Rethinking inventories in the digital age: the caseof the Old Bailey

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.