Slides for a presentation at the British Library - 14 Nov 2011

3. Number of words published per year, 1674-1913 (scaled on the right), against the number of
trials heard (scaled on the left). Word counts are derived from trial text only and exclude
prefatory material and punishment summaries.

4. A Scatter Chart of all 197,745 trials in the Proceedings measured by word length. Each dot in the
scatter chart below represents a single trial. Please note that the Y axis is a logarithmic scale.

5. Distribution of trial lengths in words for ‘killing’ displayed in red; all other trials in grey. ‘Killing’
includes all trials tagged as including the offences of, ‘Infanticide’, ‘murder’, ‘petty treason’,
‘manslaughter’, and ‘killing: other’, by the Old Bailey online.

6. Distribution of trial lengths in words for ‘killing’ displayed in red; all other trials in grey. ‘Killing’
includes all trials tagged as including the offences of, ‘Infanticide’, ‘murder’, ‘petty treason’,
‘manslaughter’, and ‘killing: other’, by the Old Bailey online.

7. Guilty Pleas, 1674-1913 (32,272 trials) .
Guilty Pleas as a percentage of all
verdicts, 1674-1913 (32,272 / 197.745
trials) .

8. Percentage of trials resulting in a ‘guilty’ verdict. Nb. Between October 1792 and December
1793 trials resulting in an acquittal on all charges were excluded from the Proceedings. This
exclusion has a marked and misleading impact on the moving average between 1777 and 1808;
the apparently similar spike in convictions in 1706 results from a whole issue of the Proceedings
being given over to a single trial, which was judged ‘guilty’. See 17061206.

18. "After we exclude serials, we can
finally count all the books in the
world. There are 129,864,880 of
them. At least until Sunday.“
Leonid Taycher, software engineer, Google Inc.
Thursday, August 05, 2010 at 8:26 AM

19. We no longer deal with text, we deal with ‘data’ :
The Infinite Archive of Published Text and Manuscript
Images
Objects
The Born Digital
Stuff
We need
• Footnotes that work in a digital age.
• Data that can be curated, saved, and re-used.
• Tools for genuinely deductive research.
• Tools for ‘Big Data’, close readings and for Visualisations.