90,000 convict records made available for free
The Digital Panopticon project brings together biographical data from a wide range of sources
The stories of convicted criminals, including those sentenced to transportation, can now be uncovered on a new free history website.
The Digital Panopticon website launched at a conference in Liverpool on 13–15 September as part of a project by the University of Liverpool, University of Sheffield, University of Oxford, University of Sussex and University of Tasmania in Australia.
Named after an 18th-century theoretical prison where all the inmates can be watched by one guard, the website includes information on the lives of 90,000 individuals convicted of crimes at the Old Bailey between 1780 and 1925.
Professor Barry Godfrey, a social historian at the University of Liverpool who led the project, called Digital Panopticon “a resource the likes of which we have never had before” with a “staggeringly huge” amount of information.
“It is one of the largest genealogical resources and one of the first to catalogue in chronological order so users can follow the whole life of a person,” he added.
The Digital Panopticon is based on over four million records, some of which are available on subscription family history sites Findmypast and Ancestry. Other records are taken from The National Archives (TNA) and collections in Australia.
The website is aimed at a variety of users, including family historians, teachers, writers and academics. They can search the Digital Panopticon for a wide variety of information, including an offender’s name, sentence, date and place of birth, and even hair and eye colour.
There is the opportunity to view indexed information from the records and even create data visualisations of the search results. In addition, the website features background information on the records, biographies of the criminals, and information on the historical context.
Professor Bob Shoemaker of the University of Sheffield said that the site “combin[ed] extraordinarily rich records with the latest digital humanities methodologies” and had “clear relevance to contemporary penal regimes”.
Tim Hitchcock, professor of digital history at the University of Sussex, said: “The Digital Panopticon helps us understand history from below in a new way – from the perspective of the hundreds of thousands of working people caught up in a global system of policing, punishment and empire.”
Among other discoveries, the researchers found that many convicts originally sentenced to transportation never left Britain; transported convicts tended to stop offending once they married and had children; and children born to transported convicts were healthier and taller than the children of British convicts.
Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart of the University of Tasmania said that the site would “provide access to many records hitherto unavailable to Australian-based researchers”.
“It will prove a particularly important resource for family historians, enabling them to track the lives of the men and women sentenced in the Old Bailey to ‘leave their country for their country’s good’,” he added.
Professor Deborah Oxley of the University of Oxford said that the Digital Panopticon represented “a new era” for social and economic history.
“Mass biography, connecting multifarious records across individual lives, offers new opportunities for understanding the past,” she added.
Researchers carried out the data assembly, record linkage and website creation needed for the project at the Digital Humanities Institute at the University of Sheffield. The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
To view the records, go to digitalpanopticon.org.
It is one of the first genealogical resources to catalogue in chronological order