Victimization Narratives and Courtroom Sexual Politics: Prosecuting Male Burglars and Female Pickpockets in Melbourne, 1860–1921

Piper, Alana

doi:10.1093/jsh/shx147

Cited by 1 publication

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“…Criminological concerns with understanding changing patterns of crime, policing and punishment are joined with legal historical questions about the changing process of prosecution. Accessing original data enables researchers to explore questions rarely contemplated in historical studies of the criminal justice system, such as the specific roles and impact of defence lawyers (Piper and Finnane, 2017a, 2017b) or the victim characteristics associated with the prosecution of offences against person or property (Finnane and Kaladelfos, 2016; Piper, 2018). In contrast to the focus of official record-keeping on the criminal offender, the data accessed by the Prosecution Project enable us to contemplate a history in which all parties to the process of the trial recover their historical place.…”

Section: Project Aimsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sharing the archive: Using web technologies for accessing, storing and re-using historical data

Finnane

Kaladelfos

Piper

2018

Methodological Innovations

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Historical data pose a variety of problems to those who seek statistically based understandings of the past. Quantitative historical analysis has been limited by researcher's reliance on rigid statistics collected by individuals or agencies, or else by researcher access to small samples of raw data. Even digital technologies by themselves have not been enough to overcome the challenges of working with manuscript sources and aligning dis-aggregated data. However, by coupling the facilities enabled by the web with the enthusiasm of the public for explorations of the past, history has started to make the same strides towards big data evident in other fields. While the use of citizens to crowdsource research data was first pioneered within the sciences, a number of projects have similarly begun to draw on the help of citizen historians. This article explores the particular example of the Prosecution Project, which since 2014 has been using crowdsourced volunteers on a research collaboration to build a large-scale relational database of criminal prosecutions throughout Australia from the early 1800s to 1960s. The article outlines the opportunities and challenges faced by projects seeking to use web technologies to access, store and re-use historical data in an environment that increasingly enables creative collaborations between researchers and other users of social and historical data.

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Section: Project Aimsmentioning

confidence: 99%