Measuring the Diversity of Immigration using the Old Bailey Online 1674-1834

"Mother's Wartime Passport -1941" A. Davey

This is the second in my series of posts on the Old Bailey Online (OBO) corpus. I've downloaded all of the trial transcripts from 1674 to 1834 (find out how on the Programming Historian 2), which is about 100,000 trials and 51 million words of text. In the last post I looked at the impact of editors and scribes on the vocabulary in the Old Bailey Proceedings.

This time I thought I'd look at something a little closer to my area of expertise: immigration to London in the Early Modern era. I've used the OBO heavily in my doctoral work on Irish immigrants, but that's been focused exclusively on the years 1801-1820, immediately following the 1801 Union of Irish and British parliaments. I've yet to take a longer look at immigrants across the centuries using the OBO and I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to do so.

This time I'll be looking at the "people words" extracted from the OBO corpus. As I mentioned in the last post they were identified by extracting all of the words that appeared between a set of "persName" tags in the XML version of the transcripts. This gave me just shy of 62,000 unique strings (referred to hereafter as "words") used to represent people. That's nearly half of all unique words in the corpus. Of those 62,000 words, most (55,000) are not found in the four English language dictionaries I used to identify English words. The remaining 7,000 are words such as "green" or "woman" or "the", which are used to refer to people such as "the woman" or "John Green", but which can also be used in other contexts (the woman's green hat). Not all of these words are therefore proper names; instead, they are words that have been marked up by the OBO team as a reference to a person somewhere in the corpus.

In Figure 1 you can see the rate at which these new "person words" appeared in the corpus.

Figure 1: Total number of "person words" found in the OBO corpus to date. [expand +]

Nothing particularly exciting here. It seems like most of the person names that are also English words appear very early on. It also looks like the number of unique words used to describe people increases at a steady pace throughout the long eighteenth century. From a cursory look at the list of names, it seems evident that many of these words are surnames.

Given names (first names) on the other hand, are much less common. That's because most early modern Londoners had pretty common given names (William, John, Elizabeth, or some variation thereof). Silly names for babies are largely an invention of twenty-first century Hollywood actors and football players.

While London is home to hundreds of thousands of people in the eighteenth century, it's safe to say the number of surnames people had in London increased over time as migrants flooded in from across England and beyond carrying new names with them. New surnames therefore have a few ways to end up in the corpus:

1. An established London family is mentioned in the record for the first time
2. An immigrant family with a new name arrives in the area and ends up in the record
3. Someone with a funny accent tries to say their name and it gets spelled phonetically

In the case of #1, it's entirely possible an established family (or anyone with that name) just avoided the Old Bailey for decades on end. I've managed to do so and there's no reason to expect others didn't too. However, common names shared by many people and local to Londoners should eventually show up. In fact, there's a reasonable chance they'll show up very early. We see this is in fact the case, as Smith, Wilson, Brown, White, and Allen all appear for the first time before 1680. "McCaffrey" on the other hand doesn't show up until 1834 and it's safe to say represents a name brought to London by an immigrant (either scenario #2 or #3 above).

New names arriving in the area may not be indicitive of the total number of new people who have migrated to London, but I do believe it reflects the growing diversity of immigrants arriving. Malcolm Smith and Donald MacRaild's article, "The Origins of the Irish in Northern England" shows that at least with Irish surnames, most names can be pinpointed to a particular region in Ireland. This regionality of names was still evident into the middle of the nineteenth century and will be no surprise to any genealogist who has sought out their family's past. We can see direct evidence of this regionality by mapping surnames. Great Britain Family Names allows you to see the distribution of any name in Britain in 1881. In Figure 2 you can see the distribution of "Howard" families, which clearly cluster around a few areas.

Figure 2: The distribution of "Howard" families in 1881 [expand +]

John Mannion agrees with Smith and MacRaild's conclusions about migration. In "Old World Antecedants, New World Adaptations" he argues that people tend to follow migration "channels". That is, someone from their village went before them and came home to say how great it was. Mannion was looking specifically at Irish migrants to Newfoundland and was able to show that villages who had already sent migrants to Newfoundland were vastly more likely to continue to do so than somewhere without the same history. That means the first "McCaffrey" in London was far more adventurous than the 351st. In fact, we could suggest that in many cases the first McCaffrey drew the other 350 over time by breaking the ice. I am interested in why that first McCaffrey decided to come to London, and what factors might have influenced his or her decision to do so.

The reason I think the OBO corpus is a useful set of records for monitoring this growing diversity of migrants is because I'm quite firmly convinced that the Old Bailey is the place one takes people they don't know when they've wronged you. I believe strangers (including immigrants and migrants) were much more likely to be subjected to the official justice system than were people with deep roots in the community.If a stranger wronged you, they had to be caught and punished quickly, or they might disappear. If your long-time neighbour steals your linen tablecloth, you have lots of options for how best to deal with them. You could smack him, you could set the dogs on him, you could knock on the door and demand it back. You had options, and time, because you knew he would be there tomorrow. And the next day. You don’t have that same assurance with someone you've never seen before. And that meant I believe people were more likely to seek a legal response than to choose a community resolution when dealing with strangers or those they do not know very well. In John Beattie's wonderful book, Crime and the Courts in England: 1660-1800, he appears to agree:

In the small-scale society of the village a prosecution may not have been the most effective way to deal with petty violence and theft. Demanding an apology and a promise not to repeat the offense, perhaps with some monetary or other satisfaction, may have been a more natural as well as a more effective response to such an offense, or perhaps simple revenge directly taken (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986, p. 8).

If I am correct in my assumption then immigrants are more likely to appear in the Old Bailey records than established members of the community (at least as a defendant), and are even more likely to do so shortly after they arrive in London as opposed to several generations later. That means that there is likely a reasonably strong connection between the date a name first appears in the OBO corpus and the date that name first appeared in the London area. It may not be a precise way to measure the arrival of new names, but I would hasard to say that in most cases it's probably accurate to within a few years or a decade at the most.

Therefore, one way to find new families with few if any connections to the locals arriving in the area is to look for the first time a given surname appears in the records. Considering the nature of the Proceedings, most names that appear in the record likely refer to people in London as opposed to strangers living far away. That's not always going to be true but for the most part it's a reasonable assumption. That means by measuring the rate at which new names appear in the OBO, we should get a reasonable if rough idea of the rate of immigration from distinct family groups over time.

To isolate surnames I've taken all of the 60,000 names present in the London area in the 1841 census and checked them against the "person words". This returned a list of just over 20,000 surnames. That means one third of all unique surnames in London at the end of the period have showed up in the Old Bailey corpus at some point or another. I'm sure I've missed a few, particularly those spelled phonetically, but this is probably a pretty good start.

You can see when each of these names first appears in the corpus in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Number of new surnames in the OBO corpus per year [expand+].

What Figure 3 shows is that the rate of new surnames arriving is actually fairly stable over the course of the eighteenth century. As mentioned in the previous post, the big dip around 1700 is caused by missing data and very short trial accounts, and we might be wise to assume that the entries around 1715 should actually be lower if we had the full set of trials as more names would appear earlier, filling in the gap. The long slow decline therefore over the course of the eighteenth century might actually be better understood as a reasonably flat line hovering around 100 new surnames per year and declining slightly towards 50 or 60. But it turns out that is not the whole story, and the clue to that is the increase in new names in the years immediately following the Napoleonic Wars c. 1815.

After the fall of Napoleon at Waterloo it seems quite clear that there's an influx of new surnames into the London area. I've got a suspicion that the cause of this influx is decommissioned soldiers and sailors who were dumped in London (or found their way there) after the war and got themselves into trouble. War collects soldiers and sailors from far and wide and brings them together. When those soldiers and sailors are no longer needed they're released to go on with their lives.

It would seem that after two decades of war enough people had been uprooted from their native regions by this process for a long enough period that they felt no inclination to go back home. Instead some of them obviously resettled in London or the growing industrial cities in the north, which seemingly offered greater opportunities or were more germane to their skills than the family farm. In fact, many people may have found themselves without a farm to go back to, since the enclosure movement had been consolidating ariable land into much larger units throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, leaving many people landless. That landlessness may have attracted them to the army or navy in the first place, and now with military life behind them they had to find something else to do with themselves. London, it would seem, was it. At least for some.

This trend of more new names after the Napoleonic War doesn't appear to be an isolated incident; it's merely the most obvious case. Instead we see similar patterns in other major wars and domestic conflicts involving the British, the results of which can be seen in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Number of new surnames in the OBO corpus per year, colour coded to highlight periods of war and peace [expand+]

Figure 4 shows the same number of new surnames per year arriving in the OBO corpus, but this time is highlighted to show some of Britain's major wars and domestic conflicts in the latter-half of the eighteenth century. The wars depicted in red are:

1. The Seven Years War (1756-1763)
2. The American Revolutionary War (1775-1782)
3. The French Revolutionary Wars (1793-1802)
4. The Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815)

While the American Revolution wasn't officially settled until 1783, it was effectively over by the end of 1782. The grey bar between 1802 and 1803 separates visually the two wars with the French.

The black bars represent years in which significant domestic conflicts took place:

1. The Jacobite Rising of 1745 (1745-1746)
2. The Gordon Riots (1780)
3. The Irish Rebellion (1798)

In nearly all cases we see a decrease in the number of new names showing up shortly after a war or domestic conflict erupts. This is most evident for the Jacobite Rising of 1745. The apparent dip in migration at this point makes sense; who wants to move when there's a rebellion going on? This dip is then followed by lower than average numbers of new names until the conflict ends, at which point almost invariably the following years experience an above average result. This is evident both for domestic conflicts as well as international wars. The pattern appears again and again.

The differences between the average number of new surnames per year during war compared to the average in the five years after the end of a war are in fact statistically significant, at least for the American Revolution and the combined French Wars (paried t-test: p = 0.0418, and p = 0.0001 respectively. Significance in this case was p < 0.05). The Seven Years War does not pass the statistical t-test (p = 0.1346), However, I am confident we are seeing evidence of the same trend. While my statistical skills are rather rudimentary, I think it's worth noting that failing a t-test does not mean something is not true. Instead, it suggests the numbers alone cannot support that conclusion beyond all reasonable doubt. For me, the fact that the latter wars are so obviously following this trend strenghtens my confidence in a similar trend for the Seven Years War and we can see this in Figure 5, which shows the average number of new surnames per year during and after the three wars.

Figure 5: The average number of new surnames per year during the wars and in the five years following the wars [enlarge+]

The strength of the correlation between these conflicts and the decrease in new names, followed by an increase in peacetime suggests to me that my original assumptions about newcomers getting in trouble with the law were correct. It also suggests some interesting things about migration patterns in the eighteenth century. That is, people migrated when they felt it was safe. During times of turmoil, they stayed put and waited things out.

There are implicitly two groups of people here, so each requires its own discussion, I think. Firstly there are the sailors and soldiers. The reason we don't see these people arriving in London during wartime is perhaps obvious: they were in the employ of the state, off fighting the enemy. Gathered from across Britain and Ireland, as mentioned above, when they were decommissioned they had the opportunity to move where they liked and it would seem some chose London. This may have disproportionately included sailors who may have hoped to find work in London's booming shipping business.

The second group are families or individuals who have decided for economic reasons to move to London. Since we don't have evidence that someone with that name lived in London previously, many of them are presumably amongst the first of their stock to try their hand at London living. This in itself should not be taken lightly, as moving to early modern London without a social support network was an incredibly lonely and dangerous prospect, which is why so many migrants failed and found themselves in gaol, or starving and desperate, looking for any chance to get away. Sadly, we see many immigrants like Sarah Holmes, who claim that they "have no friend but God" as they throw themselves at the mercy of the courts.

What does all this mean? What can we learn about these arriving surnames? War and domestic conflict are not the only variables at play here, but I think it puts forth a reasonable case for the effects of war and peace on migration patterns of those moving towards London in the long eighteenth century. Returning to the idea mentioned earlier about the first McCaffrey (or the first of any family), it seems that families were only too willing to bide their time during periods of war, waiting instead for peace before making their way to a new life in London. We can see why this strategy might have been appealing. Why take a risk when the country is at war?

Unfortunately it may have been the wrong approach from an economic standpoint. According to Ball and Sunderland's "An Economic History of London, 1800-1914", the gap between real wages and cost of living peaked just after peace was called with France in 1817 (p. 95). That means people were most desperate when the government realised it actually had to start paying for the war it had waged. It seems to me likely that the two trends are actually connected. As new families arrived they may have been desperate for any work, forcing down the price of labour in London as a surplus of workers vied for jobs. It may seem counterintuitive, but these data suggest it's best to move during war rather than after.

Nevertheless, this unlikely set of criminal records has provided, I think, an interesting window into wider migration strategies across the eighteenth century. And it came about not by looking at how many people arrived, but when unique groups of people likely first emerged. London it would seem was home to an increasingly diverse population. That population continues to diversify to this day. And though I'm sure there are some Brits who might see war as a strategy for keeping the net migration in the "tens of thousands", take heed, for when peace comes, so too will the immigrants.

Whose Lexicon? The Impact of Reporters and Editors on the Old Bailey Proceedings

A few weeks ago I was discussing early modern vocabulary with Tim Hitchcock (as one does on a Wednesday evening). If I recall correctly, he felt that new words likely appeared at roughly the same rate as old words disappeared from the language. In essence, we're not getting a bigger vocabulary, we're just using an ever-shifting one. Ben Schmidt's blog posts on "Age Cohort and Vocabulary Use" and "Predicting Publication Date and Generational Vocabulary Shift" would tend to support this idea. The basis for Schmidt's article was an analysis of the age of authors and how their age impacted the way they used words in 19th century literature. Schmidt found that people learn to use language in a certain way in their youth and tend not to change those patterns very much as they age. This accounts for the slightly different languages whippersnappers and their grandparents speak, even to this day.

I decided to see what I could find out about vocabulary use by digging into the Old Bailey Online (OBO). As many of you undoubtedly know, the OBO is a wonderful corpus of electronic text for anyone interested in Early Modern London. The OBO is an electronic XML version of the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, an abridged transcription of what was said in court for each case held in the Old Bailey courtroom between 1674 and 1914. What we have is not an exact facsimile of every word spoken, but what Magnus Huber believes is “guided by” what was said in court, capturing the ideas, if not always the exact words of the speaker. Though not a perfect transcription of speech, Clive Emsley believes that we can put our faith in the events described in the Proceedings because “the Old Bailey Courthouse was a public place, with numerous spectators, and the reputation of the Proceedings would have quickly suffered if the accounts had been unreliable”. 

Originally intended as a profit-making venture, entertaining the masses with tales of woe in the courtroom, the Proceedings became the official record in 1778 and were required to present a “true, fair and perfect narrative”. Practical limits of course made this difficult. The Proceedings were created entirely without electronic recording devices by shorthand reporters. Many trials therefore appear in significantly condensed form, such as the six-hour trial of Charles Stokes and company from 1787 that is recorded in only 468 words in the published version. Unfortunately, I do not have Huber's annotated version of the OBO corpus. I do however, have the full set of XML files, downloaded from the Old Bailey Online website (to learn how to do this check out the Programming Historian 2). I decided to focus on the records between the beginning in 1674 and the foundation of the Central Criminal Court in 1834. That gave me 161 years worth of early modern transcripts for just over 100,000 trials and 51 million words.

What I found was that even with such a wonderful resource we cannot be sure what people said to one another and how closely those speech events relate to the written records we have left. None of us knows how to speak like an eighteenth century Englishman, and based on my digging I don't think that the OBO can teach us how. That's because the vocabulary used in the OBO is the vocabulary of the people who recorded and edited the trial transcript and not of a wider communal lexicon. Instead of looking into vocabulary, I quickly realized I needed to be thinking about vocabularies. When it comes to the original assumption, we're not getting a bigger vocabulary, we're just using an ever-shifting one, the real question is: who is "we"?

Before coming to this conclusion, I looked at the rate of unique words entering the corpus over time. When I calculated this there were more than 120,000 unique words in the corpus, the introduction of which can be seen in Figure 1, showing a surprisingly linear increase. I should note that I'm defining a word as a unique string of characters. "word" and "words" are two different words for my purposes - that is, the corpus was not lemmatized.

Figure 1: The size of the lexicon int he Old Bailey Online [enlarge+]

Since I work on immigration to London this got me wondering if what we're actually seeing is not necessarily a growth in the vocabulary, but a diversification of names present in the metropolis. Trial transcripts typically discuss people, so we do get a lot of names popping up. New names can come from new people arriving in the city with unique names that no one else had, or when someone pronounces their name with a thick enough accent that a phonetic variation appears in the corpus as a new word (Callaghan, Calaghan, Callagan, Colligan, Calahan, Callaham, Callahan, Calleghan). Early modern parents were still largely not very adventurous with their names so we don't see a lot of children named "Apple" or "Harper Seven" and so creativity is not likely going to be a big factor driving the growth of new names. The OBO XML tags make this relatively easy to test. The "persName" tags allowed me to identify and extract all words used to describe people. As it happened, there were roughly 60,000 of these such names - about half of the entire lexicon.

I also decided to check if the new words represented use of English words, or if they were archaeic spellings, acronyms, or otherwise misspelled words, so I ran the entire set through a series of four English-language dictionaries to see if we were dealing with recognizeable words. These dictionaries included 90,000 unique "words", including lemmatized variations. Each word could therefore be a "dictionary word", a "name word", a combination of both, or neither.

The results can be seen in Figure 2, which shows what category the new words fall into, graphed over time along the same scale on the y-axis.

Figure 2: The size of the lexicon at each trial session, broken down by the category of word [enlarge+]

The results are, I think, interesting. I'll discuss the "Names List" and the "No List" entries in future posts. The bottom left graph is words that appear both as names and as words in the dictionary. This includes words such as "green", which can be both a person's name and a word describing the colour of something. I've decided not to disambiguate between the two on a word-by-word basis for time reasons.

For now, I'd like to focus on the dictionary terms. Dictionary words seem to be on the rise throughout the eighteenth century. The reason for this may in fact be a slight growth in the lexicon, but I think more likely is a tendency towards increased standardization in the spelling of English words. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary appears in print for the first time in 1755, so this is the age of standardization in lexicography. As anyone who has ever tried to read a seventeenth century text knows, people spelled (spelt?) words differently back then. Over time the "accompts" of criminal activity transform into "accounts". People stop committing "burghlary" and are instead charged with "burglary". This of course occurs shortly before the last "souldiers" are sent off to war.

My four "dictionaries" were built for modern use rathern than seventeenth or eighteenth century vocabulary, which means the figures above are a better indicator of when standardized spelling of English words were adopted than they are measures of the lexicon. "Burghlary" should really be counted as a variation of "burglary" rather than as a unique word in the "no list" category. A linguist would tell me that I should have lemmatized my corpus.

But don't dispair, not all is lost. I think we still can learn a thing or two about the lexicon as well as the OBO records themselves from this analysis. In Figure 3 you can see the number of new dictionary words per year introduced into the corpus.

Figure 3: The number of new words per year introduced into the OBO corpus [enlarge+].

The number of new terms is highest in the early years. This makes perfect sense as the corpus size starts at zero on the date of the first trial. Before a word appears in the corpus someone has to use it, and that takes time. The big peak in 1689 is an anomaly caused by a single account that was much longer than typically found at the time. Most big peaks can be traced to particularly long accounts, since these generally represent a reporter going into much more detail and therefore using a wider vocabulary. The dip in the early years of the 18th century represent a series of particularly short accounts, as well as some missing accounts. Where it all gets interesting for me is at the first arrow around 1715.

What we see at this first mark is a fairly high number of new dictionary words appearing each year until about the 1740s. The number of new words around 1715 may be artificially high, since we do seem to be missing entries in the previous decade and presumably some of those new words would have appeared earlier if we had the records. Nevertheless, there does appear to be more new words than normal in the following two decades. Perhaps surprisingly, the publication of Johnson's Dictionary at the second arrow marker, is actually a low point for new word growth in the middle of the eighteenth century. This to me suggests that Johnson was in many respects responding to generally accepted norms of spelling and word use rather than driving the adoption of such uses.

The last arrow is for me the most interesting. The number of new words per year again increases significantly just after 1778, which as I mentioned above was the date that the Proceedings of the Old Bailey became a "true, fair and perfect narrative" - an official record of courtroom activity. Perhaps this shift from a popular to an official record meant a significant change in what went into a trial account. That does seem to be part of the answer. The length of the Proceedings does slowly start to increase, starting in 1783 when the graph jumps upwards.

The fact that there are spikes in new words every time a long transcript appears reinforces the fact that the Proceedings are using a specific vocabulary - one related to criminal justice - as opposed to a vocabularly that's representative of the entire active English lexicon. But the spikes in new words, as well as the number of words in a trial transcript, can tell us even more, if we look at who was writing those words down.

As mentioned previously, Magnus Huber believes the Proceedings are "guided by" what was said in court. Before a spoken word appeared in the Proceedings the original speech event was converted to shorthand by a courtroom reporter and were converted back to prose by the workers in the print shop before being committed to paper. Words represent the attempt of one person to communicate an idea to another. As above, "burghlary" and "burglary" refer to the same idea. The difference between the two spellings is merely a choice in how to record the sounds using letters.

So what effect does changing the scribe have on the rate of new dictionary words entering the corpus? Apparently, quite a lot. I've located the names of the scribes from 1749 onwards in Huber's article, "The Old Bailey Proceedings, 1674-1834: Evaluating and annotating a corpus of 18th- and 19th-century spoken English". When we look at the number of new dictionary words each scribe introduces into the corpus (Figure 4), we see it's certainly not even across the board.

Figure 4: The number of new dictionary words per session added to the corpus, coloured by courtroom reporter [enlarge+].

I recognize there's a lot going on there, so I'll break this down into chunks that are easier to see. What I'd like to draw your attention to is the fact that some scribes increase the size of the corpus significantly, and others do not.

Firstly, let's look at Hodgson, who was holding the transcribers pen from 1782 to 1792 (Figure 5).

Figure 5: The number of new dictionary words in the Old Bailey corpus from 1781 to 1795, coloured by courtroom reporter [enlarge+].

Though W Blanchard was only on the job for a few months, it's quite clear that E Hodgson was on average adding more new words to the corpus each month than had his predecessor. The number of new words Hodgson adds starts slowly, but then picks up rather dramatically before tailing off towards the end of his tenure. Hodgson's "reign" so to speak also overlaps with the significant growth in the size of the Proceedings mentioned above. From the graph and the trendlines, we might make the following conclusions:

• Hodgson was verbose and reported more than his predecessors
• He had a larger than average vocabulary that he happily shared
• After a few years his "used up" his vocabulary and ceased to find as many new words

Hodgson has therefore influenced both the vocabulary used in the Proceedings as well as the length of the resultant documents. We would be naive therefore to suggest that Hodgson was an impartial observer or that the Proceedings during this period are anything but the output of Hodgson himself. The records were not "created"; they were created by Hodgson. The way Hodgson created the records was distinct from how the others did so.

Moving forward slightly in time, let's consider the next three scribes who wrote between 1792 and 1801 (Figure 6).

Figure 6: The number of new dictionary words in the Old Bailey corpus from 1792 to 1801, coloured by courtroom reporter [enlarge+].

The effect of different writers here is perhaps more obvious. Silby doesn't seem to be one for new words, whereas Marson and Ramsay in the blue definitely are. The fact that Ramsay stays on afterwards and the growth of the vocabulary is stunted thereafter suggests that it was Marson driving this change. It's becoming clear that anyone working with these records should be wary of who was responsible for creating them in the first place.

The last section I'd like to highlight is the final one from 1816 to 1834 when a single scribe named H Buckler was on the job. However, Buckler worked under a series of editors as can be seen in Figure 7.

Figure 7: The number of new dictionary words int he Old Bailey corpus from 1816 to 1834, coloured by editor [enlarge+].

In this case, the scribe stays the same yet we still see patterns that seem to make more sense when we know there's a different editor publishing the Proceedings. Clearly when Stokes takes over in 1828 there's a change to the resultant lexicon that spikes up, presumably after he had become confident in his new role after a few months on the job. This set is particularly interesting because from what we can tell, the scribe H Buckler doesn't seem to be the one driving the adoption of new words. From 1816 to 1828 he's one of the less ambitious in this category, but that begins to change as new editors take over.

Conclusions

How does this all tie back with my origional questions about vocabulary in the early modern era? Well, first of all, I failed to test what I set out to understand. Because I did not lemmatize my corpus I was not able to determine if we do in fact have a growing vocabulary or a shifting one. What I should have looked at was a moving window of word use, calculating how many words were used in a given ten-year period. I'll leave that for another day or another researcher to take on if they feel so inclined. My suspicion is that we have both a growing and shifting vocabulary. Words are falling into disuse or at least out of regular use. I imagine that Ben Schmidt's analysis explains most of that shift: young kids don't learn - or at least don't use - the same words as their parents or grandparents. Words die one funeral at a time.

The reason I wasn't able to see a shifting vocabulary using the OBO corpus is because the OBO does not represent a single person's vocabulary. Instead, it roughly represents the combined vocabulary of people who appear one way or another in the Old Bailey courtroom to discuss matter of law and justice, filtered through a courtroom reporter and an editor. As I discovered, those last two have a much bigger impact on the corpus than we might have liked to imagine. For anyone who looks at the language of the court or indeed the format of the transcripts by using the OBO corpus, I'd urge you to keep the impact of those reporters and editors in mind. For anyone studying academic history, do note that what seems like a window into the past, is in fact the product of a few individuals who made decisions they may not even have been aware of that impacted what was recorded, what was not, and what words they used to do so.

Crymble Awards: Digital Humanities & History Best of 2012

In keeping with the tradition I established last year, I thought it fitting to again take a moment on the last day of the year to acknowledge some of the people and projects that inspired and influenced my academic growth the most in the past year.

These days there is much talk about the impact of research - particularly in the UK with the impending "REF" that has academics across the country scrambling to demonstrate that they are "world class". We're always looking for ways to quantify who has the most influence, and unfortunately that's more often than not meant counting up citations. But the people I cite are not always the ones who have given me most cause to think, or those whose efforts I've appreciated the most. And that's where the Crymble awards are important for me. They're a chance to acknowledge that which often goes unacknowledged. And a chance to challenge the notion that a footnote is the only worthwhile measure of success.

Last year the awardees included six men who worked on five projects: Tim Hitchcock, William J. Turkel, Tim Sherratt, Ben Schmidt, Sean Kheraj, and Jeremy Boggs. Though all six continue to produce inspiring work, I've decided to exclude past winners. I will however stick with five projects as the magic number of awards. And this year I'm pleased to say the gender imbalance is improving - if only slightly.

In no particular order, I present this year's winners:

• Julia Flanders, "Faircite: towards a fairer culture of citation in academia"
  
  I emailed the journal Digital Humanities Quarterly back in January to suggest that the journal adopt fairer citation practices that would see a wider range of team members on collaborative digital humanities projects credited publicly for their work. The response I got from Julia the editor was astounding, full of energy and enthusiasm. She encouraged me to pursue the matter further, gave the idea a catchy name, and even helped put together a formal proposal for the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations which she supported and presented. I'm happy to report a number of projects have responded positively to Faircite and have begun offering more inclusive suggested citations that acknowledge the work of their team members - a trend I hope to see continue to grow. (See the Old Bailey Online, and Voyant Tools for examples). Thanks to Julia for her support.

 

• Luke Blaxill, "Quantifying the Language of British Politics 1880-1914" Paper presented at King's College London, 2 November 2012.
  
  Luke's a (recently) former colleague of mine at King's College London. His work ties together corpus linguistics with historical inquiry in a way that's so simple, yet so effective. What I love about Luke's research is that his distant reading approach to history has so effectively challenged conventional historical wisdom in a way that close reading could never highlight. I've incorporated many of the principles and tools I learned of through Luke into my own research. You can hear a version of his talk on the IHR History Spot archive. For those of you looking for a digital humanist with some great textual analysis skills, you'll be happy to hear Luke has recently received his doctorate in history and digital humanities, and I'm sure he'd love to hear from you!

• Peter King, "Ethnicity, Prejudice and Justice, The Treatment of the Irish at the Old Bailey 1750-1825" (under review).
  
  It's always a little frustrating to find someone's just published the very topic you had been working on. But in this case, the experience turned out much better than I could have hoped for. Peter King is a Professor of History at Leicester University and very willingly shared his pre-publication work with me, has answered questions, provided advice, and even made a trip down to London to watch me present a response paper to his work. I think it's fair to say he has been amicably combative about my work, and has pushed me to continue to improve.

• Andrew Marr, The Open University et al. "Andrew Marr's History of the World" BBC One. Television Series: October-November 2012.
  
  This one may perhaps look like the "one of these things just doesn't belong here" entry. Andrew Marr is a BBC journalist who presented an eight-part "world history" this autumn in the UK. I found myself unable to get enough. The team behind the series did an amazing job of finding specific examples to illustrate broader themes that captured what was unique about entire civilizations. It forced me to consider the scope of my own piddly 20 year local study and how that fits into the broader spectrum of human history. Kudos not just to Andrew Marr, but also to the Open University and everyone involved in the project. I'm sure there were many of you.

• Fred Gibbs and Miriam Posner "The Programming Historian 2"
  
  Fred and Miriam joined the Programming Historian 2 team of which I'm a part right at the beginning and have been been invaluable to getting the project off the ground. Miriam has taken on the role of our outreach officer, and Fred one of our general editors. Thanks very much to both of them for all their hard work on the project. (And though I said I wouldn't re-award past winners, I feel compelled to mention that William J. Turkel and Jeremy Boggs are also instrumental team members!).

Thanks to this year's winners for all your inspiration.

How to Download Multiple Records using Python

I'm pleased to announce my latest endeavour to teach historians how to program computers in aid of their research has been published and is freely available on the Programming Historian 2 website.

Full Lesson: Downloading Multiple Records Using Query Strings

The hands-on lesson builds upon some introductory Python tutorials also available on the site and is intended to teach practicing historians how to use Python to discriminately download a copy of sources found in scholarly databases to their own computer for further processing. Thanks to Fred Gibbs, Miriam Posner, and Sara Palmer for their assistance working the lesson into shape. The abstract is available below:

Downloading Multiple Records Using Query Strings

Downloading a single record from a website is easy, but downloading many records at a time – an increasingly frequent need for a historian – is much more efficient using a programming language such as Python. In this lesson, we will write a program that will download a series of records from the Old Bailey Online using custom search criteria, and save them to a directory on our computer. This process involves interpreting and manipulating URL Query Strings. In this case, the tutorial will seek to download sources that contain references to people of African descent that were published in the Old Bailey Proceedings between 1700 and 1750.

For Whom is this Useful?

Automating the process of downloading records from an online database will be useful for anyone who works with historical sources that are stored online in an orderly and accessible fashion and who wishes to save copies of those sources on their own computer. It is particularly useful for someone who wants to download many specific records, rather than just a handful. If you want to download all or most of the records in a particular database, you may find Ian Milligan’s tutorial on Automated Downloading with WGET more suitable.

The present tutorial will allow you to download discriminately, isolating specific records that meet your needs. Downloading multiple sources automatically saves considerable time. What you do with the downloaded sources depends on your research goals. You may wish to create visualizations or perform various data analysis methods, or simply reformat them to make browsing easier. Or, you may just want to keep a backup copy so you can access them without Internet access

Providing A Familiar Assessment Process for Digital Projects

"Trust Me" by Anderson Mancini

A few weeks ago in my Early Modern British History tutorial the students read a book review that had been printed in a scholarly journal. I asked the students, “Why are we reading this? What’s the point of this piece of writing?”

My cynical self tried not to let on what I was thinking: wasn’t it written so some PhD student could score a free book and put another line on his C.V.? My students thankfully didn’t see it that way.

Historical writing generally comes in one of a handful of tried-and-tested forms. In the course I teach we usually read and discuss articles published in peer reviewed journals. The students are now used to the goals of that particular mode of writing. They know it contains a historian’s contribution to a particular scholarly discussion, which is fairly narrowly defined and tends to correlate rather strongly to the topic we’re discussing that week in lecture.

They understand edited collections contain a series of articles by different authors on a theme defined by the editor. They know books (or monographs as historians like to call them) cover broader topics than a journal article, but they expect to find chapters in those monographs that rival the scope of an article. And for a first year undergraduate, that about covers the known forms of printed historical research.

Scholarly book reviews are generally a fairly new beast for the students. My question about the value of book reviews was of the type I knew I would not have been able to answer as a first year undergraduate, but I’m blessed with very clever students who had all manner of ideas. My favourite comment was that a book review:

provides another perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of the work, which are important to keep in mind when coming to our own conclusions about the author’s arguments.

I believe that idea holds the key for digital humanities scholars, many of whom feel their colleagues have been unwilling to award due credit for digital projects. However, the problem is not necessarily an unwillingness; the problem is that most people aren’t qualified to assess digital humanities work, so they just don’t. Forcing someone to assess something without the skills to do so is not the answer. I think most of us would prefer that a review of our work came from someone with the background to assess it fairly.

Scholarly reviews are a great platform for that assessment process for two reasons. Firstly, they take a form that nearly all humanities scholars already understand. Secondly, they allow the digital humanities community to self-define the major projects so that non-digital colleagues don’t have to.

Familiar Clothes

Like my students, most scholars can visualize where a review fits amongst the various scholarly apparatus floating around in the intellectual space in which we share and critique each other’s work. They understand that a quality review in a reputable journal represents an arms-length critical evaluation of the work by someone with the skills to make the assessment. Reviews certainly are not a perfect model. There is clearly a risk to any creator or team that they will get an unfairly negative treatment by someone who perhaps is not as qualified to write the review as they may think. But this is the same risk authors of monographs face, and to me, the benefits far outweigh the risks.

The world of publishing is changing, but there’s something to be said for making something look familiar. The Journal of Digital Humanities has taken this approach by experimenting with new ways of finding content that is important to the scholarly development of digital humanities – although I imagine that process of identifying content would look rather shocking to a typical historian or English lit. professor. (If you’d like to learn more about that project read their “How to Contribute” page.) However, by wrapping it up in the clothes of a traditional peer reviewed journal, the editors get to experiment, the authors get credit for their contributions, and the readers are drawn to some of the best ideas that appear online. Everyone wins.

For me, the Journal of Digital Humanities has represented a great success as a project that has been able to forge ahead, while acknowledging that sometimes it’s a good idea to change things gradually. In that project, the team decided to make sure they held onto some familiar concepts. They registered an ISSN number (2165-6673). They release the journal in “Volumes” with issue “Numbers” to ensure any citations look like a typical humanist expects them to. Neither of these is technically necessary, but they certainly do not hurt. And by having them those who disapprove of any changes to the mechanisms for scholarly communication have a few less things about which to complain and are instead forced to discuss the actual changes such as the open submission system rather than a lack of an ISSN number.

The Major Contributions

Digital humanities projects – particularly the digital ones – have taken an entirely different path to the familiar clothes approach. They look completely different. Many people still aren’t clear where a scholarly database or a digital tool fits amongst the other scholarly apparatus. Is it akin to a monograph? Is it a chapter in an edited collection? Is it an edited collection? Just how much work was it after all?

By changing the clothes completely digital humanists have made it difficult for non-digital colleagues to assess the work because they don’t necessarily understand how it was constructed or the intellectual considerations that went into building it. I believe we can change that by beginning to write and publish reviews, because within the traditional humanities framework reviews are reserved for major contributions. In historical journals it is generally only books that warrant a review, and I would suggest the book-equivalent amongst digital projects could benefit from the same.

If the community of digital humanists own this process, then it’s the community that gets to decide what the major contributions to the field are, by putting them up for review. And that process means non-digital colleagues not only have an arms-length evaluation of the merits and shortcomings of digital work from a reputable expert, but this review can then become the basis for digital scholars to go to their departments and say: this is what I achieved. And with that form of evidence, I think we’ll be one step closer to slotting digital projects into that mental framework of scholarly contributions.

Let’s Get Started!

Ok, ok. But before we get going, perhaps we should sit back and think for a few moments to ensure the reviews follow that model of familiar clothes. For these reviews to hold weight with non-digital faculty and to play an important role ensuring digital work receives the credit it deserves, reviews need to withstand a certain level of scrutiny. But they cannot merely look like reviews. They have to be rigorous, reliable, and arms length.

The first question then is where should the reviews appear? Many digital humanists would likely suggest blogs are the answer. After all, they are cheap and they are efficient publishing platforms. But I believe that would be an error in judgment. Firstly, they fail the familiar clothes principle. Some academics are still untrusting of blogs and whether we collectively agree with that skepticism or not the goal of reviews is to bridge that gap in trust, not entrench it; therefore we must make reviews as easy to swallow as possible for those we hope to engage.

Secondly, blogs are not arms length because the author controls all levels of the review’s distribution. A few years ago Amazon’s review system showed us why that can be a problem when the wife of an academic wrote poisoned pen reviews of his competitor’s books. If project reviews are to have an important role in assessment and credit then it is important that those reading them can be confident that the review was not written by a friend or colleague (or enemy) of a project leader who may have had an agenda.

For me, the natural home of project reviews is in a scholarly journal. Not that many dedicated scholarly journals out there focus on the digital humanities and from what I can tell only one (Literary and Linguistics Computing) currently publishes reviews - at the moment limited to reviews of books about digital humanities. This suggests to me that there is an opportunity for any of these journals to take the lead on such an initiative and adopt a project reviews section. I would particularly urge the Journal of Digital Humanities to take on this challenge not only as the new kid on the block, but as a group committed to trying new things in publishing and championing those who do things just a little bit differently.

By having reviews centred in a scholarly journal they gain not only a trusted distribution system – again familiar clothes – but they also fall under the control of an impartial editor. This is important for the same reasons that a blog is not the right venue for such work; by putting the system of soliciting reviews in the hands of an arms-length editor, a further check is placed upon the quality of reviews. This will not only reduce the number of friends-helping-friends reviews, but also ensures that the best work gets reviewed, rather than the work of people with large professional and personal networks.

By providing a familiar form of critical assessment for non-digital colleagues, digital humanists can collectively define what makes their work good, innovative, and scholarly. Because it is they who are best positioned to do so. In a few years I hope to be sitting with a new class, asking them: “Why are we reading this digital project review? What’s the point of this piece of writing?”

Then as now, the answer is not because a PhD student wanted to add a line to his C.V. Rather, it is because the digital humanities community needed a mode of assessing their work in a way that reflected the unique challenges and assets of such projects so that their colleagues had the tools available to critique some great if oftentimes overlooked projects.

I’ll even volunteer to write the first review. You know where to find me.

How to Animate Digital Humanities

What does digital humanities look like as an animated cartoon? Please help me find out.

Fabulously talented cartoonist (PhD Comics, Jorge Cham) is hosting a contest offering to animate a 2 minute description of a PhD student's thesis. But it's a popularity contest, and that's where I need you!

My talk is the only digital humanities entry (and one of a handful of history entries) in a field of more than 200 student talks from around the world. I think this is a great opportunity to spread the gospel of what we as digital humanists - in this case me - do on a daily basis.

I'd be grateful for your support in the form of a vote (no registration required)

http://www.phdcomics.com/tv/2minute/#92

Outreach is something I've always enjoyed experimenting with as a public historian and a digital humanist. But sometimes you need a lot of friends to achieve outreach. Popularity contests are one of those times. And while you're at it, have a listen and hear what I'm up to. I'd be happy to hear what you think.

Thanks to those who have already voted, and thanks to those who are voting right now. I can't do it without you.

Please RT!

Voting closes August 20, 2012.

"Shock and Awe" Graphs in Digital Humanities

As you can see here, this graph, representing ten million points of data, plotted logarithmically against seven million other points of data in a counter-clockwise fashion, with a smoothing value of 3 and scaled by a function of the distance from my elbow to my fingertips, designed by a particularly gifted graphic artist at Bewilderment Inc., CLEARLY shows that eighteenth century cattle had a strong preference for south facing barns.

Can't argue with that. But I will anyway.

Over the past two years I've been noticing a rise in what I like to call "shock and awe" graphs in digital humanities, designed to overwhelm their audience and perhaps even to evoke doubt in one’s own abilities to compete in the same scholarly conversation. These graphics are both incredibly complex representations of data, and incredibly beautiful. If we got rid of the axes, we might even be tempted to hang them as art. A colleague of mine used the term "poster graph" to describe these works. The idea behind that name was that the graph looked nice enough to blow up and put on a poster. Implicitly, this colleague suggested that represented in this manner, the data was likely to impress and captivate. Great. But are complex graphs good for scholarship? 

Scholarship shared between academics is not inherently meant to impress. It is meant for making discoveries. And so, while complex graphs are beautiful, they have a time and place.

Exploring data is certainly one of those times. Complex representations of data are sometimes the only way we can make some types of discoveries. Our eyes are, after all, great at noticing patterns. In a recent example (of which I was quite openly critical), trends in a set of data only became evident when it was plotted logarithmically. This graph then led the researchers on the trail of some interesting discoveries that would not have otherwise been possible. I have no issue with this. I have no issue with quantitative analysis.

I also have no issue with attempting to engage an audience who might not otherwise be interested in the research. I'm always thrilled to see historians, archaeologists, and mathematicians discussing their work on TV or on radio. That's fantastic. And in those cases, a "shock and awe" graph is probably appropriate. After all we have to sell what we do if we hope to compete with the Hollywood pros and the increasingly popular data journalists in major news outlets for the scant attention of the masses.

But I do have issue with shock and awe graphs sneaking into work intended for academic colleagues – particularly in peer reviewed work, and particularly when the complexity of the graph is not absolutely necessary to the conveyance of information. I do have issue with the fact that many very intelligent people who are responsible for evaluating the truth of these claims do not have the skills to interrogate these complex visualizations. These graphs have seemingly come out of nowhere for many who have spent their entire careers working almost exclusively with text and perhaps only simple numbers. For interdisciplinary work, there is a good chance that the first time many researchers will come across a "shock and awe" graph is when they have been handed a paper to review for a journal.

Understandably it can be embarrassing to realise you do not have the skills to critically assess the work in a field to which you have devoted your life. By handing someone a graph you know they likely cannot appraise, you are deliberately playing towards their sense of insecurity. It is easy to say the problem is numerical literacy but we must remember these are extraordinarily complex visualizations. It takes a lot of skill and a lot of learning before someone can create these graphs. It takes a comparable amount of time to learn how best to interpret them. And not everyone has had the luxury of focusing his or her time on that skill. In some cases surely the reviewer passes the graph through the filters unchecked. It’s less embarrassing that way. 

I don’t believe this is just a matter of numerical literacy levels. I’d go so far as to suggest that these graphs are often intentionally overwhelming and unnecessary for making the argument. But this is not my greatest worry. From the perspective of good scholarship a shock and awe graph is impossible to test. And therein lies the biggest problem. You plot tens of thousands of points on a complex multi-coloured, multi-dimensional scatter plot. The reviewer gets a static image. How do you test that exactly? How do you know there hasn’t been a dramatic mistake in the way the information was put on the graph? How do you know the data are even real?

You can't. You don’t. And I believe too often their creators know this and hope that in an effort not to expose one's own weaknesses, a reviewer will overlook parts he or she does not fully understand. Shock and awe becomes one way to increase the chances you will get a publication for your CV. I suppose we can’t blame people for looking out for their own career development. But, one day someone will take advantage of this knowledge and will cheat. That is, if they have not already.

Cheating in academia is not altogether unheard of. The humanities have long battled with plagiarism. Famously, Saif Gaddafi was accused of having parts of his thesis ghost-written while studying at the London School of Economics, leading to the resignation of LSE's director Howard Davies shortly thereafter. Plagiarism is a war that may always persist. But with the introduction of digital humanities in collaborative efforts with more traditional humanist fields, we now have to watch out for the faked results that researchers like Jatinder Ahluwalia have been accused of committing.

Ahluwalia recently made headlines after allegedly faking research results during his PhD work at Imperial College London and later during a Post-Doc at University College London. The investigation into Ahluwalia's work led to the embarrassing retractions of papers in the Journal of Neurochemistry, Nature, and a parting of ways between Ahluwalia and his employer, the University of East London.

We now need safeguards to protect the integrity of the good work out there, and to allow people to critically evaluate our results. One way to do that is to be hyper-critical of the very graphs we love to look at so much. Do they convey the data in the most straightforward way possible? Are they produced in a way that allows the data to speak for themselves, or are colour, size, shape, scale, orientation, or any other number of variables manipulated in a way that seeks to draw the reader to a conclusion that may not be the correct or only interpretation? Even something as simple as the order in which data points are put on a scatter plot can drastically change how one interprets the results. Points that are put on first may be covered up by later points, thus hiding or highlighting a trend that may not exist.

There will always be people who distrust numbers or who scoff at digital humanists as a bunch of bean counters. That can be frustrating, but it is also invigorating to know that there are those out there who will be sceptical of what we produce. We need this scepticism and we need to meet it head on if our work will be accepted. We can either work towards quelling this type of scepticism by ensuring our graphs present necessary information as transparently as possible, or we can attempt to silence it through a policy of shock and awe, with ever-complex representations of increasingly intricate datasets.

We'll likely make more friends if we take the former approach.

So before you publish a visualization, please take a moment and step back. As in the cult classic, Office Space, ask yourself: Is this Good for the Company?

Is this Good for Scholarship?

Or am I just trying to overwhelm my reviewers and my audience?

photo credit: “Swirling a Mystery” by garlandcannon