The Prosecution Project

Abstract

Family and local community historians have always made use of criminal justice records. Increasingly available as digital files, these documents are accessible to anyone with access to an internet-linked computer or even smartphone. In many cases, the fragmented nature of these records means their richness remains a potential rather than reality. The Prosecution Project1links these records as a large-scale Australian exercise in unlocking the criminal justice records of all the states. We seek to digitise and eventually make publicly accessible the records of the criminal courts, documenting not only the names of the accused but of magistrates, judges, lawyers, police and victims and other witnesses. The project is a significant collaboration between university researchers and a large and growing community of volunteers. This paper outlines what the project is doing, how we are doing it and illustrates its potential use for family and local historians interested in Australia's past.

Digital Crime Histories and Developing a Public Pedagogy of Criminal Justice

“…According to Evans (2011: 68), family historians have different priorities to academics: rather than engaging with history's big picture first, they perceive many diverse, individual life stories collectively as creating a holistic view. The Digital Panopticon (2017) and the Prosecution Project (2014) configure their datasets in ways that serve both functions: enabling researchers to search for named individuals while also providing public access to a large dataset that can be analysed for wider patterns (Finnane and Smaal 2018;Shoemaker 2018).…”

“…Founders & Survivors harnessed community participation to crowdsource its transcriptions and encoding early, recruiting volunteers through articles in newspaper and family history publications, radio broadcasts, project websites and newsletters, and presentations to family history groups (Bradley et al 2010). Similar techniques were used to attract volunteers to help create the Prosecution Project database (Finnane and Smaal 2018). New crowdsourcing platforms, such as Zooniverse, are likely to increase the number of digital humanities projects relying on the recreational labour of volunteers worldwide (J Cox et al 2015).…”