I started making history websites in 1999; projects since then have ranged from handcoding HTML, hacking WordPress and wikis, building PHP/MySQL databases, to static site generators (including this site). I’ve made several datasets for historical research in the course of my personal and my work projects.
2025
Essays with experimental interactive visualisations of the Beyond Notability data (with James Baker).
dataviz
interactive
women
2025
Guides to using the OBO API and more, with R and Quarto.
api
crime
resource
personal project
2025
Data blog for the Skin and Bone project, using R and Quarto
blog
bodies
dataviz
2024
Data blog with exploratory notes and analysis of the Beyond Notability database, using R and Quarto.
blog
dataviz
women
2022
Data from 2847 early modern English petitions published by The Power of Petitioning in 17th-Century England. Includes information about petitioners, petition topics and administrative responses.
dataset
early modern
petitions
2021
A website for exploring and visualising data created by The Power of Petitioning in the 17th Century (TPOP).
dataviz
early modern
petitions
personal project
2020
An electronic edition of the book London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690–1800, including updated visualisations, built as a static website.
book
crime
early modern
poor
for
London Lives
2018
Dataset created for the Digital Panopticon from registers of prisoners in Newgate originally digitised by London Lives. I cleaned up and standardised prisoner names, ages, heights, trial dates, prison and court names, offences and outcomes.
crime
dataset
2018
A Quarto blog for exploring and visualising history data using R, with open data and code.
blog
dataviz
personal project
2018
Data for 2894 Westminster inquests, including dates, places, verdicts and causes of death from a collection digitised for London Lives. Data creation involved identifying individual cases and extracting information using standard document format.
crime
dataset
early modern
personal project
2018
A website to document my digital history projects focused on the exploration of data from London Lives 1690-1800 and the Old Bailey Online.
crime
early modern
petitions
poor
personal project
2018
Dataset created for Digital Panopticon from registers of "habitual" criminals in England and Wales. Includes detailed biographical, physical and administrative information. I cleaned up OCR, restructured data and did data linkage.
crime
dataset
2018
This project extracted descriptions of tattoos for c.60,000 individuals in the Digital Panopticon database. I worked on data exploration and visualisations.
blog
crime
dataviz
for
DHI, Sheffield
2018
Corpus of all prisoner defence statements that could be identified in trials in the Old Bailey Proceedings between 1751 and 1900, with metadata about the trials, defendants, offences and outcomes.
crime
dataset
2018
Text and summary data for 21000 trials reported in the Proceedings, created for Digital Panopticon research. A "remix" of the Old Bailey Proceedings and the Old Bailey Corpus, to enhance speaker role markup and link defendants' trial outcomes.
crime
dataset
2017
Dataset created for Digital Panopticon from lists of prisoners tried at Middlesex/Westminster Sessions; includes biographical and offending information. My work included cleaning OCR and extraction of ages, dates, sentences, etc.
crime
dataset
2016
Dataset of about 28000 individuals in 10700 eighteenth-century pauper examinations. Digitised as part of London Lives, creation of the dataset involved separating examinations based on text patterns, identifying roles and deduplication.
dataset
early modern
poor
personal project
2015
About 10,000 eighteenth-century petitions to London magistrates, originally digitised for London Lives. I extracted petitions from about 100,000 pages of heterogeneous documents using strategies based on distinctive textual features.
dataset
early modern
petitions
personal project
2015
Data for 1515 offenders convicted at the Old Bailey and Middlesex Sessions and conveyed to ships for transportation to Australia. Created from Order Books digitised by London Lives; I added structure for names, dates and ships.
crime
dataset
personal project
2014
An edition of my MA thesis research on sexual defamation in 17th-century York, including an online version of the thesis and searchable calendar of cases. Originally PHP/MySQL, now Quarto.
early modern
resource
women
personal project
2014
Dataset of 107 defamation causes in York, based on archival research for my MA thesis in 1999 and more recently linked to the York Cause Papers database. Includes names of plaintiffs and defendants, linked cases, defamatory words and categories.
dataset
early modern
personal project
2013
A step-by-step guide to using the reference manager Zotero, originally created to accompany a British Library training workshop.
resource
zotero
for
British Library
2012
A website gathering together resources and material from my research on the history of crime.
crime
early modern
resource
personal project
2001
Searchable bibliography on crime, disputes and disorder, criminal law and punishment, mainly Britain, western Europe and north America. Originated in my PhD research, subsequently expanded and converted to a Zotero library.
crime
early modern
resource
personal project
2001
A microsite focusing on women's voices and experiences of the British Civil Wars, with source extracts, images and mini-biographies.
early modern
resource
women
personal project
2000
A long-running research portal for the early modern period (c.1500-1800 CE), which lists websites that are free to access and focuses on high-quality resources suitable for advanced research, study and teaching.
early modern
resource
personal project
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