Tim Hitchcock discusses how big data from historical records can be used to analyze the past. He highlights several digital resources and projects that have digitized and connected historical court, geographic, and demographic records from sources like the Old Bailey and London Lives. These projects have developed tools and visualizations to analyze trends in topics like trial lengths, geographic distributions of crimes, and occurrences of terms over time. Connecting these diverse historical data sources allows for new insights and research.

1. Big Data for Dead People.
Tim Hitchcock
University of Hertfordshire

2. www.oldbaileyonline.org

3. www.londonlives.org

4. www.connectedhistories.org

5. Locating London’s Past

6. Curated Digital Resources
API
Commercial and
Paywall Resources
Tools and Visualisations
Research Spaces
Publishing Spaces
Up-to-date GUIs
Connected
Histories
Indexes
API
API
API Independent APIs
V&A, Tate, BM
Data re-used, new-used and linked

7. Distribution of trial lengths in words for ‘killing’ displayed in red; all other trials in grey.
‘Killing’ includes all trials tagged as including the offences of, ‘Infanticide’, ‘murder’, ‘petty
treason’, ‘manslaughter’, and ‘killing: other’, by the Old Bailey online.

8. Distribution of trial lengths in words for ‘killing’ displayed in red; all other trials in grey. ‘Killing’
includes all trials tagged as including the offences of, ‘Infanticide’, ‘murder’, ‘petty treason’,
‘manslaughter’, and ‘killing: other’, by the Old Bailey online.

11. An extract of the buffered and trimmed polygons –
Locating London’s Past. www.locatinglondon.org

12. ‘horse’, ‘mare’ and ‘gelding’ from the Old Bailey, mapped by ‘street’.

13. The geographical distribution of colours
in the Old Bailey – In small blocks

14. Katy Börner, Plug-and-Play Macroscopes
Communications of the ACM, Vol. 54 No. 3, Pages 60-69
10.1145/1897852.1897871

17. Some of the web sites illustrated along the way:
Discontents (Tim Sherratt’s blog): http://discontents.com.au/
Datamining with Criminal Intent: http://criminalintent.org/
Locating London’s Past: http://www.locatinglondon.org/
Old Bailey Online: http://www.oldbaileyonline.org
London Lives: http://www.londonlives.org/
Connected Histories: http://www.connectedhistories.org