Loose, idle and disorderly: vagrant removal in late eighteenth-century Middlesex

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Social History on 2 October 2014, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2014.975943Peer reviewe

The civilizing process in London’s Old Bailey

The jury trial is a critical point where the state and its citizens come together to define the limits of acceptable behavior. Here we present a large-scale quantitative analysis of trial transcripts from the Old Bailey that reveal a major transition in the nature of this defining moment. By coarse-graining the spoken word testimony into synonym sets and dividing the trials based on indictment, we demonstrate the emergence of semantically distinct violent and nonviolent trial genres. We show that although in the late 18th century the semantic content of trials for violent offenses is functionally indistinguishable from that for nonviolent ones, a long-term, secular trend drives the system toward increasingly clear distinctions between violent and nonviolent acts. We separate this process into the shifting patterns that drive it, determine the relative effects of bureaucratic change and broader cultural shifts, and identify the synonym sets most responsible for the eventual genre distinguishability. This work provides a new window onto the cultural and institutional changes that accompany the monopolization of violence by the state, described in qualitative historical analysis as the civilizing process

Rethinking inventories in the digital age: the case of the Old Bailey

This article builds on the digitized version of the Old Bailey Proceedings (www.oldbaileyonline.org) by first extracting the indictments from the surrounding text and then subjecting the words they include, and objects they describe, to analysis. This entails working with a corpus of over a million words. At this scale, close reading no longer serves the historian well. It would require far more time than is reasonable or feasible; and a strategy of ‘distant reading’ is adopted here to allow analysis to focus on larger units of text

PRESERV: Preservation Services for OAI-Compliant Repositories

The OAI-PMH has become the de-facto standard for exposing metadata. In the PRESERV project we have explored new models for enabling thedigital preservation of and long-term access to content in Institutional Repositories (IRs). We envision digital preservation being achieved through simple preservation services working with standards-based, interoperable repository software. As support for the OAI-PMH matures so repositories are providing more robust mechanisms to access their content through OAI, e.g. community standards for using Dublin Core, support for METS or DIDL. Based on this, we have developed an exemplar File Format Profiling tool in the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), utilizing OAI and PRONOM DROID. PRONOM-ROAR is a first step to preserving digital content through simplifying content file format management for IR Managers by providing file format profiles and alerts

Bootstrap methods for the empirical study of decision-making and information flows in social systems

Abstract: We characterize the statistical bootstrap for the estimation of information theoretic quantities from data, with particular reference to its use in the study of large-scale social phenomena. Our methods allow one to preserve, approximately, the underlying axiomatic relationships of information theory—in particular, consistency under arbitrary coarse-graining—that motivate use of these quantities in the first place, while providing reliability comparable to the state of the art for Bayesian estimators. We show how information-theoretic quantities allow for rigorous empirical study of the decision-making capacities of rational agents, and the time-asymmetric flows of information in distributed systems. We provide illustrative examples by reference to ongoing collaborative work on the semantic structure of the British Criminal Court system and the conflict dynamics of the contemporary Afghanistan insurgency

Preservation for Institutional Repositories: practical and invisible

With good prospects for growth in institutional repository (IR) contents, in the UK, due to the proposed RCUK policy on mandating deposit of papers on funded work, and internationally due to the Berlin 3 recommendation, it is timely to investigate preservation solutions for IRs. The paper takes a broad view of preservation issues for IRs - based on practice, experience and visions for the future - from the perspective of Preserv, a JISC-funded project. It considers preservation in the context of IRs. Based on the OAIS preservation model, an architecture is proposed to support distributed preservation services for IRs. Work performed so far involves adapting the IR user deposit interface in a pilot version of EPrints software for building IRs, and determining accurate file format information using Pronom software. The paper looks ahead briefly at the role of preservation service providers, working for the IR, within this architecture. The strategy is to take practical steps that are, as far as possible, invisible to all but those concerned with the preservation process for IRs

Digitometric Services for Open Archives Environments

We describe “digitometric” services and tools that add value to open-access eprint archives using the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. Celestial is an OAI cache and gateway tool. Citebase Search enhances OAI-harvested metadata with linked references harvested from the full-text to provide a web service for citation navigation and research impact analysis. Digitometrics builds on data harvested using OAI to provide advanced visualisation and hypertext navigation for the research community. Together these services provide a modular, distributed architecture for building a “semantic web” for the research literature

PRONOM-ROAR: Adding Format Profiles to a Repository Registry to Inform Preservation Services

To date many institutional repository (IR) software suppliers have pushed the IR as a digital preservation solution. We argue that the digital preservation of objects in IRs may better be achieved through the use of light-weight, add-on services. We present such a service – PRONOM-ROAR – that generates file format profiles for IRs. This demonstrates the potential of using third- party services to provide preservation expertise to IR managers by making use of existing machine interfaces to IRs