Big data and dead criminals, presented by Professor Tim Hitchcock of the University of Hertfordshire.
This talk explores work to make complex trial accounts totalling 127 million words fully searchable by key word and location on The Old Bailey Online. Surveying a series of projects from geographical data and corpus linguistics to explicit semantics used to make the accounts searchable. It explored the evolution of the British criminal trial and the language used in court that without this work would have otherwise remained impenetrable.
This event took place as part of Big Ideas, a series of monthly talks on big ideas coming out of The National Archives’ research programme.