Stuff and Dead People

In recent years I find myself using the terms Stuff and Dead People in talks and titles more and more.  And as a historian I find myself conceptualising my work as being about Stuff inherited from Dead People.  Both expressions just sound right.  But it occurs to me that while I have a relatively clear sense of what I am intending to convey when I use these terms, their meanings might not be entirely apparent to others.  For this reason I thought I would have a stab at providing a couple of definitions, and a brief explanation of why I find these terms so useful

In my usage Stuff encompasses all the different varieties of artefact that can be used in practising history.  The term is in some respects an attempt avoid saying that our object of study is text or image, the manmade landscape or a piece of furniture, or indeed even data in its broadest form.  Instead, the use of Stuff is intended to signify that my practise as a historian actively seeks to make use of all of these things.  In terms of an epistemology, it is an attempt to distance myself from the categories of knowing that I (we) have inherited.  Stuff denies the taxonomies of knowing that define a museum object as being different to a pamphlet; a hedgerow different to a  teapot.  In part this usage reflects a profound disillusion with the narrow practise of textual comparison that lies at the heart of the Rankean tradition of historical analysis; but it is also a recognition that new technologies allow us to encompass new types of evidence in new ways.  When all Stuff is data it can be interrogated across boundaries that seemed natural and unbreachable just a few decades ago (between a hedgerow and a teapot). And while data itself is also a form of Stuff, and the transition from varieties of stuff to data is itself a process of creating a new taxonomy, there remains a rather wonderful transition involved.  There is an opportunity to rethink the meanings of Stuff, and without a new vocabulary it is all that much more difficult to do so.

In other words, Stuff is a simple rejection of post-enlightenment categorisation.

In some respects Dead People serves a similar function.  The use of Dead People avoids the traps of both identity and social modelling; while at the same time giving some shape to the object of historical study (human culture in the past).  Ironically some Dead People are still alive.  Henry Kissinger is apparently still breathing, but is nevertheless a figure of substantial historical analysis.  In my view he is undeniably Dead People.  At the same time, because cultural history seems to take longer to turn journalism in to books, Amy Winehouse and Michael Jackson may be dead, but they are not yet Dead People.

The term Dead People implies a refusal to describe the people of past as men or women, workers or citizens, artists or authors.  And in doing so, like Stuff, is used to signal that I do not find the traditional categories and boundaries that comprise social science very helpful.

Stuff we inherit from Dead People is my object of study as a historian. 

One could convey these ideas using other words.  The results might be a bit long winded, but could certainly point up my intention.  At the same time, the use of these terms serve a slightly wider function.  They form an attempt to de-centre the language of historical and social science authority that underpins the professional claims of academic historians as a whole.  By refusing to use the categories and languages of authority we inherited, I am self-consciously rejecting the systems that underpin the professional academic practise of history. 

It is perhaps a ridiculous comparison, but I like to think of the use of these terms as akin to the transition in thinking brought about by the evolution of labelling in quantum theory between the proposal of the eight-fold-way in the 1950s and the November Revolution of 1974.  Like most people of my generation and education, I was raised in an Einsteinian universe in which unusual phenomenon were described in the most secure of scientific jargon - we believed in the physics because it was expressed in the language of authority.  But in the 1970s, in particular, a whole new language of strangeness and charm was broadcast to a popular audience.  As a teenager schooled in an older tradition, this challenged me to rethink.  By using everyday words to describe complex phenomena I was forced to interrogate what I believed more closely than I would otherwise have done.  I don't understand quantum, but suspect I understand Einsteinian physics better as a result!   I use the terms Stuff and Dead People in the hope that their use will challenge listeners to question the labels and phenomena they think I am talking about.
    
    




 

Hearing the Dead - Ten years of the Old Bailey Online

The Old Bailey Homepage, 2003

The Old Bailey Online has now been around for a decade - and we are celebrating.  But it also seems a good moment to take stock of what went right and what went wrong and just reflect for a moment on fifteen years of project work.

My most vivid memories are of the team of people involved.  They were amazing, and I feel hugely privileged to have worked with them all; most especially with Bob Shoemaker, who has been a constant collaborator and friend for over three decades, through at least five projects and two books.  But also a whole crew of people who came together to make something good happen.  Just in relation to the period before the initial launch in 2003, there was Jamie McLaughlin and Simon Tanner, Geoffrey Laycock, Louise Henson, John Black,  Edwina Newman, Kay O'Flaherty, and Gwen Smithson. What they produced was ground breaking, and that was a simple result of their hard work and good sense. Since then a dozen more people have been involved - most importantly Sharon Howard. 

I suppose the real  question is: if we had to do it over again, what would we have done differently?  Speaking for myself, rather than for the project, I can't think of all that much I would change.  Perhaps we could have chosen better software to begin with, and been generally more technically saavy, and worried less about IP.  But these seem small things from this distance.   I guess I regret the six months of my time, and several thousand pounds of project money spent licensing the images we used for the background pages on the site.  The experience demonstrated to me that the copyright system in online images is broken, but it seems a hard lesson won at a relatively high cost!

I also regret over egging some of the early discussion about the project.  The whole 'new history from below' narrative which we developed in thinking about the site simply raised the ire of a group of historians offended by the hubris; or who felt their own expertise was somehow threatened.  I hold my hands up to the charge of hubris (though I still stand by the need for a 'new' history from below).  Digitisation and the Internet, and Digital Humanities more broadly does lend itself to hyperbole, and I am far from immune to its attractions.  But mainly it was unnecessary, as the site has effected the wider historical agenda and the kinds of history people write with no need for any one to lead the way or yell about it.

And what we got right - however fortuitously - seems to me to outweigh these issues.  Looking back on the decisions we made in the late 1990s, the choice of a double-entry rekeyed text, in combination with XML tagging turned out to be perfect, even if it was through luck rather than expertise (though Michael Pidd's experience and initial steer helped!).  We also got the timing right. Because it was 2003, because we started the project in 1998/9, the launch received a lot of news coverage, and generated what seemed at the time a ridiculous amount of usage - without us having to pursue the kinds of detailed 'impact' plans the funding councils now demand. 

But mainly, I like to think what we got right was our decision and commitment to digitise the most compelling source of social history I know; of history from below.  I am continuously moved by the fact that lots of people now read eighteenth-century trials who would never preoviously have thought to seek them out.  Professional historians have always known what powerful voices the Proceedings contain, but putting them online in a form that is easy to use and free has meant that millions of people who would not otherwise have been minded to read this stuff, have done.  They have used what they found in the Proceedings in novels and on television, in endless undergraduate dissertations and in more books than I want to read; and I take neither credit nor blame for their work.  But, I believe that the decision to make freely available a source that prior to 2003 could only be read by a small and privileged group of academics, was an unproblematic good thing. 

Bob Shoemaker (right) and Tim Hitchcock, 2003.  Clock the monitor!

Most people forget just how elitist and exclusive academic libraries could be (and still can); how hard it was to get access to microfilm, special collections and rare books.  Unless you had been vetted (largely for class and race) by some great institution, you were simply out of luck. I like to think the Old Bailey Online undermines that exclusivity just a bit.  I also like to think that in combination with London Lives the site has helped to make a corner of social history I love, and have committed my life to studying, a little more secure from the infinite condescension of the present.

In the next ten years I very much hope that the Proceedings will form the basis of a growing body of more technically sophisticated analyses, using all the techniques of datamining, corpus linguistics and information science, all made easier by the API.  But most importantly, I hope that people continue to hear the voices of anger and pain it contains; and that for just a second they let their imaginations take them to that brutal theatre of judgement where working people were forced to negotiate with power.

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.

A New History From Below

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.