CV

Employment

Data Manager, Old Bailey Online

2022-present, Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield. Various pieces of work for a major update to the Old Bailey Online, Locating London’s Past and London Lives websites. This included converting all three sites’ static background material from a wiki format for export into WordPress; data cleaning and corrections; converting a text-based bibliography to a Zotero library; enhancement of geo data for Locating London.

Research Fellow, Alice Thornton’s Books

Sept 2021-March 2025, University of Edinburgh. Research and XML markup and linkage for a digital scholarly edition of the four autobiographical texts of Alice Thornton.

Research Fellow in Digital Humanities

August 2023-December 2024, University of Southampton. Data analysis and visualisation for the Beyond Notability project.

Research Associate, Skin and Bone

December 2022-August 2023, University of Lancaster. Data development and analysis for a project on accidents, injury, and violence in industrialising London, 1760-1901.

Research Assistant, Civil War Polarisation

July 2021-November 2021, University of Reading. Creation of a corpus from EEBO-TCP texts and digital textual analysis for a project on polarisation in the early stages of the English Civil War.

Research Associate, Transatlantic Networks pilot project

April-July 2020, Animating Text Newcastle University. XML markup, entity linkage and exploratory visualisations of the correspondence of David Bailie Warden.

Research Associate, Power of Petitioning in 17th-century England

January 2019-March 2020, Birkbeck, University of London. Research for a project on 17th-century petitions, including a case study of Cheshire.

Research Associate, Nineteenth-century Criminal Tattoos

October 2018-September 2019, Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield. Research on 19th-century tattooing, experimenting with data analysis and visualisation techniques.

Research Associate, History DMT

March-August 2013, Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield. Research and writing for online course material for the History Data Management Training project (lead institution: Institute of Historical Research, London).

Digital History Project Manager: Old Bailey Online, London Lives, et al

August 2006-December 2017, Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield. Projects include The Digital Panopticon, Old Bailey Proceedings Online 1674-1913, London Lives 1690-1800 and Connected Histories 1500-1900

BA Postdoctoral Fellowship

October 2003-July 2006, University of Wales Aberystwyth, Dept. of History and Welsh History. Postdoctoral research on crime and violence in seventeenth-century Wales and Cheshire; included undergraduate teaching (early modern crime and first-year introductory courses).

Education

• PhD, History, 2003, University of Wales Aberystwyth. ('Crime, community and authority in early modern Wales: Denbighshire, 1660-1730', pdf)
• MA, Women's and Gender History, 1999, University of York.
• BA, History, 1998, UWA.

Publications

• ‘The local power of petitioning: petitions to Cheshire quarter sessions in context, c.1570-1800’ in Brodie Waddell and Jason Peacey, eds, The Power of Petitioning in Early Modern Britain (UCL Press, 2024.) OA book
• ‘Introduction’, Petitions to the Cheshire Quarter Sessions, 1573-1798 (British History Online)
• 'Bloody Code: Reflecting on a decade of the Old Bailey Online and the digital futures of our criminal past', Law, Crime and History 5:1 (2015) (OA journal)
• 'Abuses of Authority, Local Officers and Communities in Early Modern Denbighshire', Denbighshire Historical Society Transactions 63 (2015), pp. 37–53.
• with Tim Hitchcock, Robert Shoemaker, Katherine Rogers and Jane Winters, Chapter 7 Connected Histories case study, Content Clustering and Sustaining Digital Resources (2011)
• Law and Disorder in Early Modern Wales, 1660-1730, University of Wales Press: Cardiff, 2008.
• 'Servants in early modern Wales: co-operation, conflict and survival', Llafur: the Journal of Welsh People's History, 9 (2005), pp. 33-43.
• 'Investigating responses to theft in early modern Wales: communities, thieves and the courts', Continuity and Change, 19 (2004), pp. 409-30. pdf
• 'Imagining the pain and peril of seventeenth‑century childbirth: danger and deliverance in the making of an early modern world', Social History of Medicine, 16 (2003), pp.367-82. pdf
• 'Riotous community: crowds, politics and society in Wales, c.1700-1840', Welsh History Review, 20 (2001), pp. 656-86. pdf

Selected conference papers

• ‘A new digital edition of Alice Thornton’s Books’, UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association First Annual Event, London, June 2023.
• ‘Alice Thornton’s Books’ (with Cordelia Beattie and Suzanne Trill), How to Do Things with Early Modern Words, Loughborough, July 2022.
• ‘Where the Social Historian Meets the Data Scientist’, session on Medieval and Early Modern Studies in a digital climate, Leeds International Medieval Congress, July 2021.
• ‘The local power of petitioning’, The Power of Petitioning in Early Modern Britain, online workshop, September 2020.
• '"A matter soe shamfull and unnaturall, as the lyke by anie woman hath seeldome bine offred": women, gender and non-lethal violence in petitioning narratives in early modern England and Wales', Gender and Violence in the Early Modern World, Cambridge, November 2019
• Gender, institutions and the changing uses of petitions in 18th-century London Petitioning in Context: when and why do petitions matter?, London, April 2019
• Defendants’ voices and silences in the Old Bailey courtroom, 1781-1880, Digital Panopticon launch conference, Liverpool, September 2017
• Settlement and Removal: Poor Relief and Exclusion in 18th-century London, Cultures of Exclusion, Warwick, May 2017
• London Lives Petitions Project: Remixing and Remaking Digital Histories, Digital Humanities Congress, Sheffield, September 2016
• What can you do with 10,000 petitions? (web presentation of talk) Addressing Authority: Petitions and Supplications in Early Modern Europe (London, March 2016)
• 'The Digital Panopticon', Transforming research through Digital Scholarship, British Library, November 2013 (slides)
• 'Bloody Code: reflecting on a decade of Old Bailey Online and the digital future of our criminal past', Our Criminal Past: Digitisation, Social Media and Crime History AHRC Network Event, London Metropolitan Archives, May 2013.
• 'Unmarried mothers in eighteenth-century London', North American Conference on British Studies (NACBS), Louisville, November 2009.
• 'Making lives digital: the challenge of creating Plebeian Lives', British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies annual conference, Oxford, January 2009.
• 'Internet sources for local population history: the Old Bailey Proceedings and Plebeian Lives', Local Population Studies Society Conference, Sheffield, November 2008.
• 'Digital History 2.0? Collaboration, community and interactivity in the digitisation of history', The Metropolis on Trial, Open University, July 2008.