JISC

Summer 2011: This project has now completed. A summary of its discoveries is below, and more information is available from the Criminal Intent website.

By creating a facility to download and analyse 127 million words of text, extracted from the trials that form The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913, this project created a public environment in which ‘text mining’ methodologies could be applied. Anyone interested in exploring should visit the Getting Started Page on the Criminal Intent webpage.

Additionally, using the Mathematica 8 software, the full run of 197,000 trials recorded in the Proceedings was subject to a new form of exploration. This work illustrated how accounts of trials accounts evolved between the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, and how these changes in turn reflected the behaviour of the court at the Old Bailey. The results can be read in further detail in the accompanying white paper and some explanatory slides.

In the process the project illustrated that the accepted narrative of the development of the criminal trial was wrong, and demonstrated the importance of the rise of ‘plea bargaining’ in the 19th century, as a significant development in the creation of the modern criminal justice system.

This project has allowed the team to test and revise the historical narrative of the evolution of court room practise at the Old Bailey, from an early modern form of trial in which juries and negotiation dominated, to a more familiar modern system characterised by professional control by lawyers and the police; the declining role of juries, the rise of plea bargaining, and growing rates of conviction.