Playing around with colour on Locating London's Past

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

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.