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.
Wednesday, 17 September 2008
Thursday, 22 May 2008
The Old Bailey on Steroids
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.
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.
Thursday, 29 March 2007
Towards a Folksomonic Solution to Nominal Record Linkage in Distributed Historical Resources
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.
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.
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