£1.7M award to trace the lives of British and Australian convicts

A £1.7million award from the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) is set to enable people to trace the records of Londoners sentenced to either imprisonment or transportation from 1787 up to the 1920s, when the last convict died. The project, The Digital Panopticon: The Global Impact of London Punishments, 1780-1925 funded by the AHRC, will use digital technologies to bring together existing and new genealogical, biometric and criminal justice datasets held by different organisations in the UK and Australia to produce a searchable website. Led by the University of Liverpool, the project team involves the Universities of Sheffield, Oxford and Sussex in the UK and the University of Tasmania, Australia. The Digital Panopticon will make it possible to explore the impact of the different types of penal punishments on the lives of 66,000 people sentenced at The Old Bailey. The University of Sheffield's Humanities Research Institute (HRI) will play a pivotal role in the project, developing new record linkage and data visualisation techniques which will enable researchers and the wider public to explore life stories across thousands of documents. Professor Bob Shoemaker from the University of Sheffield's Department of History explained: "The Digital Panopticon extends the life of the successful Old Bailey Online project by linking it to other digital resources which document the lives of convicts and their descendants. "The project addresses an issue of considerable contemporary relevance - the effectiveness of punishments in reducing reoffending, by comparing the life experiences of those who were imprisoned with those who were sentenced to Australia.