Hitchcock, Tim, Turkel, William J and Helmreich, Anne (2014) Rethinking inventories in the digital age: the case of the Old Bailey. Journal of Art Historiography, 11. ISSN 2042-4752

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Abstract

This article builds on the digitized version of the Old Bailey Proceedings (www.oldbaileyonline.org) by first extracting the indictments from the surrounding text and then subjecting the words they include, and objects they describe, to analysis. This entails working with a corpus of over a million words. At this scale, close reading no longer serves the historian well. It would require far more time than is reasonable or feasible; and a strategy of ‘distant reading’ is adopted here to allow analysis to focus on larger units of text.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Old Bailey, material culture, London, eighteenth century, crime
Schools and Departments:	School of History, Art History and Philosophy > History
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > DA History of Great Britain > DA020 England > DA129 By period > DA300 Modern, 1485- > DA505 George III, 1760-1820 N Fine Arts > NX Arts in general > NX0440 History of the arts
Depositing User:	Timothy Hitchcock
Date Deposited:	11 Dec 2014 10:31
Last Modified:	03 Jul 2019 01:30
URI:	http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/51669

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