The Digital Panopticon: The Global Impact of London Punishments, 1780-1925

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Led by an international team of established researchers, this ambitious large-scale project develops new and transferable methodologies for understanding and exploiting complex bodies of genealogical, biometric, and criminal justice data, thereby demonstrating the benefits of digital innovation to sometimes skeptical scholars and public audiences. Through data mapping and life-course analysis this project will investigate a central issue of penology and social policy: the relative impacts of different types of punishment on criminal desistance, health outcomes, employment opportunities, and family life over the long term. Using sophisticated data-linking methodologies it joins together existing and widely used large data-sets (Old Bailey Online [containing accounts of all trials held at London's Central Criminal Court]; London Lives [a searchable archive of crime, poverty and social policy]; and Founders and Survivors [records of the 73,000 men women and children who were transported to Tasmania]) with newly digitised data to make it possible to chart the fortunes of all Londoners convicted at the Old Bailey between the departure of the First Fleet to Australia (1787) through to the death of the last transported Londoner in Australia in the early 1920s. Prisoners kept in London's burgeoning prison estate will be identified and followed in newly available digitized prison records, as well as civil datasets (such as the censuses carried out between 1841 and 1911). Convicts sentenced to transportation will be traced through the richly detailed convict records in Australia, as well as in London prison registers and birth, marriage and death records. We will trace the criminal London poor through a plethora of digital records, recreating a pan-global prism capable of mapping and analyzing their lives at both the collective and individual level. The main output will be a database and curated-website, in addition to publications in leading journals. At the outset we will publish a blog, and a project website (which will explain our methodology and progress, introduce debates on ethics, methodology, and epistemology, and provide preliminary findings, so that we can engage with the widest possible audience). The 'London Eye' website will also provide an integrated search engine for searching the conjoined datasets containing life course data for 66,000 Londoners who experienced differing penal regimes, which we expect to be regularly consulted by many of the 12 million family historians in the UK and Australia. In addition, in partnership with media and industry partners, we will create online digital learning resources that will disseminate project findings to family historians, schools, and the creative industries. This project reconstructs the story of family formation, desistence and reoffending on a vast and unprecedented scale. In constructing this digital Panopticon of London criminal justice, this interdisciplinary trans-national project will resolve a number of important questions which have long intrigued historians, sociologists, social geographers, linguistic researchers, economists and criminologists, who have hitherto lacked the tools to carry out this research.