things we query issues in relation to books, are left unexplored in relation to the online text we actually read.

And as importantly, the way we promulgate our ‘history’ hasnot kept up either. I want televisionprogrammes with footnotes, and graphs with underlying spreadsheets andsliders. Yes, I want narrative andanalysis, structure, point and purpose. I want to continue to be able to engage in the grand conversation thatis history; but it cannot continue to be produced as a ragged and impotent ghostof a fifteenth century technology; and if we don’t do something about it, wemight as well all go off and figure out how to write titillating tales ofeighteenth-century sex scandals, because at least they sell.

The book had a wonderful 1200 odd year history, which iscertainly worth exploring. Its form self-evidently controlled and informed significant aspects ofcultural and intellectual change in the West (and through the impositions ofEmpire, the rest of the world as well); but if, as historians, we are to avoidgoing the way of the book, we need to separate out what we think history isdesigned to achieve, and to create a scholarly technology that delivers it.

In a rather intemperate attack on the work of Jane Jacobs,published in 1962, Louis Mumford observed that:

‘… minds unduly fascinated bycomputers carefully confine themselves to asking only the kind of question thatcomputers can answer and are completely negligent of the human contents or the human results.’

LewisMumford, “The Sky Line "Mother Jacobs Home Remedies",” The New Yorker, December 1, 1962, p. 148

I am afraid that in the last couple of decades, historians who are undulyfascinated by books, have restricted themselves to asking only the kind ofquestions books can answer. Fifty yearsis a long time in computer science. Itis about time we found out if a critical and self-consciously scholarlyengagement with computers might not now allow us to more effectively addressthe ‘human contents’ of the past.

Culturomics, Big Data, Code Breakers and the Casaubon Delusion

2011-06-19T04:10:00.000-07:00

Suddenly it seems as if 'big data' humanities is all the crack; with quantitative biologists and mathematicians diving in where previously only historians, literary critics and linguists dared to swim. Digital humanists have been slowly engineering a new field from history and linguistics (aided and abetted by library science) for over a decade, gradually building new bodies of evidence, and road testing new methodologies. But in just the last year or so, the biologists and mathematicians, with Google's help, have stolen a march on all their puny efforts. In particular, it seems that Science and Nature have fallen head over heels in love with 'culturomics' and the heady enthusiasms of Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, and their Google ngram viewer. To read the most recent issue of Nature is to be confronted with a heady mix of big science and gushing Hello Magazine prose, that work to mythologise the new 'science' of culturomics and its creators. It feels like the birth of a myth and of a brand.

This is all rather wonderful, and I am a huge fan of the Google ngram viewer, and the playful way it allows scholars and students to engage with the 'infinite archive' of inherited texts. I think Aiden and Michel (and Google) have done the humanities a huge service. But their real achievements do not quite explain the cloud of hyperbole that seems to be rising around them.

And this made me wonder what is really at issue here? What is it about culturomics that turns on the reporters from Nature. At its heart, the use of word frequency with a reasonably sized (if problematic) data set simply provides one more form of evidence to be added to all the rest. Knowing that the term 'electricity' peaks between 1870 and 1900 is useful evidence, but does not provide either an explanation for why, or a description of how it is being used. Historians will no doubt look this particular gift horse in the mouth, and worry at the condition of its teeth; but they will also happily use the ngram viewer as one more component in a complex landscape of evidence. This use may be delayed by the peculiar lack of any guidance on how to cite the results of a search, but it will be normalised in due course.

But simply providing a new body of evidence is not what seems to get Nature going. Instead, it is the claim that the ngram viewer lays the basis for a new 'science', and that the results make other forms of historical analysis redundant. In the words of Aiden and Michel, somehow this data is uniquely available for 'scientific purposes', in contrast of other forms of evidence.

It is not, therefore, the mechanics of the ngram viewer that is at issue. Instead it is the underlying intellectual paradigm that Aiden and Michel bring to its use. They appear to claim to be able to read history from the patterns the ngram viewer exposes - to decipher significant patterns from the data itself. Their great party tricks (and they are particularly impressive in live performance) include the analysis of the decline of irregular verbs to a describable mathematical pattern, an equation, and the rise of 'celebrity' as measured by the number of times an individual is mentioned in print. These imply that all historical development can, like irregular verbs, be described in mathematical terms, and that 'human nature', like the desire for fame, can be used as a constant to measure the changing technologies of culture.

In some respects, we have been here before. In the demographic and cliometric history so popular through the 1970s and 80s, extensive data sets were used to explore past societies and human behaviour. The aspirations of that generation of historians were just as ambitious as are those of the parents of culturomics. But, demography and cliometrics started from a detailed model of how societies work, and sought to test that model against the evidence; revising it in light of each new sample and equation.

The difference with culturomics is that there is no pretence to a model. Instead, its practitioners will simply seek to discover patterns in the entrails of human speech, hoping to find the inherent meanings encoded there. What I think the scientific community finds so compelling is that like quantitative biology and DNA analysis, Aiden and Michel are using one of the controlling metaphors of 20th-century science, 'code breaking' and applying it to a field that has hitherto resisted the siren call of analytical positivism.

Since the 1940s the notion that 'codes' can be cracked to reveal a new understanding of 'nature' has formed the main narrative of science. With the re-description of DNA as just one more code in the 1950s, wartime computer science became a peacetime biological frontier (cashing in on big-pharma, as military expenditure declined). That Aiden comes from a background in DNA analysis should clue us to the fact that culturomics is an attempt to apply the same kind of code breaking to human society as a whole.

I strongly suspect that the project will fail, just as naive readings of DNA as a code for life have largely failed to fulfil their promise. But much more importantly, this attempt to repurpose a 'scientific' approach to historical analysis simply miss-understands the function of history itself. These large-scale visualisations of language may be the raw material of history, the basis for an argument, the foundation for a narrative, the evidence put in the appendix in support of a subtle point, but they do not serve as a work of history.

Historians interpret the past to the present. They marshal evidence and use all the tools of genre writing to allow a modern reader to engage with the past. And the questions they ask are not driven by the evidence, but by the needs of a modern society. Gender history, the history of sexuality, and of race, have been created by two generations of historians not because the archives are groaning under the weight of relevant evidence, but because our society needs to understand the role of these forces in the present. The fundamental flaw with culturomics is that it assumes that history is about the past; that what historians seek to achieve is an ever more accurate description of everything. Instead, it is about the present. Ironically, Aiden and Michel have rediscovered the 'Casaubon delusion'; and believe, like George Eliot's tragic figure, that they can create a new 'Key to all Mythologies'. They need to listen to the Dorotheas of this world.

Towards a New History Lab for the Digital Past

2011-04-01T03:03:00.000-07:00

The text of a talk delivered at the launch of the Connected Histories held at the Intitute of Historical Research, London, on 31 March 2011.

When the Institute of Historical Research was first established in 1921, its purpose and object was described as:

to become an index to historical knowledge, a focus of historical research, a clearing-house of historical ideas, and a historical laboratory open to students of all universities and all nations.

Institute of Historical Research leaflet, 1921

And those of you who know the IHR, as it has evolved through almost a century of change, will recognise in its seminars, in its unique open shelf library, and in its simple role as the centre of a community of historians, of students, and of the curious and argumentative, the continuing vibrancy of this original spirit and purpose.

In many respects, Connected Histories is a simple attempt to ensure that this spirit and objective continues to thrive online; that immediate access to 2 billion words and 150,000 images - searchable at the click of a mouse, and sharable across time and space – will enhance that community, and the history it creates.

www.connectedhistories.org

But Connected Histories is also a recognition that the nature of historical research has changed; that we are drowning in an infinite archive – an ever expanding world of information. And that the secure sense of a discipline that knew how to judge quality, how to assess evidence, is challenged by the sheer number of sources we can interrogate for words – at least - if not yet for meaning.

Given the privilege of a few minutes with a powerful audience, I want to do a couple of things this afternoon. First, I want to describe just what Connected Histories does and how it works. And in the process say a bit about why it is designed the way it is, and what issues it is meant to address. And second, I want to talk a bit about how it fits into a trajectory of changing research and publishing practise – to describe where it sits in a process of frighteningly rapid change, and to locate it along with the other resource being introduced today – Mapping Crime.

Connected Histories is what is called a ‘federated’ search facility, and currently makes some eleven different web resources available – over two billion words of text, and 150,000 images, some free to access, others supported by a JISC license for use in British Higher Education, and others still, commercial sites designed for a wider audience of family and local historians.

It includes

British History Online
British Museum Images
British Newspapers, 1600-1800
Charles Booth Archive
Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540-1835
House of Commons Parliamentary Papers
John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera
John Strype's Survey of London Online
London Lives 1690-1800
Origins Network
The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online, 1674-1913

And we are in the process of adding several more.

Underpinning its searches are indexes of every word in those eleven ‘distributed’ websites – each of which were chosen to represent large bodies of academically credible and relevant material. As a part of this index, each word is associated with a web address, a URL, that allows you to click through to the original. This creates a basic facility that in response to a word or phrase search will return tens of thousands of results, each associated with a snippet of text, and each linked to the full resource held elsewhere.

In other words, at its fundament and in its water, Connected Histories is simply a comprehensive index of words. But in the process of creating that index, we also sought to assign meaning to some of them. Using a methodology called natural language processing, we identified names and dates and places (to an accuracy of around 75%). So, in addition to an index of all the words in these 11 resources, we have also created indexes of all the names and places and dates mentioned: all the names in the Burney Collection, and all the dates in the Parliamentary Papers (however they are expressed).

In other words, what we have is not just one, but four indexes, and you are searching each of these 2 billion words, or the millions of names or dates or places, each time you enter a query – allowing you to combine keyword and name, date and place searches to find just what you want.

That it works is a testimony to the hard work of the technical staff at the HRI and IHR, to Kathy Rogers and Bruce Tate in particular. But also to Sharon Howard, who managed the project, and to the large team of people involved.

The starting point for this project was always an attempt to address what Digital Humanists tend to label the ‘silo effect’ – the idea that one of the problems with small scale websites and resources of the sort so many of us have worked to create over the last fifteen years, is that you tend to go along to one site – do a bit of research – before heading to another. That just like traditional forms of research most of us forget what we knew in the British Library, during the short walk to the London Metropolitan Archives.

And in its most basic formulation the silos Connected Histories seeks to blow apart, are the boundaries between web sites. You can now cross search the British Museum image collection, against Strype’s history of London, and associate images of specific locations, with descriptions and commentary on them. You can search the Parliamentary Papers, in combination with the records of all the sessions papers of the county of Middlesex – bringing onto a single screen precept and practise. There are sixty thousand settlement examinations that can now be cross referenced against apprenticeship documents, and trial records.

But this blithe image of easy cross searching, fundamentally understates the complexity of the issue, and the precise reasons Connected Histories is designed in the way that it is.

One overwhelming, and very real, aspect of the ‘silo effect’, is that while many of the primary sources we need are freely available, many others are not. The walls of some silos are much more difficult to breech than others. While frustrating, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Unless we can convince the state and the taxpayer to pay for universal digitisation, we can’t really complain if the cost of digital resources is being borne by the end users. Early modern and modern Britain is quite simply the most digitised where and when in existence, because of the combined efforts of the academy, of the great cultural institutions of Britain, of individual scholars, and private publishing companies motivated by profit. But, at the same time, as scholars and teachers, we need access to all those resources. Or at the least we need to know what is in them, in order to make an informed decision about what we want out of them.

The model of a series of indexes to the original material is precisely designed to address this issue. We don’t need to have direct access to all the products of ProQuest and Gale, of the Origins.net, or JISC funded projects like the John Johnson collection, if we have an index that tells us what they contain. These materials can sit behind their paywalls, the intellectual property they contain safe from harm; while we can now interrogate them from a distance.

In other words, Connected Histories is designed to build a bridge between the academy and commercial publishers; it is designed to mess up the models of delivery, and the walls of division that keep us apart. These ‘silos’ are almost philosophical in character, but even more than the technical ones that divide one website from another, they need to be breeched; and that is part of what this project has been about.

But, the silo effect goes beyond even this. It exists between our own ears as well. At its best and most compelling, history is a community of scholars, sharing knowledge and effort in pursuit of a real and usable understanding of the past – it is a collective project. At its worst, it is a collection of egomaniacs, desperate to be lauded as the great authority on this or that – however specialised and narrow that might be. The much lamented lone scholar is as frequently a Casaubon, forever seeking and failing to find the key to all knowledge; as they are a Dorothea, driven by enthusiasm and a desire to share with others. At some level, the ‘silo effect’ is inherent in the idea of ‘authorship’ (and the ‘authority’ it implies). It is there when we decide one persons’ work is literature, and another is art history; when we label by period or methodology, when we decide who to exclude from the conversation, and who to include.

We do not all need to work collaboratively, or to abandon our notions of intellectual property, but in the spirit of a ‘history lab’, we do need to share our work, and remember the common purpose of historical research. And Connected Histories is again an attempt to address these particular silos.

By creating individual workspaces that build into a new body of ‘connections’ , by allowing users to link documents, and names, and stuff, across billions of words, and then pooling those links and allowing them to be explored by a wider public; Connected Histories, is designed to build a new shared body of knowledge grounded in everyday practical scholarship. It is designed to nudge the lone scholar to become a more sociable animal.

In many respects all these ‘silos’ are part of our inheritance from the Enlightenment. They are inherent in every library catalogue, and in the practise of individual scholarship leading to named authorship. They reflect the co-evolution of the academic community, in a symbiotic death grip, with commercial publishing; and they were imported without fanfare or thought, into what one might want to describe as Web 1.0 – that first iteration of the internet created in the image of older forms of scholarship and communication – with e-mail, e-spreadsheets, e-footnotes, e-everything – all mimicking an older intellectual technology.

In other words, there is a bigger ‘silo’ out there – a division that is more fundamental to the internet and the cultures of scholarship than the mere distance between the technical implementation of British History Online, on one hand, and The Burney Newspapers or the Old Bailey on the other.

Yes, we want to consult this material in one go; and yes we need to overcome the boundaries, created by pay walls and subscription; and yes we want historians to work together in a common laboratory of ideas and connections. But, what really needs to break down is the silo that suggests that information itself is something to be consulted and collected; that it is an unchanging object of study, rather than a pool of constantly changing stuff that can be interrogated from any angle, and pursued along any trajectory.

The most fundamental silo Connected Histories is intended to address is between traditional forms of criticism and scholarship that assume we can contain data in an internally structured and divided, ‘library’; and the emerging world of text and data mining, that sees data as a process – something to be played with and analysed on a massive scale, across boundaries of genre and type.

The innovation at the heart of Connected Histories, the one I think is most interesting, is the methodology used to allow us to sit in London this afternoon, and locate the site and its gubbins in the IHR; while the indexes it interrogates sit on a server in Sheffield – which distributes pointers to eleven different servers around the country.

What has been created by the Institute and the Humanities Research Institute in Sheffield, is a model that uses an ‘API’ as its core. An API is an Application Programming Interface (the most widely used version of which is Google Maps), and it is designed to allow you to create a simple query that can address a dataset from a distance (in this case four indexes). It is not a website, or a ‘front end’, it doesn’t need to exist as a visual or physical thing. It is essentially a series of agreed conventions that allow anyone to address a web resource and ask it for a bit of the data it contains. What Connected Histories does, is locate the ‘front end’ in London, with information about the sources, with the workspace and connections, etc., but that front end’s main job is to address the API in Sheffield, to gather the data required from the indexes, to bundle it up into an xml file, and to present it in an attractive way to the end user who can then navigate to the original sites, create links, and share searches.

In other words, the indexes in Sheffield have been created as a standardised and generic resource, which is then addressed by a specialised and bespoke search and save environment.

For most of us, this is a seamless process of little interest; but what it does is create a space between search and data, that can now be occupied by anyone. In other words, and unlike most free-standing websites - it is designed to be mash-upable.

With a bit of technical nous you can now generate a bit of code that will automatically select and download the contents of all the indexes, reflecting all the words in Connected Histories. The text miners who do this will not be gaining access to the original resources – there is no intellectual property issue here (beyond that of this project). There is no question of them being able to recreate the sites so laboriously constructed by whatever business or academic model was employed to create them in the first instance; but they will have access to what amounts to a detailed description of the contents of it all – the index of every word, and name and place and date.

Or to put it another way, the API architecture breaks down the structures of online resources into their component parts – separates out data from processing, from delivery - allowing each to be re-used and re-purposed. At the moment it looks like a traditional website with a single front end and datastore, but that front end can address more than one data store; and the datastore can be addressed by more than one front end.

The API architecture addresses that final wall, that silo that means that providers are on one side and data consumers, forced to query the data through an ever narrowing front end, are on the other. Suddenly, we are all mixed up in the infinite archive.

To my way of thinking, this comes under the heading of an unalloyed good thing. An outcome that liberates data, while protecting it; that makes for better history (whoever is writing it), and contributes to the democratisation of scholarship.

But it is only one step in a longer journey; and I want to spend the next few minutes pointing up three or four directions, that I think Connected Histories helps make possible; or which seem to grow naturally from it.

And the first is to do with those academic text miners, suddenly empowered to access ridiculously large bodies of data. What do you do with a 2 billion word index?

What I want to do, is to begin the process of modelling what recorded language since Gutenberg, looks like; how does vocabulary change; how do genre evolve; how are ideas passed from medical literature to political science, to novels; how is changing technology and a changing environment reflected in changing texts. In a sense, half of the last century was taken up in worrying about whether text, words, reflected a knowable universe, or were themselves controlling discourses, leaving humans powerless to imagine something new or describe something real – held captive in words.

I like to describe what we can now access as ‘massive text objects’ – too large read, too complex to be contained in traditional taxonomies. But, if we can begin to model them – if we can know both the absolute amount of language recorded; and how it changes from source to source, and decade to decade, we can use it in a more sophisticated way to trace first, the controlling forms of language, but also to more securely tie description to an underlying and knowable historical past. If you know the shape, and texture of what has survived, you can begin to think through how it might relate to Herbert Butterfield’s, ‘...genuine relationship with the actual…’.[Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, (George Bell and Sons: 1950), p. 73. See also Michael Eamon, ‘A "Genuine Relationship with the Actual": New Perspectives on Primary Sources, History and the Internet in the Classroom’, The History Teacher 39.3 (2006): 32 pars. 6 Sep. 2006]

It is in text mining massive text objects that the hope of a new empiricism in historical analysis lies.

But for myself, I suspect there also something else also going on. The urge to create new connections, to escape our inherited taxonomies, can already be seen in projects such as Mapping Crime – being demonstrated later today. By tying material related to crime available through the John Johnson Collection of printed Ephemera to other repositories and other genre, a reconstructed set of links begins to emerge, that confound the structures created by librarianship. The data itself, its newly digital form, seems to suggest the need for new connections.

And the API model at the heart of Connected Histories is itself an attempt to embed this idea and aspiration at the core of the design process. It assumes that new connections are there to be made, and that they will inevitably cross boundaries of form and origin to encompass an ever expanding body of inherited artefact.

To take just a small example, we will soon be able to geo-reference at least a portion of the place names in Connected Histories, tying all that text to space in new ways. By modelling maps in the way that we are beginning to model massive text objects, we can relate historical geography to present geography, to secure a further line between representation and a knowable past; and by using an API methodology we are ensuring that it is all mash-upable, with resources from wherever they come. By September (if we keep to schedule), we will have the ability to mash-up eighteenth century London as found in the Old Bailey, and in London Lives, in Google Maps, with a rectified version of Rocque’s 1746 map of London, in combination with around 3 million artefacts dating from the period, dug up by the Museum of London.

This JISC funded project is in hand, and is in many ways the natural outcome of what has been described as the spatial turn in historical studies. But by putting an API at the heart of the system, it will again facilitate the re-use and re-imagination of what we can do with a few billion lines of data.

And, of course, we can take the same approach to that other great inherited body of evidence: objects. The historians and the museums will work together eventually (the logic is too ridiculously obvious to need re-enforcing), and at that point, the ability to cross reference maps and texts and objects, again will begin to change how we can evidence the past.

And if we could add to the museum collections, that other massive online record of surviving historical artefacts; that other massive resource digitised by accident – the auction catalogues – we would have created an entirely new resource, available in a new way. Auction catalogues have been created as online, digital resources for over a decade, and already contain detailed descriptions and images of millions of objects: the record of what individuals have valued and preserved on their own behalf, from the past. And thousands more images and descriptions are added each month.

Again, these represent a massive lens through which we can observe the past, and a silo dividing related and cognate materials. Connecting them to texts and maps and stuff, will help us better understand the whole.

It is intended that Connected Histories will grow over time. In its first update in September the National Archives ‘documents online’ will be added, as well as two key nineteenth-century resources: 65,000 digitised British Library books from the Jisc Historic Books Platform and the JSTOR collection of pamphlets on social and political issues. Suggestions for additional content are welcome.

But beyond more text, we are confronted with the challenge of integrating more different things. And with each new variety of stuff, we move to a different kind of understanding, more sophisticated, better articulated, more firmly rooted in a clear model of what it is we are looking at; what we can securely see, and what we can’t.

All in all, I think it is kind of cool.

But I also think it remains part of that bigger project:

to become an index to historical knowledge, a focus of historical research, a clearing-house of historical ideas, and a historical laboratory open to students of all universities and all nations.

Connected Histories.

Urbanism Kolkata Style

2011-01-13T08:58:00.000-08:00

I recently spent a week at a workshop in Kolkata organised by the British Library and the National Library of India, designed to lay the foundations for a project to digitise early Bengali Books (1778-1914). In many respects it was a wonderful experience, and the project is incredibly worthwhile (though it will be difficult to implement). But this was also my first visit to India, and my first visit to what might be called a 'mega-city', and the experience has forced me to revisit some aspects of how I have been conceptualising urban living, and in particular the nature of eighteenth and nineteenth century London.

A couple of years ago I visited Marrakesh and was struck by the essentially orderly character of what is a relatively poor and very crowded urban environment. By contrast, what struck me in Kolkata was the extent to which urban growth seemed to have outstripped the city's ability to discipline behaviour. At around seven million people at midday, and four million at midnight, Kolkata is both one of the worlds most recently created cities, and a city occupied by a rapidly burgeoning population drawn primarily from its own rural hinterland. The city lived up to many stereotypes - crowded streets, fearsome pollution, and traffic that worked like fairground dodgems. And while there were fewer beggars (either children or the disabled) than I had expected, and while I saw little evidence of malnutrition, there were ragged shanties and street people around every corner.

But what surprised me was the nature of the rubbish. It seemed to pile up along every roadside, untended and ignored. And it seemed to be made up overwhelmingly of small bits of plastic, mixed with dust. There was little evidence of large amounts of organic matter - no rotting fruit, or vegetables, fly specked bones or industrial by-products. At one level it seemed the least varied or interesting rubbish I had ever seen - and it seemed to sit entirely unregarded, unmoved and unchanging.

My only explanation for this phenomenon is that, first, everything that could be recycled, re-used, turned to any account whatsoever, had been sifted from the pile and moved on. And second, that there was no working system in place to remove the last, uneconomic residuum.

As a historian of the urban environment this seems to me to re-enforce the profound inter-relationship between the economics of city life (its wealth), and the need for cultural controls on the behaviour of each individual urban dweller in order to make a city work. In essence, what it confirmed for me is the extent to which living in a city requires the kind of detailed social and cultural system that could remove the rubbish; and that such cultural and bureaucratic systems can only be sustained in the face of measured growth - and that they can easily breakdown in the face of rapid migration.

When cities grow quickly as Kolkata certianly has; when behaviours and systems of bodily maintenance fitted for small holdings and low-density living, are practised in a high-density urban environment, the result in this instance seemed to approach the unliveable; or at least a form of urban dystopia.

In relation to the history of London, this observation seems to me to both emphasise the extent to which the city in the eighteenth century was able to maintain a culturally disciplined series of behaviours that both ensured that the rubbish was coralled to the correct place on the street; and that it was not allowed to stay there - poor neighbourhoods seldom tipped irredeemably into chaos. It also suggests that the evolution of the nineteenth-century rookery formed an outpost of disfunctional urbanism that can be mapped against rural in-migration. But, most importantly, this experience has re-enforced a belief that 'urban living' can be conceptualised as a distinct cultural phenomenon that takes similar forms across the globe - that being a city dweller is first and foremost about sharing a cultural system built on specifically urban forms of behaviour.

The Conundrums of Assessment

2010-11-29T10:05:00.000-08:00

To my chagrin I recently realised that I have been assessing research proposals and grant applications for some twenty years, and have done so for most of the major humanities and social science funders in the UK, Europe and North America. Over the last ten years I have also sat on numerous grant awarding panels, and helped to design the odd funding programme. I have form in this particular small area of academic life. So when I was asked for advice about how to write an assessment by a colleague faced with their first request of this sort, I felt obliged to offer some. And since there is no independent body of advice about how the system works, or how the panels who arbitrate on the final decision use the reports drawn up by assessors, it seemed worthwhile posting that advice:

In the UK, funding bodies have made great efforts to train assessors, and brief them on what is expected; and to all intents and purposes have created a system that seems transparent and clear, with apparently precise criteria laid out in straightforward prose. A great deal of effort has also been put into the supporting documentation in an attempt to ensure that assessments can be compared against one another, and that the process of decision making undertaken by the panels is speedy and uncontentious. A real attempt has been made to eliminate special pleading, conflicts of interest, and the administratively perverse. But, of course, all bureaucratic systems are also cultural systems, and there remain many unstated realities that effectively determine how a grant application and the assessments written in response to it, are read by the people charged with eventually sifting the funded from the unfunded.

The single most important and determining factor that every assessor needs to keep in mind is that most funding programmes have a success rate of around 20-25% (some as low as 10%). From a panel's perspective, four out of five applications must be rejected. As a result even small issues and problems in an otherwise exemplary application will be used to make a determination. After reading perhaps thirty solid projects (and these days few applications are less than solid) and when faced with the need to find just five or six to fund, any panel, however well meaning or intelligent its individual members, will begin to reach for the smallest weakness.

As an assessor you need to be aware of this problem. This does not mean that you simply laud your favoured project to the skies. If you do, your assessment will be judged to be insufficiently critical, and therefore worthless. Instead, it means that if you seriously think a project is likely to be better than 80% of the others, you need to act as a critical advocate, and to place yourself at the heart of the debate that the application you are assessing will inevitably generate.

There will always be one or two applications that sit on the top of the pile, and if you are assessing one of these you can give yourself the freedom to engage with the underlying ideas, and to simply discuss the project's importance for a wider field. Even in this instance, you might want to suggest where small problems might exist, but have been effectively addressed.

But these few, intellectually exciting and beautifully realised projects are rare and are consistently funded. Where all the debate will be focussed is over the next tranche of projects. This usually comprises some 40% of the total. In a panel meeting (and regardless of how they are organised) the grading schema inevitably breaks down, and this 40% of applications start to bunch around the boundary grades. Most panels give up on whole number grading of the sort the funders recommend, and end up using some form of 4.257, or 4-+(?) (if they are dominated by older academics from the Russell Group). If you are asked to assess an application of this sort, the first decision you need to make is whether you think it should be funded; and having made that decision (assuming it is positive) you need to act as an advocate.

In other words, the first thing that any assessor needs to do is make an informed, over-arching judgement about the quality and importance of the application in front of them. If you think the application you are assessing is compelling, although not so strong as to sit on the top of the pile, then you need to say so, and say why. Alternatively, if it is in the bottom 50%, for either technical or intellectual reasons (i.e. not exciting, or not practical, or just not well written) there is little point in expending your time struggling to find something good to say. It will not affect the outcome, and it is likely to be fed back to the applicant in a way that just encourages them to resubmit something similar, instead of something better.

For myself, I start of with a basic question in my mind: Am really excited by the project? Has it caught my imagination, and left me thinking that I would actually want to know the outcome? Would I want to read the book? Or in a Knowledge Transfer context, would it make a significant social difference?

A minority of academic projects get past this hurdle. As a result, the real problem comes with the next stage, which is that while the intellectual case needs assessing (and if you are excited by the project, this is the easy bit) it is essentially all the things around it that will be used to exclude marginal projects. If the project plan (with methodology and budgeting etc.) looks less than professional and doable, the application will be excluded on these grounds. But if the fundamental idea is exciting and you decide you want to support it, regardless of its minor faults, you will need to deal with these issues directly and explicitly. If you don't, the curmudgeon in the corner (and there is always one) will use these small issues to denigrate the project - generally as a stratagem to promote their own discipline or methodology or favoured project. In this context, if you see a weakness, you need to address it directly and explain why it is not important to the success of the project.

My feeling is that you need to exercise an abstract academic and professional judgement, and in the round (regardless of the hoops and bureaucratic forms the funders want you to jump through) come to a conclusion about the worth of the project. Once you do this, you are duty bound to do everything you can to ensure that the result is positive, in full recognition that most projects, including innumerable worthy ones, wont be funded. This can lead to a rather instrumental and manipulative approach (which is a problem), but it at least has the advantage of allowing us to exercise the kind of judgement that is implied in peer review even when the process feels like bureaucratic games playing.

A Review to be published in the Economic History Review

2010-11-18T04:05:00.000-08:00

Phil Withington, Society in early modern England: the vernacular origins of some powerful ideas. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010. Pp. xi + 298. 23 figs. 14 illus. ISBN 9780745641300 Pbk. £16.99)

10129

This volume does something new, remarkable and important. It uses a quantitative approach to the evolution of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century language and word use as the basis for a re-analysis of the significance of corporatism and sociability in the creation of a ‘modern’, and more specifically ‘early modern’ society. In the process, it attempts to re-integrate the economic and the cultural, the linguistic and the material.

Following an extended and sophisticated account of the development of the profession of economic and social history in Britain since the nineteenth century, organised around the evolution of the phrase ‘early modern’, Withington dives into an entirely innovative form of analysis. The core of this study is a new mapping of the appearance of a series of key words in the titles of all the books that appear in the English Short Title Catalogue for the period up to 1700. ‘Modern’, ‘Society’, ‘Company’, ‘Wit’, ‘Civil’, ‘Commonwealth’, among a host of related terms, have been trawled from the full title fields of the ESTC, and transformed into frequency graphs. These graphs have then been used to illustrate, first, that terms signifying and labelling a specific kind of ‘modernity’ (based in a notion of what Withington terms the ‘sociable self’), became prominent in the latter half of the sixteenth century, and in particular during the 1570s and 80s. And second, that terms like ‘commonwealth’, which referenced an older form of social ordering, went into relative decline (particularly after the Civil Wars).

Withington’s conclusions essentially re-enforce a growing consensus among historians about the importance of sociability and forms of corporatism in creating a transitional Res Publica, (in this context a kind of beer and skittles ‘public sphere’), that contributed to and resulted from both a newly decentralised but bureaucratic state, and the development of corporate capitalism (with a remarkably sociable scientific revolution thrown in for good measure). In many respects, and in company with Keith Wrightson, Mike Braddick, Steve Hindle and Andy Wood, Withington is pushing back the origins of Jürgen Habermas’s ‘authentic public sphere’ from the 1690s to the 1570s, and attempting to articulate the relationship between ‘modernity’ (in both its statist and possessive individualist forms) and civic humanism.

As a description of early modern English and British culture, and the evolution of the state and the economy, this is entirely compelling. Habermas’ chronology, based on coffee and newsprint, has always been suspect even if his overarching analysis of the role of public debate in the history of the nation state remains compelling. More problematic is the methodology Withington uses to illustrate this new chronology.

As historians we are faced with an entirely new kind of evidence – mass digitised text - billions of words, retrievable through keyword searches. To make sense of these new resources we need new tools; and this book is a laudable first attempt at creating precisely these. Unfortunately the methodology used here is essentially unconvincing. What appears on a title page of a book, on the colophon, and end papers, changed dramatically between the late fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries – the very nature of a book changed. For all the heroic efforts of cataloguers and bibliographers to force early modern print objects into a single format, to tame their ‘slipperiness’, it is not credible to read the title of a book published in 1520 in the same way as one produced in 1690. Nor is it necessary to take this aggressively reductionist approach. Withington could, for instance, have translated the text of his titles in to a formal corpus, and used the tools of quantitative linguistics to chart the rise and fall of his ‘keywords’ against more robust measures of textual density, variety and proximity. By restricting himself to only the most basic statistical techniques we are left with a series of graphs measuring change in a way that at first sight seems intuitively reasonable, indeed common sensical, but which belie all the subtle complexity that historians have found in language through the many decades of the linguistic turn. In essence, what Withington has produced is a clear and compelling narrative of the evolution of the ‘sociable self’, and an equally clear series of measures charting the development of the language of title pages, but has not effectively related one to the other.

This will seem a harsh criticism, but it is not meant to be. As a profession we are confronted with both the real challenge of dealing with massive electronic texts (produced in half a dozen different ways, and of hugely varying quality), and the need to create usable and intellectually credible tools that can both deal with words in their billions, and at the same reflect our new understanding of the complexity hidden in a single phrase. Dr Withington has taken an all-important first step in the direction of a new form of historical scholarship and we should all look forward to the next.

University of Hertfordshire TIM HITCHCOCK

A Couple of Eighteenth-Century Ballads

2010-07-23T03:47:00.000-07:00

I have recently been involved in a couple of projects that allowed me to engage with the eighteenth century in a very different way than I am used to. I was involved - in a non-musical capacity! - in helping to create recordings of a couple of eighteenth-century ballads.

The first is a ballad the only copy of which (at least as for as I know) is in the British Library, and is titled The Workhouse Cruelty. I first came across this piece in the early 1980s, and haven't really done anything with it since. But, when I was asked to provide a ballad that would help illustrate a case about a murder in a workhouse for Voices from the Old Bailey on Radio 4, it immediately sprang to mind. The nice thing is that the producer, Elizabeth Burke, then went out and had a recording of it made. The result is here:

This particular recording seems a little sweet to me, and lacking in the political grit of the original rough printed version. And I suspect that it was originally sung by a man - of the sort known as a 'chanting' ballad singer (they normally specialised in durge-like religious songs). But it nevertheless made me want to think harder about how one interprets the words, and how one re-constructs the soundscape in which it was performed.

This then encouraged me to have a go at commissioning a recording myself. Francis Place's papers contain the words of a dozen or so, primarily bawdy, ballads he recalled from his youth in the 1780s. The really nice thing about Place's notes, is that he described where he heard them sung - behind St Clements church, etc - and by whom - two young women - and when - in the evening. The ballad I was particularly interested in was Jack Chance, which Place describes as being sung just after the Gordon Riots. As I was giving a lecture on the Riots, it seemed a natural thing to accompany it. I was also familiar with a printed version of this particular song, mis-dated at 1795, and retitled as Just the thing, among the digital collection at ECCO. I integrated the two versions to eliminate some of the blanks in Place's version and asked a friend of my son's, Henry Skewes, to write the music. Unlike most 18th century ballads, no tune was mentioned as being used with this one. Henry wrote the music, and asked another friend Stephanie Waldheim to sing it. The upshot is:

Jack Chance: Or Just the Thing

Music and arrangement by Henry Skewes;
performed by Stephanie Waldheim and Henry Skewes
copyright: 2010, Henry Skewes, Stephanie Waldheim and Tim Hitchcock.

This version has been translated from its original AAC Audio format to a mp3 format, and has developed a few oddities, but you get the point.

One way or another, this experience has taken me back to Bruce Smith's wonderful, but seldom cited, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor. It has also reminded me that there is a lot to do to recreate a neighbourhood soundscape, but that if one could, it would help; and that perhaps it is time to have a go.

Can we make a thesaurus of meanings for digital humanities?

2010-07-02T04:11:00.000-07:00

In an idle moment I have been re-reading the introduction to Roget's Thesaurus, and have been struck by what a thesaurus actually does. It breaks up all words in to one of eight categories and assigns a number to each category. "Affections", for instance, is class eight. It then subdivides these categories in to more sub-categories, with "cheerfulness" falling under "Pleasure and Pleasurableness", and being assigned a number of 868 - after discontent (867) and before solemnity (869). If you then look up 868 - cheerfulness, it is divided again into 20 further subcategories, with around 15 words in each category. So, "gladden" falls under 868.6, and as it is the second word in the category, could be expressed as 868.6.2. The second half of the thesaurus simply lists all these words in alphabetical order to allow the user access to the hierarchy of meaning in the first half.

In other words, a thesaurus assigns a numerical value, that equates to one or more category of meaning for every word it contains.

If you took a large body of text - ten years of the Times, or everything published in 1840 - and broke it up into a set of words, and assigned each word a number from the thesaurus's hierarchy, you would end up with a unique numerical representation of the collected meaning of the words that make up the text.

If you take the sentence 'the sunlight warmed his forehead' and convert it into its thesaurus equivalents, you end with 334.10.7; 328.17.3; 239.5

It can be equated with: "The midday sun cooked his brow", which is 334.10.11; 328.17.20; 239.5

This would allow a kind of semantic search that was not dependent on direct context, and would not be universal, but would work perfectly well for historical text in English (all the better suited to historical material, as Roget was a late Enlightenment figure, and his categories map well on to historical text). There would remain an issue of disambiguation (making a distinction between "clip" as a noun, versus "clip" as a verb); but this could be mitigated either though mathematical approximations (you could create a third unique number that essentially averaged the two or more meanings assigned to any single word), or you could simply live with the errors generated, on the assumption that the historians are used to filtering their own reading. You could also apply the chronological data contained in the Oxford Historical Thesaurus to map how close (or distant) an individual text is to standard usage for a particular period; or how different genre relate to a standard evolving language (how literature vs law treatises map onto accepted usage in the decade they were written).

As we are confronted by massive text objects (I think the notion from linguistics of a corpora is less useful for historians who are seeking to find information, rather than define bodies of text), the ability to locate related or similar text across genre and texts is important. It would also be another way of approaching the measurement of "distance" between texts.

Alternatively, and this is closer to Roget's original scheme you could use this numerical labelling as a basic form of computer aided reading. You could, for instance, assign a colour to each broad category, and a shade of that colour to each sub-category; allowing you to identify the work that different parts of the text is doing, through a simple visual examination. When skimming through a large body of text, at perhaps 40 pages on a single screen, the colour coding would allow you to identify areas in which "affections" are directly discussed, or any of the other thesaurus categories - "Space", or "Physics" or "Matter".

Have I missed something - Does anyone know why we don't use a thesaurus based numerical hierarchy to code meaning in large texts? It would give you a "word" = "a set of numbers" (an unique number for each major word) in a paragraph or sentence or text division, which could then be compared statistically, or colour coded to reflect the breadth of meaning found. Or you could colour code for types of words and locate relevant sections in a large text in a particular colour. It just seems dead obvious as a way of moving towards the ideal at the heart of the semantic web, while avoiding the creation of 'triples', and the ever retreating promise of universality. My guess is either that librarians having been doing this for the last thirty years and not telling me (librarians are cruel that way), or that the rest of the world forgot to read the introduction to Roget's Thesaurus, which is also possible. Of course, the final possibility is that I don't understand the semantic web; and that ontologies in aggregate are already a form of thesaurus.

A New History From Below

2010-04-02T07:48:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I argued in a review essay in History Workshop Journal for the need to rethink the history from below tradition, to take into account both the changing nature of how we find information on the internet - what the creation of new resources makes possible - and also how Western European progressive politics have changed over the last twenty years. Coming on the heels of the posting of the Old Bailey Online I suspect this argument struck some as a bit hubristic. Several historians certainly expressed the view that there was nothing wrong with the original version, and that I was, in any case, not in a position to change it. A couple of years later, in a remarkably sneering (and ill-informed) review of two books based on the Old Bailey, books that were preliminary experiments in trying to create a new history from below, Nicholas Rogers lambasted and mocked that work and intellectual direction. This response made me feel rather wary of publishing much of anything, for fear of offending a generation of historians whose work I respect, but who don't seem to warm to much of anything new. Instead, I just got on with the task of posting large bodies of historical manuscripts on the web, on the assumption that democratic access to primary sources was an unproblematic good thing, and that perhaps I should leave intellectual innovation to people like Nicholas Rogers.

But, I was recently invited to Brussels by Hugo Soly, to give a lecture on my work to his MA class, and as a part of this, had to revisit a 'new history from below' and attempt to explain what I had meant, in terms that would make sense to an audience more interested historiography than technology. Where I ended up was re-convincing myself that we do need a new history from below, and that there is an opportunity to create a form of history that engages with the present, makes proper use of online resources, and which moves with both the technology and the politics of now.

What I said to Hugo Soly's students was that a new history from below is new, and needs to be new, for precisely three reasons.

First, because the relationship between the individual and the state has changed. It seems to me that the Western European mixed welfare state is as good as it is going to get for the moment, and so we need a history from below that is not focussed solely on raising political consciousness in strictly idealogical terms; but instead takes as its object how the individual forces the state to deliver the goods of a good life. As a result, this ‘New’ history from below, should be precisely focussed on how paupers and prisoners, the poor and the benighted, navigate the emerging institutions of the modern state – and how their behaviour (and agency) shape those institutions. Everyone knows that a school, or a prison, or a hospital, or a university, is a subtle compact – a conspiracy – between guard and prisoner, doctor and patient, teacher and student. This new history from below should be about how to write about the prisoner, the patient and the student when they speak to power.

Second, it is new because the one lesson that the interminable ‘linguist turn’ should have taught us was that language is a technology. If we now know the subtle stratagems of textuality, then we ought to be able to use those strategies in a more self-conscious way, to self-consciously manipulative the reader. In other words, what is new, is the recognition that it is not enough to write truth, or to do good research; and that what is needed is writing that makes the best use of the technology of emotions and representation – how you use words and pictures and a story to impact, not just on what people think, but on what they see in their mind’s eye. I always come back to the notion of a simulcra – the idea that literary representation is made up of a few fragments of information that are used to represent the whole. In history writing, in which the details about a single poor person might add up to nothing but a few lines in an account book, that notion, that idea that you can use a single detail to represent the whole, becomes even more important than in fiction. When you add, for instance, the colour of a jacket, or the weather on a given afternoon, to a bald list drawn from the boring records of administration – it brings someone to life. In some ways this is just about good writing of a sort historians used to value, but given the mountains of poor writing that are published every year, by academics who think their sheer brilliance makes up for their deadly prose, this remains new.

And finally, the most obvious newness, is the internet. In the last ten years the nature of what can be found has changed out of all recognition. In the London Lives project, and The Old Bailey Online, in the Burney Collection and Parliamentary Papers Online, we have a remarkable haystack, and a powerful magnet with which to search out its needles. And if you add to that Google Books, The Times Digital Archive and all the rest, suddenly for eighteenth century London at least, 80% of every word published, and 10% or 20% of every pen stroke, every manuscript, can be searched electronically. This means the archive, the search, can be thoroughly re-configured around groups of individuals, rather than archives themselves. London is uniquely well-served in this regard, but the infinite archive of electronic texts is building. And it is being used by people in their millions. The internet, in other words, both creates a new audience, and is a way of re-configuring research from the archive and the institution to the individual – to the pauper, the prisoner and patient.

Revisiting this material has made me more optimistic about history writing, and what is possible, and it seemed a good moment to set out a stall, and see if anyone is interested.

Milk and madeleines

2009-12-07T01:01:00.000-08:00

I just finished watching the film, Milk, and it immediately took me back to a place I left long ago, stirring memories made somehow clearer with distance. Between the ages of eight and eighteen, between 1965 and 1976, I lived just off Castro Street in San Francisco, and processed my way through the local schools. I owned that street in a way only a child can, and could easily have been one of the teenagers in the historical shots with which the film begins. I was the hippy jam in the sandwich between an older working class San Francisco, and the Gay community.

I liked the film, but more than this it put me in mind of that neighbourhood before the Gay revolution – the storefront theatres that showed silent movies to the overwhelming smell of dope; the Castro Theatre (25 cents for a double bill and a floor sticky with someone else’s spilt coke), the Italian deli, the five and dime; the old fashioned candy store and the green and white street cars and electric buses – the smell of the ocean, wet wool, and fog.

But, as well as being a bullied hippy in the local schools (in retrospect my habit of riding a unicycle to school in a top hat, while wearing a peasant smock, was ill-advised), I was also part of a wider community. My mother and grandparents were Italian, and that meant I had some connections with the Irish, Filipino and Chicano communities, which with the Italians, were knitted together by unionism and the church, and which dominated the neighbourhood. My school friends were all confirmed, and to ignore St Patrick’s Day was to invite serious physical abuse. I never wore the local boy’s uniform of Ben Davis black jeans, a white shirt (a blue striped one for work), blue canvas jacket, and shiny black shoes, but I knew I should have done. I also went to James Lick Junior High School (Castro and 26th St.) – an institution designed to produce boys and girls able to work on the docks and in light manufacture, as electricians and carpenters, ship's pilots and engineers, and as secretaries and seamstresses. Carlos Santana is the school's only famous alumni.

Milk is a great story of the political liberation of the Gay community – all those kids running away from Minnesota and Kansas; small town Mississippi and rural Oklahoma. The rise of identity politics that it charts is a wonderful one that needs to be celebrated. But, the new community created in the process was located just in my neighbourhood; just in those few streets I thought were my own.

It is not my sense of loss, however, that strikes me now. I used to be angry that the ‘New York street games Olympics’ was first held at my school in San Francisco (the notion that there was an equally vibrant local kid’s culture was simply laughed at). Instead, Milk brought to mind that older working class, Irish, Italian, Filipino, and Chicano community that was destroyed in the process of creating this new politics of identity.

What is not reflected in Milk is the pre-existence of a wider working class politics, and union based socialism that had been at the heart of local San Francisco politics for sixty years (in hard-fought competition with big-money republicanism). Harry Bridges, the leader of the communist inspired San Francisco general strike and west coast dock workers action of 1934 was still living in the neighbourhood in the 1970s (I met him once and his daughter was a contemporary of mine at James Lick Junior High).

The killer, Dan White is used to represent all those traditions. And at some level, I cannot help but recognise in him the Catholic firemen and policemen, plumbers, painters and electricians (and managers of clean-room silicon chip manufacturing sites) that my schoolmates went on to become. But these were not illiberal bigots. They were inheritors of American socialism; of the dream of seeing working people able to care for their children; to see them educated and secure.

Harvey Milk was a Republican, a small business man, a libertarian; and identity politics is libertarian in its very marrow. The problem, for me, for the morality I learned on the streets of San Francisco, is that those identities and that politics don’t seem to leave a lot of room for working men and women, for children and old people, for all those individuals whose ‘identity’ isn’t quite special enough.

Towards the end of the film Milk is shown parroting the rightwing line of the decade – America, “love or leave it”. I left it in favour of the Western European welfare state, and I have not a single regret in having done so. But the film made me want to pay homage to and to mark the passing of a working class politics that once held sway in San Francisco. If it was in part socially conservative and intolerant of difference, it also cared for the weak, and sought to make simple labour and social contribution something that defined a life well spent.

A Review: The Diary of Edmund Harrold

2009-01-23T03:29:00.000-08:00

This is a pre-print of a review commissioned for publication in the Economic History Review ©2009, Economic History Society.

Craig Horner, ed, The diary of Edmund Harrold, wigmaker of Manchester 1712-15 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. xxxvii + 178. 3 figs. 1 map. ISBN 9780754661726. Hbk. £55)

Reading a diary always feels slightly transgressive; as if you are looking through the front window of a private home on to a domestic scene beyond. Historians have used the intimate nature of these sources to construct a broad narrative of a changing interiority, of the evolution of a modern ‘self’; and to chart the texture and quality of interpersonal relations. And yet, as any dedicated voyeur knows, most domestic scenes observed through a distant window make for very dull viewing. In a similar way diaries are frequently repetitious and frustrating. The events of most lives are made up of petty conflicts, self-serving worries, and banal jealousies. The diary of Edmund Harrold is no exception. A somewhat maudlin and self-pitying drunk, Edmund Harrold made a poor living as a wig maker in early eighteenth-century Manchester – a manufacturer of perhaps the most useless item imaginable, in a world newly committed to making useful things. This particular diary is not very illuminating about the nature of early industrialization, or the economics of innovation. It tells us remarkably little about the social life of Harrold’s all important contemporary generation of Mancunians, and while it does provide a comprehensive account of pretty much everything Harrold read, even this seems to consist almost entirely of the most conventional of religious writings. Nevertheless, this is an important diary, and this edition, scrupulously transcribed, footnoted, and introduced, is a welcome addition to our modern public understanding of the long dead and very private interior world of one early eighteenth-century Mancunian.

The detail many readers will assume sets this diary apart and gives it heightened scholarly interest is Harrold’s record of his sexual relations with both his second and third wives. And it is true that sexual activity is rarely recorded in even the most revealing of diaries, but it is also remarkably unhelpful. Harrold regularly records that he ‘did wife’ or ‘did wife new fashion’. Since he was also father to nine children, however, these bald statements simply repeat the obvious. Of much greater historical significance is Harrold’s record of his courtship of his third wife Ann Horrocks. The inclusion of a record of night visiting, when combined with the birth of his eighth child, John, six months after the wedding, provides new and individualized evidence that this particular style of courtship was accompanied by penetrative sexual activity. But, even more important are the small details of Edmund Harrold’s emotional engagement with his second wife, Sarah. His account of her decline over a period of some three weeks following the birth of their daughter, and her eventual death in Edmund’s arms is both evocative and moving. In combination with the details he gives of his arrangements for his newly orphaned infant child, also named Sarah, and his active and to modern sensibilities, hasty, search for a new wife, the diary makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the pressures felt by a middle aged, down-at-heel member of the middling sort. These separate elements of the diary help to reveal how emotional engagement, affect and hard calculation might co-exist in a single early modern breast.

The diary also helps to give texture to our story of the evolution of ‘self writing’. It seems to partake equally of the seventeenth century tradition of religious self-examination, and a more ‘modern’ secular concern with personal emotional response. Admixt between these covers are endless self-flagellating explorations of Harrold’s religious laxity; a compelling, unself-conscious story of his relations with two wives; and a detailed and essentially secular narrative of the crash and dodgems journey of a chronic alcoholic.

As an edited edition of an eighteenth-century manuscript, this volume is also exemplary. The introduction is clear and informative, and the academic apparatus is extensive (if occasionally slightly too extensive). Four appendixes are also included. The first reproduces a lecture based on the diary given by J.E. Bailey in 1884; the second, a series of copied abstracts from Charles Povey’s Meditation of a divine soul (1703); the third, a comprehensive and very useful list of all works mentioned by Harrold; and the fourth, a hand list of comparable published diaries. The volume concludes with a good, but not exhaustive index. It is perhaps unfortunate that this work has been published as a hard copy edition, rather than online, and in a form where the occasional glancing reference could be more easily located, but Craig Horner should nevertheless be congratulated for an excellent piece of scholarship.

For the inveterate voyeur, dedicated to wandering the shelves in search of an uncurtained window revealing a meaningful scene beyond, this volume provides a few excellent vantage points. It is perhaps not particularly revealing about the changing nature of economic behavior in the early industrial revolution, but it does reveal a single man, caught in a web of culture, of friends and wives, and alcohol.

TIM HITCHCOCK

Lives in the Infinite Archive

2009-01-01T08:46:00.000-08:00

A contribution to the opening panel for the annual conference of the British Society for Eighteenth-century Studies, in Oxford, January 2009. The conference theme is 'Lives'.

The theme of this conference seems the most secure possible. A life is a quantum of raw biology about which we can all agree. Its pus and blood, piss and sputum, its tragic arc from shitting infancy to incontinent old age, are the raw ingredients and very stuff of human consciousness.

And yet, our understanding of past lives – and our own - is essentially a product of a series of intellectual technologies. The biography, the portrait, the novel, the memoir, the biographical dictionary, the census, and tax record, as well as history writing in all its forms, make up a series of inherited technologies that structure our knowledge about lives. And these technologies are themselves underpinned by basic systems for organising information – of indexes and concordances, of the Dewey Decimal system, and that of the Library of Congress – forms of intellectual organisation that would have been as intelligible to Samuel Johnson and Casanova as they are to us. We are here at BSECS, because at some level, the eighteenth century invented much of this technology, and we think it is worth pursuing and perfecting.

My problem, and I think it is a wonderful problem, is that I believe the technological underpinnings of our world have shifted. As of the day before yesterday, pretty much every printed word produced in English in the eighteenth century can be electronically searched and found. By the day after tomorrow, the same will be true of the nineteenth century and the twentieth. Every journal article you write, and soon, every book, will be found using keyword and structured searching, online and with scant regard for where it appears on a library shelf. The distance between how the eighteenth century explored the universe, and how we perform the same task, has grown exponentially in just the last decade. We are confronted by what is already an ‘infinite archive’, whose very structures (what is a novel, vs what is a volume of history) have largely dissolved in the face of keyword searching.

And where, in the last ten years, print started – in EEBO and ECCO, the Times Online, and the Old Bailey Online – manuscripts are rapidly following. Many of the manuscript collections of eighteenth century American figures are now available on line, as are the papers of Hartlib, Newton and Darwin. Soon, 40 million words of everyday manuscripts from eighteenth-century London - hospital and workhouse records, parish and voting records - will be available online in a keyword searchable form. And of course, you can add to this all those representations of artefacts and images – tied perhaps less securely to our finding aids, but newly accessible in a new way, through museum websites and commercial image galleries.

In other words, what is being created is an entirely new and comprehensive library of the textual and artefactual leavings of the dead. And the question I find myself continually asking is what do we do with it?

To a large degree we can simply continue doing what we have been doing for two hundred years. The discipline of textual analysis and comparison – the heart of what most of us do - does not change just because we suddenly have the power to compare more and more diverse, texts. And yet, we are also suddenly able to do weird new things. To take just a single example, with just a little technical nous, you can trace a single phrase, or a set of ideas as expressed in a set of phrases, across 40 billion words of text – to chart the borrowings and adaptations, to test the roles of context and structure.

But as a historian, I believe this creation of an ‘infinite archive’ challenges us to look even further, at our basic object of study – the dead and their leavings. And for myself, I believe that ‘lives’, in the broadest possible sense, can form an organising principal that allows us to make new and better use of this new way of searching and ordering the past.

The textual archive of the eighteenth century – the tons of rotting paper and parchment that fill our record offices - was created for the most part as a coherent system for the management of information about money, and institutions, people, and places. It worked as a fragmented set of intellectual technologies that force us to think in the grooves of an eighteenth-century mind. Historians, for instance, constantly find themselves reproducing the perspectives of the archival clerk, newspaper editor, and politician. And they do so not because they want to, but because it is only by understanding the perspectives of those who created the archives, that those archives could up till now be effectively used.

But, quite suddenly it is possible to do something different. Imagine for a moment, the ability to extract every reference to an individual from the broader archive of the century. For almost every pauper and criminal, worker and dying child, you would find lines in an account book, payments made, a birth registered, a trial recorded – brief traces of quiet lives. For others, for the privileged and the prideful, the sheaves and reams of textual artefact would pile ever higher. But for both, you would find enough to begin the process of reconfiguring how we analyse the past.

Imagine for a moment that you are a historian of medicine, interested in the history of venereal disease. You could trace the evolution of institutional provision for the care of the pox through the hospital records, through lists of supplies, and architectural plans. You could create a coherent narrative of the evolution of care and institutions. But you could not effectively assess the impact of those changes or that care. Because you could not know how the treatment meted out impacted on the lives of patients, the basic role of the hospital remains opaque.

But now, it is increasingly possible to start from the other end – from either a collection of lives that define a local community, with a subset that ends up within the hospital records; or else, from the collection of lives that end up on a particular ward, in the care of a particular doctor, or whatever, and to then trace them back to their communities. You could then assess the role of the hospital in the lives of its patients, and demonstrate and reconceptualise the function of this particular institution in the patterning of social change.

In the process, what is created is a counter-point to the stark history of institutions. A new narrative of collected lives, to set against and compare to that narrative found in the structures of eighteenth century record keeping.

At some level, we have been here before, in the aspirations of the authors of micro-histories, in the empathetic personal narratives of the history from below tradition, in the collective political biographies of the Namierites. But, what is new is the ability to use these techniques and approaches on the infinite archive itself.

To return to the theme of this conference, and for myself, I believe that the technologies of knowing that have evolved in the last few years, mean that for the first time in generations, it is possible to put ‘lives’ at the centre of our analysis. To move beyond the ‘text’ as the object of study, to society, to lived experience, to the individual, and the collective – to lives.

Towards a popular conception of the world in 1780.

2008-12-29T02:55:00.000-08:00

The text of a contribution to a panel on popular conceptions of the world, for the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference in Oxford, January 2009.

Imagine for a moment living on Long Lane in London, just north of Smithfields Market, in the Spring of 1780, in a furnished, rented room. This is the kind of accommodation shared by the vast majority of working Londoners and recently described by Peter Guillery. [The Small House in Eighteenth-century London (Yale University Press, 2004).] The house you live in is a hundred years old, and made of oak and brick. The windows are small casements and the fire place is rudimentary, creating a barrier to more complex forms of domestic cooking, and forcing you to participate in a local round of public eating. Your room is in a vernacular building, and the dominant colours are the browns of distemper, the off-whites of lime wash, and the darkening hews of unpainted wood. There is the occasional flash of brass, but most of your everyday objects are dull pewter and tin, wood and earthenware. The only strong colours you are likely to live with are found in your clothes – in the flash of a printed bit of cotton, in the red of a neckerchief, in the grey-white of your worn linen. The house you live in is probably like that rented by Francis Place ten years later:

...very dark and dirty... built with timber, lath and plaster; ... filled with rats, mice and bugs.[Mary Thale, ed., The Autobiography of Francis Place (1771-1854), (CUP, 1972), p.107.]

Your working life is similarly old fashioned, built around a small scale process of production and exchange; probably tied to a local hinterland of supply. In other words, for the vast majority of Londoners in 1780 life was embedded within a familiar frame, within a cultural and material economics that must have seemed simply ‘natural’.

But, if in that Spring of 1780 you walked just a few yards from that room, out the door and past the lowing pens of Smithfield, towards Newgate Street, where the new prison was just finishing, you would have been confronted by something else. And the point is simply that while most eighteenth-century Londoners lived in a vernacular city of dull browns and natural hues, and worked in a hand-made world of complex, but decentralised craft, authority was being new built around them in forms of white neo-classicism. What had been a medieval gate – Newgate – of warn shapes and familiar statues, a symbol of community, that marked the boundary between a safe city collective, and a more frightening external world, had been rebuilt over the preceding decade into a massive, white stone edifice, its portals and doors picked out with a ubiquitous black cast iron. The building was three hundred yards long, and walking past this, the longest single street-frontage in London, a newly distant and powerful state authority must have welled up in your heart. In buildings like this – but most especially in Newgate Prison itself – was created a new urban landscape of authority that every pedestrian Londoner needed to interpret and navigate in a new way.

But if authority and power were demonstrated through the use of a neo-classical architectural palate, and an ever growing weight of cast iron, its meanings must have seemed to stretch in every direction.

In the cold baroque of Wren and Hawksmoor’s churches, once again, authority was built in a different colour – in Portland stone and cast iron. The decision in 1714 to spend £11,600 to encircle St Paul’s within a black cast iron paling, topped with spear heads – privatising and monopolising the traditional medieval church yard, the civic centre of London - was simply the first brutal act in the process of creating a new landscape of power. [E. Graeme Robertson and Joan Robertson, Cast Iron Decoration: A World Survey, (Thames and Hudson, 1977; 1994 edn), p.16.]

And what is most significant about this rebuilding of authority is that it seamlessly spread from actual government and religious buildings, to the houses of the simply rich. To walk through a stuccoed London square, with its bright white, mock stone exteriors, its sunken areas encased, not just in cast iron, but by mid-century onwards, by cast iron in the form of spears and daggers; was to be confronted by a ruling class newly comfortable with its own authority, willing to use the signs of state power, to claim a more personal variety.

In other words, a changing world view that necessarily accommodated to new forms of authority was created as late eighteenth Londoners wandered through their city. Class and state authority were re-made of bricks and stone and iron. So when we think of that subtle process of class formation, and its changing conceptions of the world, we need to think about it not just as an intellectual process, but as a physical one as well.

And of course, this new-built environment of class division extended to the smallest of items. In the late 1770s, as black refugees from American slavery flooded into London, with the scars of a brutal system cut in to their very flesh; each product of slavery, each mahogany chest and the contents of each inlaid snuff-box, must have gradually taken on an ever more powerful meaning that claimed for its owners authority over an Atlantic-wide empire.

Peter Linebaugh has written about the symbolism of keys and locks for working Londoners, but it seems to me that the world of meaning and symbol extends to almost every object.[The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, (2nd edn, Verso, 2006), pp.366-8.] A mahogany picture frame was redolent of a system of colonialism that extended across four continents – and was just then, in 1780, in wild and military dispute on all of them. Cotton spoke of an exotic empire and brutal heathens; tobacco and coffee, of the brutalities of slavery, and cast iron and stone, of a new found system of industrial production.

All I am really trying to suggest is that the evolution of a popular conception of the world was, particularly in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, embedded within a physical framing whose signs could be held in your hand, and whose visage fronted every street.

And that therefore, when we try to understand the contents of popular politics, of events such as the Gordon Riots in June 1780, we need to see them not simply as expressions of a stated ideology but as physical engagements with a world full of meaning.

That Newgate Prison formed an early object of assault and destruction is just the most obvious fragment of a process that spread to every level of activity. To ‘pull down’ a house – as the Gordon Rioters did with Lord Manfield’s – was to tear out its sash windows (a symbol of modernity and power that even Jane Austen recognised a few years later in Northanger Abbey); was to burn the mahogany furniture (and smell its distinctive smoke – so different from that of oak and ash and elm); was to make a bonfire of identifiable symbols of authority. To pull down Lord Mansfield's house, was not just to comment upon his role Chief Justice, but to manipulate a coherent series of symbols of state and Imperial authority, made flesh in the objects themselves. A political bonfire of the sort lit by the Gordon Rioters, smelt and sounded, not like a bonfire of celebration (made of oak and broad leafed woods), but instead crackled with the sick sound of burning lacquer, and smelt of mahogany built authority.

In other words conceptions of the world are found as much in the palm of your hand and the memory of smoke in your nostrils, as in the expressed content of your library.

Thinking with a Marrakechi Laystall

2008-11-04T07:32:00.000-08:00

I recently went to Marrakech for four days as an unabashed western tourist, in a wonderfully unabashed non-western city. It was fantastic, and forced me at every turn to think hard about early modern urban history. Marrakech is not an early modern city - it is a twenty-first century city that just happens to work as a locus of craft and production; the centre of which is serviced by donkeys and human power; and whose every street is cleaned and maintained by the people who live in it. There is electricity and running water in every house, a satellite dish on every roof top, and internet cafes jostling for space with food stalls and workshops. It is a modern city, but it doesn't work like London or San Francisco.

It seemed clear, for instance, that the systems in place for organising this particular urban world were bound within a culture rather than a bureaucracy. I did not see a single uniform, or a single dustman in the city centre, and yet every street was clean and orderly, crime felt distant and unlikely, and well defined rubbish piles could be found in many corners, out of the way, waiting to be collected. In witnessing a minor traffic accident in a Souk (a teenager on a moped, clipped the arm of an elderly woman), all the mechanisms of self-policing seemed to come into immediate play. The witnesses, perpetrator and victim engaged in a long debate, about the behaviour of the teenager and the elderly women. The boy tried in vain to defend himself and cast fault on to the victim, while the woman used all the authority of age to cast him in the light of responsibility. No police were called, no punishment extracted, but it appeared to be a community entirely happy to get stuck into the process of immediate moral judgement. No fight was going to occur, no sentence carried out; instead the actions of all involved had the feel of a well-crafted process for conflict resolution of a sort that has always existed in my mind's imaginary eighteenth-century eye.

Marrakech is also a city where things are made. The Souks are full of workmen, but more importantly, every small turning was also full of craft. Every other long wall was given over to winding waxed thread for use in making leather goods; every doorway framed a worker, a craftsman, a workshop. It is easy to assume that cities are about trade and living (that is what most modern cities do), but Marrakech reminded me that cities are also about creation. The image that sticks in my mind is of a man listening to a radio, a bright electric light above his workplace, using a pole lathe powered by a strong left arm, a gouge held in his right hand, in turn controlled by his left foot. The process was as old as you like, but the decision not to attach a cheap electric drill to the lathe, spoke of a different approach to production. The other striking element was the apparent conservatism of the goods being produced. Every stall sold a profusion of things that looked precisely similar to every other stall. And while the rugs and fabrics were incredibly colourful and varied, even these followed a series of well worn patterns. We associate industrial production with the creation of uniform goods of a single standard. But we forget (or at least I forgot) the pressures felt by every craftsman, to wring the highest quality end product they could from expensive raw materials. The limits of one's own craftsmanship implies constant repitition. You can get an untrained apprentice to produce a wonderfully finished piece of work, but only by asking them to do it over and over again, day in and day out for months. Uniformity seemed to evolve not from industrial manufacture, but from the very craft process itself. And more than this, the limited variety of goods (of whatever quality or form) being manufactured, seemed to betoken the cultural framing of production that precluded innovation.

There were beggars with established pitches, and street sellers hassling the tourists, and men with carts waiting for some work. And there were mosques which defined each neighbourhood, and whose calls to prayer punctuated each working day. One can get all tied up with a self-conscious historicism, but that is not the point; and ironically, I saw not a single artefact older than a couple of hundred years. The people of Marrakech themselves seemed entirely unconcerned about the relationship between how they lived, and how it might fit into a longer term story, evidenced in carefully preserved and labelled artefacts.

In other words, Marrakech is a city on a different model, that somehow has escaped the historical narrative of urban history itself - with its teleological notion of a single evolving modernity. Perhaps I am deluding myself, but I found in Marrakech the option, the space, the opportunity, to think about early modern worlds in a different way. And while I know much of this is in the literature somewhere or other, the visceral, the personal, the quotidian, seemed to read differently.

Peer Review Smells.

2008-10-15T12:04:00.000-07:00

Most academics who have thought about it will agree that peer review is just rubbish. It is ridiculously hard work - work volunteered by academics as a mulct on their lives. And it is subject to the politics of the playground. Most subjects and academic communities are simply too small to allow true anonymity, and as a result the outcome of peer review is frequently informed by nothing more than hubris and hurt feelings.

My personal bugbears regarding peer review are that, first, it is inherently conservative - encouraging a narrow definition of scholarship; and second, that it forms a comprehensive subsidy on publishers that in turn shifts money that should be spent on either research or dissemination into the coffers of private companies. Universities pay for the privilege of buying journals that are written and edited by their own staff, and reviewed at their own expense. In an online environment, where the costs of printing is decentralised, this makes no sense whatsoever.

At the same time, there are aspects of peer review I like. I want to know that someone with some expertise thought an article was worth publishing. It saves me the time (the seconds it takes to skim a few hundred words) otherwise spent on determining whether the material being discussed is worth the effort of reading.

The traditional answer to these complaints and observations is the care-worn observation that peer review is the worst system ever, except for all the others.

But, with the advent of new models of online sharing and community interaction, it seems to me the moment to reinvent this particularly irritating wheel. Why not create an open 'academic journal space' for all articles that anyone cares to post, with a tagging regime for subject definition. In other words, anyone could post under the tags 'eighteenth-century British history', or indeed 'past & present'. If editors, or foundations, chose to shepherd particular collections of tags and to create an 'identity' from this association, this could certainly be accommodated. Moves in this direction were commonplace in many science subjects in the 1990s, but it hasn't resulted in a reform of the world of journal publication.

The point, however, would be to ask all contributors (all people - even academics - who choose to post a contribution) to also undertake a series of peer review assessments. These would be post-publication, but since online material could be continuously edited, it would nevertheless act in the way current pre-publication peer review acts in relation to polishing an article.

The point, however, would be to rate the assessors. I am more interested in what Natalie Zemon Davis thinks about an article on 16th century France, than I am in the opinion of a third year undergraduate (at least in the first instance). By allowing assessors to themselves build up an online profile you could incorporate a continuum of quality that is made up of the opinions of all assessors, weighted according to authority (i.e. the opinion of three senior figures in a field, could balance out that of 12 graduate students, or 18 unrated individuals, or whatever). The rating of individual assessors, could be determined by what they have contributed in the past, or based in a metrics of cross posting of the sort being used by the Australian and UK higher education systems to distribute research income. There are real problems with metrics, but they do form a consistent measure of community regard (at least in most subjects).

The result would be an academic commons that nevertheless preserves the 'authority' that is the single valuable aspect of peer review. It would also open up academic publishing to a broader community. There is no reason for 'outsiders' not to post material. Much of it might be denigrated by 'high authority' reviewers, making it possible to still select out articles of a certain 'standard', but it would also create a way in of a sort that doesn't frequently exist in the current system. Groups of reviewers who choose to generate a 'journal' identity, could still do so - with the 'journal' being made up of those articles that a defined group of 'assessors' chose to assessn positively.

As an evolving community of assessment and contribution, the system would be self-validating, and a lot cheaper to run than the plethora of journals currently clogging our libraries and lives.

To rot in a God-made world.

2008-10-12T08:46:00.000-07:00

A synopsis for a contribution to a panel discussion to be delivered at the British Society for Eighteenth-century Studies Conference at Oxford in January '09.

The rancid smell of decay; the constant putrefaction of a world of wood, of oil, of fabric, burned sharp in the minds of eighteenth-century people. To create a pre-industrial society that worked, every bit and piece of the man-made world required attention on an almost daily basis. It was this fundamental material reality that underlay most working class notions of the world. In popular biblical and medical conceptions of the body, in the hard and bigoted landscape of ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarity’, in the fear of the wild, and in the innate attractions of the urban, and the farmed, is found a headlong retreat from chaos – a retreat enacted with every laborious brush stroke of a housewife at her step, or a carpenter with his chisel. Sharp and vertiginous divisions of class and gender and place, divided eighteenth-century people one from the other; but underpinning this was a shared material experience that tied the brick maker, the philosophe, the beggar, the farmer and the hopeful mother into a single unending struggle to wrest order from an all-consuming nature.

The smell of rotting chains.

2008-10-10T09:09:00.001-07:00

Jo Guldi has been blogging recently about folksonomy and 'navigation in chains', and has called for a open ended approach in which users tag content, and in which free standing sites are opened to the manipulation of a public audience. But, opening the 'archive' to its users is only an interim solution. The problem is deeper than this, and lies in the very notion of 'keyword searching', and in search based on structured tagging as well. Both are very blunt instruments, and simply re-enforce an older style of iterative research. As a result, the search engines created by free standing sites, of which Guldi complains, are themselves sad interim solutions to new problems, and will wither as new ways of searching are created (the chains will rot in short order). Tagging, is again, just one more interim technology (a strategy derived from the 1980s, and well past its sell-by date). All of these creations are based on the notion of the 'library', on ordered information and the existence of an 'index', and Guldi is simply arguing about who should have the right to order it. I believe this is all just so much renaissance detritus (a worthy subject of study, but not a working methodology). What is missing are the new tools that allow you to do things differently in the infinite archive. With 100 billion words of digitised text (whatever the actual number becomes), I want to find the patterns that I cannot imagine, and which even an infinite army of folksonomic taggers could not reveal.

Sare...Ghamidh

2008-09-17T01:39:00.000-07:00

A Review of: Paul Griffiths, Lost Londons: Change, Crime and Control in the Capital City, 1550-1660. (Cambridge University Press, 2008). An extended version of a panel discussion delivered at the North American Conference for British Studies in Cincinnati on 4 October 2008.

Perhaps surprisingly, this book starts with a single word. Perhaps equally surprisingly most books don’t. Most books begin with a story, perhaps a compressed but effecting tale of a single individual’s tragic experience; or an image, a word portrait of a single room to set the scene; or with a question, a beautifully crafted conundrum drawn from a lifetime setting too many undergraduate essays; or a mere statement of outrage, a recognition of the crackbrained foolishness of the academy, and the many errors of its denizens – a preface to a quixotic foray into tilting at the windmills of historiography.

But instead this book starts with a word, and that word is ‘Sare’.
Of course, ‘Sare’ is not just an everyday, over a cup of coffee sort of word, it is a word full of ambiguities. Personally, I have never heard it spoken, and never used it. The quote with which Lost Londons begins is: ‘The World is Sare Changed’ and within this slight but telling linguistic wrapper ‘Sare’ seems to mean ‘very’, but could also mean, severely, or dangerously, or, to have recourse to the equally gossamer protection of the OED, ‘with much suffering’, or ‘against ones will’, or ‘grievously’.

In other words, the starting point for the journey taken by this book is a studied ambiguity that challenges the reader to pay attention to words. And some hundred and fifty thousand individual words later, and with equal distain for convention, this book also ends with a word. By now, the subtle suggestion of ambiguity has become a stentorian claim to uncertainty. The word at the end is ‘Ghamidh’; an Arabic word Anthony Shadid uses to mean ‘mysterious’, ‘ambiguous’, ‘unclear’, ‘uncertain’; and which denotes a state of mind in which uncertainty is a sustainable intellectual perspective.

Between this beginning and end is the story of Bridewell’s archive, of the dead paper and parchment husk of that most verbose and loquacious of London’s hospitals, itself the product of a prolix Protestantism seeped in civic humanism, and dedicated to the furtherance of the word; a word which was then written into the stones of a prison and a workhouse.

The story is familiar enough; and tells of a new found summary justice, at the disposal of competing civic elites; of old Catholic pride and new found Protestant displeasure. Of a court and a prison for the sexually incontinent and the simply troublesome, for the ne’er do well, and the e’er do bad; of art masters and their wayward apprentices; of constables and beadles, marshals and watchmen.

In the process of telling this story Griffiths substantially revises important elements of it and of the history of London more broadly. In his hands, the much lauded stability of sixteenth century London becomes a lurching stumble through a landscape filled with fear and danger. An overwhelming rush of vagrants and vagabonds, of migrants and the simply unfamiliar, are depicted as challenging the sensitive souls of late sixteenth and early seventeenth century Londoners - people still attached to old Stowe’s London, with its warm beer and cricket, its landscapes of charity and community.

But, in its most revisionist mode, this book depicts London as an essentially successful City, coping effectively with a series of profound challenges.
Constables and watchmen are raised up from the squalor of their ill-deserved historical reputation as placemen and fools, to the more honourable status of detectives in waiting – Dogberry and Elbow are transformed into Dixons of Dock Green, if not quite into Morse and Grissom.

Parishes and wards, the City and its companies, are likewise, rescued from the infinite condescension of early modernists, and re-instated as efficient organisations manufacturing an archive of surveillance, to help police the dark streets of a newly modern city.

And a criminal justice history, that has traditionally emphasised the importance of individual victims in prosecuting crime, leading to a kind of scatter gun justice; that in turn produced the travesty of almost random judicial murder at Tyburn, is redrawn to include the sensible officers of a newly efficient set of old institutions. For Griffiths, these responsible servants and neighbourly men and women, were concerned primarily to keep the streets clean, and the traffic flowing; to gently restrain the enthusiasms of youth, and the unwelcome strategies and makeshifts of the poor. The night is efficiently lit by candles and lamps made bright by civic pride. The kennels and lay stalls made sweet by hard working men, while good citizens slept, fearful, but essentially secure in their beds.

Some of this welcome revisionism is slightly overdrawn. In a bout of middle aged cynicism, I could not help but doubt the evidence of the constable who claimed to be on the case, undercover, and only ‘feigning’ drunkenness, when he agreed to accompany Dorothy Morton to a private chamber at the Blue Boar Inn in Gutter Lane, late one night in December 1627 for the purposes of commercial sex(p.392). Dorothy Morton later found herself under arrest and tried at Bridewell; the accusing constable claiming that they never got past the stairs. Griffiths deploys these events as evidence of constables’ sharp-eyed commitment to searching out criminal activity, but it seemed to me more likely that the principals were engaged in a simple argument between a punter and a prostitute; and possibly says more about the casual power of a male constable in a patriarchal society, than anything else.

This sort of quibble apart, there can be no doubt that Griffiths has shifted the historiographical ground significantly, and in a way that we should welcome. Early modern institutions did work, and most constables were constables. Record keeping, kept records; and nightsoilmen, collected the night soil. And while historians can sweat blood and tears over felony crime; as Griffiths details, the vast majority of everyday effort went on implementing what we might now think of as community policing and zero tolerance.

Griffiths is also certainly right to re-insert and re-emphasise the impact of the problem of vagrancy, in driving the evolution of the urban quotidian. A fear of vagrancy powered the evolution of London and its institutions in a way that neither war nor ideology could.

But I don’t actually think these revisions form the most important or interesting facets of this book. They engage with a literature that has spent a century exploring the interstices of state formation. Weak state, strong state, European state, medieval state, Catholic state, Protestant state, police state, welfare state, surveillance state. Each has gone and come back again; and it seems to me that the explanatory power of this particular meta-narrative has largely run into the sands of a kind of post-nationalism. And with it, the importance of our arguments about how well past systems worked, how ‘modern’ they were, how efficient they were, have to some extent lost their intellectual purchase.

Instead, the core and centre of this book lies not in its claims to a revised history of London, but in its literary practises. Like most historians, Griffiths moons, love sick and romantic, after his archive. The physicality of the court books, the scratching intelligence of every line, is palpably present in these pages. With a whole cadre of fellow historians, Griffiths practises a certain romaniticisation of the archive, and the historians’ journey into it.

But, where most historians, once there, are held captive, forced to play the role of the ventriloquist dummy for the archival clerk, seduced by the world view of their long dead interlocutors, Griffiths, escapes this fate. Where other historians use their archives to retell stories and lives that would be familiar to long dead scribblers; Griffiths doesn’t. Where others cut their archives into individual pieces of historical cloth, prior to sewing them back together in a patchwork of explanation; Griffiths unpicks every strand, in an attempt to fully weave a new fabric.

What Griffiths has done is to refuse to simply repeat the stories found in the Court Books, and instead has re-ordered the text as a series of individual words and phrases. For Griffiths each paragraph, each legal encounter ceases to be a story that happened to a single individual, and becomes instead a series of single words and phrases; literary artefacts ground to their smallest dimension. His substantial appendix provides statistical underpinnings for the changing use of individual words, but the over-arching impression given is of a simple love affair with the grit of sixteenth and seventeenth century language.

A measure of this granularity, this balking at narrative, is that through the course of almost 500 pages of text, there is not a single contemporary quote long enough to warrant a separate indented section. Instead, there are words:

A quote whore unquote quote drew unquote men quote into lewd houses unquote and took money when their guard was down. Mary Lewis, an quote old unquote Bridewell quote customer unquote, was arrested in Cheapside in 1631, quote enticing a man to drinke with her unquote ...(p.153)

It reads wonderfully on the page, by the way.

Words pile onto words in a cascade of text that is compelling; and makes the point more fully than any simple argument could, that as Griffiths claims: ‘Bridewell... became ... London’s label factory’.

To put it another way, Griffiths uses a literary style that is essentially pointillist. Where others use broad strokes, Griffiths builds a picture word by word. In the process he escapes the narrative of his own archive, and arguably escapes the love traps set for historians among the dusty folios.

And this is a wonderful thing to have done. It is dramatically innovative, and fresh. It makes this book something very different, and something we need to pay attention to. It is a facet of the experimental literary process that historians need to participate in. Academic history has, in my estimation, gone well past its sell by date, and unless we are willing to re-invent it, we might as well call ourselves antiquarians and be done.

But each experiment has its own costs and raises its own questions. In this instance, the clear cost is to narrative itself. The creation of a story, disciplined by time, or person, or theme or institution, is a hugely powerful thing that allows the historian to create something new in the reader’s mind. It is impossible to lose yourself in passive prose analysis in quite the way you do when reading a story.

And there are innumerable stories to be told in these records. In a discussion of how seventeenth-century clerks used the archive to know about people, Griffiths observes that: ‘It did not take too long to piece together a biography from Bridewell’s books, especially with handy name indexes lining one side of each page’(426). But nevertheless, he chooses to build not a single biography, of either a vagrant or a constable. Even the institutional biography is left largely untold, leaving in its stead a wild swim in a sea of words; at the end of which the reader knows the water, its temperature and its saltiness, but is still ignorant of its tides and currents, its sharks and fish, its bottom.

This pointillist literary style also tends to de-emphasise perspective and conflict. The object of study becomes the ‘label’ or the process of imposing a label rather than the experience of being labelled. The word ‘Vagrant’ for instance is used throughout the Bridewell books, and is the key word in this text. But no individual ever described themselves as a ‘vagrant’. People are travelling, or selling, or just trying to get from A to B; and the process of being labelled a ‘vagrant’ is a violent act perpetrated by smug authority on a weak individual. In this instance, the labelling process is a form of assault. By emphasising the word, at the expense of the narratives of those being rebranded as vagrants, however, it becomes impossible to re-imagine their experience.

I suspect that I have more faith in the power of narrative than does Paul Griffiths. I think that to abandon narrativity entirely would be to fundamentally disempower history as a genre. But the pointillism of this book, its overwhelming emphasis on words, forms a vital strategic intervention in history writing to which we need to pay mind.

Having ground Bridewell’s many stories into their individual words, however, I think we need to re-invest them with a relationship one to another. And we need to see Bridewell not as a ‘factory of labels’ as Griffiths does, with its nineteenth and twentieth century denotation of a system and a product; but as a seventeenth century ‘factory of labels’ – as a trading compound where one thing is exchanged for another, where value and meaning is created by the simple process of shifting goods from outside to in, from one place to another.

To end, this book challenges us to rethink our relationship to narrative and text, to live with the ambiguities of text, and pay attention to its textures. I thought this book was ‘Sare...Ghamidh’. And all the more important for being so.

The Old Bailey on Steroids

2008-05-22T07:44:00.000-07:00

The text of a talk delivered at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield on 21 May 2008, as a part of the formal launch event of the Old Bailey Online, 1674-1913 (www.oldbaileyonline.org)

When in 1999, Bob Shoemaker and I sat in what was then the new British Library and first discussed the possibility of creating an online edition of the Proceedings, it seemed to us a good idea. From conception, to getting the money, to the hard slog of digitisation, to the equally hard slog of tagging and preparation, to the second tranche, in partnership with Clive Emsley and the Open University, to the ever inventive crises of implementation, to the whirlwind of publicity, and the equally chaotic whirlwind of online delivery, I still think it was a good idea.

But, along the way it has become something rather better than the idea we started with. In some ways, even the present on-line edition of the Proceedings the people in this room have made a reality, is an extension of an essentially Enlightenment notion of knowledge and publication. It is a massive serial body of text, indexed and structured, huge in its compass, but essentially recognisable to any historian who cut their research teeth on the old Times indexes, or who built upper body strength hefting the catalogue in the old Round Reading Room. As a result, in its current form, the Proceedings are a beautiful culmination of an old fashioned idea. Perhaps ironically, they are just so last century.

But they form the starting point for something else. The promise of online, searchable, mash-upable, analysable, deracinated text is that it offers the opportunity to do something, not just better, but different. We have yet to see the first volume of twenty-first century history; of internet enabled history. We have yet to see the first major piece of historical writing that could only be conceived as a result of the existence of online resources; but it is the promise that such a new historical form might be created that is now driving the evolution of the Old Bailey.

Through the ESRC funded Plebeian Lives and the Making of Modern London project, which we have spent the last three years helping to make happen, and will spend the next two bringing to some kind of fruition, we are taking the scripts of criminality - the events of a trial, or the retrospective biography of an Ordinary’s Account, the things we have – and adding to them 40 million manuscript words of the scripts of both poverty, and just plain normality.

This new Old Bailey on steroids will encompass eight coherent manuscript archives – the records of St Thomas’s Hospital, the Coroners’ Inquests for Westminster, the parish records of St Clement Dane, St Dionis Backchurch, and St Botolph Aldgate, and the records of the Middlesex Bench - Pauper examinations and depositions, account books, and a massive archive of rotting, quotidian paper. And to this, it will add the electronic leavings deposited by a generation historians in the AHDS; the Cantebury Wills, the voting records of Westminster, the Hearth Tax Returns. And to this too, the death and marriage and birth registers created by shoals of family historians and published as CDs.

No one has ever attempted to digitise manuscript materials of this complexity before on this scale; and more importantly no one has ever managed to order this vast complex legacy of ill-digested record keeping, into a single searchable thing. In undertaking this project, we are building on the skills created in the long process of making the Old Bailey happen. Without the world beating experience built up by the Higher Education Digitisation Service in double entry rekeying, in creating usable transcripts of every kind of eighteenth-century hand imaginable; we couldn’t do Plebeian Lives. Without the expertise of Jamie McLaughlin, without his experience of designing search facilities and making them work, we couldn’t do this project. Without Sharon Howard’s management and technical skills, and simple commitment; we couldn’t do this project. Without Ed McKenzie and Kathy Rogers, without Philippa Hardman and the HRI, we couldn’t do this project. In other words, we have taken a body of expertise built up across a decade between three Universities, re-imagined what could be done and turned it to a new and complex purpose.

The really new thing about Plebeian lives is that it relies for its very sense on the ability of search engines to find a single word in a sea of text. If we could not sift these sands of time for historical meaning at the click of a mouse, there would be no point in digitising these archives – better to leave them in their original form. But, if we can search them, analyse them, link them across archival spaces that have hitherto been unbridgeable; we as historians can move beyond scripts that retell limited stories of admittedly gripping and dramatic events created essentially for an eighteenth-century audience; to telling life scripts, to building life lines that snake through the archives, to evidence each interaction between a beggar or a criminal, or just a person, and the systems on which they relied, or feared, or avoided - to map a collection of lives.

The Old Bailey Proceedings were a good idea because they brought into the digital age the single most important and classic source for history from below, for that humane tradition of writing from the bottom up, and from the single individual’s perspective.

The point is now to move beyond that tradition, to what is only now conceivable. In my own mind, this amounts to adding a collective rigour to the humane narratives of History from Below; to – if you will excuse the historiographical contrast – forcing Raphael Samuel to sit down with Lewis Namier; and then figuring out what they together might have to say to Karl Marx. In the process, what the project seeks to achieve is a new way of understanding how individual decisions, made by non-elite men and women, contributed to the evolution of the institutions of modernity – of hospitals and workhouses, prisons, courtrooms and local government. And it will do so by tracing people’s lives through this massive archive; and in the process will argue that the agency deployed by working people, the decisions they made in difficult circumstances, help to explain why and how things changed, both in the past and by extension in the present.

But more than a new intellectual aspiration, a new explanation of historical change; this project is also about recognising that the audience we need to reach is different than it once was. The point about building upwards from individual lives, is that it allows us to connect in ways that most historians cannot, to the greatest body of readers and historical researchers ever – to the family historians. By making this project about lives, we generate something they want to read; at the same time as we analyse something we want to explain.

And as the tools of social software gain a new maturity; as Sharon Howard adds a wiki to the Old Bailey site; as we create facilities for our users to provide new content; to comment on, correct and add links to the resources we create; and more tentatively, as data mining and the searching of distant distributed resources becomes more achievable; a growing and organic intellectual project is gradually being brought into existence. It will have its monographs, articles, and authors; but it will also have its blogs and mash-ups, and its communities of users. In the process it will tie the unbounded historical interest in the everyday, to the intellectual exercise of academic history; and create the infrastructure that allows us to communicate beyond the academy.

Essentially, and in other words, what began as an attempt to make a humane, individual history from below easier to research and write; has become an attempt to add a new layer to that tradition; to update it in light of the full promise of digital resources, and to make it fit for the politics of today. The project is now about rediscovering the magical combination of narrative, and individuals, and politics that characterised the best progressive histories of the 1960s and 1970s; and adding to those the magic of digitisation and the internet, and turning the whole lot to a new purpose.

One of the great arts of academic life is to trust that an interesting, important conclusion will emerge at the end of a project, will present itself at the end of five or ten or twenty years of hard slog – and that it will be important even if it turns out to bear little relationship to the question with which you began. I still like the idea with which we started, but I have to admit that it has become a shed load more interesting along the way.

Towards a Folksomonic Solution to Nominal Record Linkage in Distributed Historical Resources

2007-03-29T07:46:00.000-07:00

Large bodies of historical evidence have been posted on the web in the last ten years, and a wide variety of new resources will be posted in years to come. They do not share a common structure, nor do they conform to an agreed set of technical standards. These resources include the electronic catalogues of libraries and archives (PROCAT, A2A), comprehensive bibliographies (RHS), full-text versions of printed sources (The Old Bailey Online, Times Online, EEBO and ECCO), biographical dictionaries (New DNB) and maps and images (Motco, Collage). In the next ten years these sources will be joined by large bodies of transcribed manuscript (Plebeian Lives, People in Place). The difficulty arises from the distributed, piecemeal and disconnected nature of these sources.

They currently need to be searched independently normally using a form of keyword searching. The result is a very traditional approach to historical research in which the historian builds up a picture of an event or subject through iterative searches in different documents. Some attempts have been made to circumvent or add to this process through automated nominal record linkage in which individuals mentioned in different sources are confirmed as the same individual (Westminster Historical Database); but effective and consistent and automated nominal record linkage has proved to be extremely difficult to implement. It has been made to work with a small number of highly structured sources such as censuses, registers and tax records, but is not suitable for dealing with more variable and qualitative records. At the same time, there are large numbers of family historians whose sole purpose is to locate disparate sources about single individuals. This project is designed to harness the hard and expert work of family historians to the problem of linking and judging links in disparate online resources.

The real experts at nominal record linkage are family historians. While academic writers generally structure their work around themes and questions, family historians work to bring together material about individuals and narrow groups defined by birth and marriage. There have been substantial attempts to harness the expertise of family historians to the task of generating large scale collections of information about individuals for use in academic history. But these have been predicated on family historians volunteering to work for a project directed and intellectually shaped by an academic (see for instance the Victorian Panel Survey Pilot Project). By creating a package that allows family historians to share information about individuals among themselves, using a social software environment model, large volumes of information about individuals could be generated as a by-product of the use by family historians of a package that in any case, satisfies a number of their needs. The greatest added value for family historians will come in three forms. First, new knowledge about family trees and individuals will be created as different family historians work backwards towards common individual ancestors (a whole new family ‘branch’ will be created every time two historians find themselves listing a single individual). Second, models of successful research will be promulgated. Knowing, for instance, the life histories of a range of people with similar profiles to that of an individual you are researching will help direct research down more effective paths. And third, a profound, self-generated contextualisation will be created through the process of generating links to disparate sources. As more qualitative sources are posted, this contextualisation will become ever more textured. It is all the more powerful for being self-generated, rather than a product packaged in the generic conventions of academic history writing.

In an environment similar to packages such as Del.ic.ious, family historians would be able to collect relevant bookmarks related to individuals and to organise these into a family tree, or similar intuitive structure. They would also be able to annotate bookmarks to include information from non-digital sources and to represent family relationships of the sort they are most concerned to establish. A template for authoring individual biographies or family histories would also be provided. In the process of using this package, family historians would create what amounts to a discreet information entity which could be given a unique identity. Because family historians search across the full range of online resources, their collection of bookmarks overcome the difficulties of searching across distributed and technically variable resources. The package would need to be free, open source, and carefully crafted to meet the needs of the widest community of family historians.

The book marks themselves could be displayed much as blog entries are displayed in Del.ic.ious. Tag Clouds and other forms of social software representations would add to the usability of the package. The important thing would be that these collections of bookmarks (and the text referred to) along with their associated annotations and connections to family members, could be abstracted as ordered information with a unique individual identity.

In this instance a folksonomic (click here for a good overview of the strengths and weaknesses of folksonomy) and social software approach would work in much the same way as it currently does in relation to blog and wiki sites.

It should be possible, however, goes one step further. In recent years, in order to facilitate the workings of online communities and to represent their activities, a number of search and association strategies and graphical strategies for the analysis of communities and networks have emerged which could be harnessed to the issue of understanding the information generated by family historians.

Once a collection of bookmarks, etc., has been identified as an individual, that body of texts could itself be turned into a single individual within an online community. In other words, the unique identity would become an avatar within an artificially created online community. The advantage of this approach is that it allows tools and strategies developed for the linking and searching of texts generated by online communities, and those created to analyse the activities of such communities to be used. For instance, words shared in the book-marked texts could be used to associate groups of individual identities or avatars. Or indeed book marks themselves could be used in this fashion. So, if you wanted to develop a detailed profile of the users of St Thomas’ Hospital, you would simply abstract all the identities which bookmark St Thomas’ Hospital (the records of which are being digitised by the Plebeian Lives project) as a part of their avatar. Depending on the nature of the bookmark (i.e. to a specific page with metadata) this could be fine tuned for date, or even a single ward, or individuals treated by a single doctor within the hospital. For an example of this kind of strategy working in practise see packages such as RefViz, which essentially cross references all text associated with a single record, against all other occurrences of the same text and then relate them to a single entity – a book or article in this instance.

A further refinement is in relation to the analysis of the communities created in the process. The relationships between individuals and the sets of groups evidenced by large numbers of historical avatars quickly outpace the ability of flat tables to represent their meaning. In projects such as Vister, however, a range of tools have been developed that could help. In environments of this sort, each node is an individual sorted into communities according to specific characteristics. Each node is also linked to an individual user (or in the case of historical avatars, the individual identity).

This kind of approach has the advantages of giving the user transparent access to the groups of text which make up an individual identity. By clicking on a single individual, or the cloud that makes up the community, the user could be taken directly to either the profile of the individual, and hence to the text, or directly to the text itself in the way that occurs in contexts such as de.lic.ious. In this example, blog entries are organised thematically according to the frequency of texts and phrases, but each entry could as easily be a historical document.

The great advantage of this approach would be that it would build ever growing levels of cross reference into the resource itself, which could in turn validate the quality of the information being generated. If large numbers of individual avatars are being linked to a single name, for instance, this would reflect a high level of uncertainty, or the possibility that two or more historical avatars are in fact the same individual. Within this context, different sources could also be rated and weighted for accuracy, quality and usefulness, allowing analyses to be more subtly formulated – i.e. a bookmark to a New DNB article, could be given greater weight than one to a Wikipedia item; or a tax record, more weight than a reference in a trial. The world will not agree on technical standards or the best way of searching historical documents. This approach would co-ordinate disparate forms of information, while retaining to the originators of historical websites a degree of authority over the content they create.

Historyonics

Playing around with colour on Locating London's Past

Playing with Locating London's Past

Academic History Writing and its Disconnects

Culturomics, Big Data, Code Breakers and the Casaubon Delusion

Towards a New History Lab for the Digital Past

British History Online

British Museum Images

British Newspapers, 1600-1800

Charles Booth Archive

Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540-1835

House of Commons Parliamentary Papers

John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera

John Strype's Survey of London Online

London Lives 1690-1800

Origins Network

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online, 1674-1913