About Me
I'm Sharon Howard, and since 2006 I've worked as project manager and researcher for various digital history projects. I’ve recently worked on Alice Thornton’s Books, Beyond Notability and The Power of Petitioning. I’m data manager for the Old Bailey Online.
I create historical datasets and websites. I like writing code for data analysis and visualisation.
Key skills
- Data analysis and visualisation
- Database modelling and design
- Data management, cleaning, conversion, etc
- Digital history/humanities project management
- Writing and editing web content
I first designed and built databases for my PhD and postdoctoral research. In recent years I’ve used R extensively in projects and research; most recently I’ve been working with Wikibases and SPARQL. I’m currently improving my skills with Javascript for interactive data visualisation.
I’ve been designing my own websites since I was a PhD student. I began by hand-building static HTML pages, moved on to customising WordPress and wiki sites, and from there to custom-built PHP and MySQL. I’ve more recently returned to static websites, but this time around I’m building them with tools like Quarto and Observable Framework.
I’ve managed a series of successful digitisation and digital history projects since 2006. In addition to day-to-day project management, research and writing academic material and web content, my key role has been to provide a bridge between project academics and programmers, and my skills have evolved accordingly in response to the needs of individual projects and developments in technology.
I have extensive experience of
- R, RMarkdown and Quarto
- XML, XQuery and XSLT
- SPARQL and Linked Open Data
- HTML/CSS, PHP and MySQL
I’m working on
- Javascript and D3.js
- Python
Historical research
Within a broad concern with British social history from c.1550-1850, my research interests concentrate on early modern crime, disputes and violence, women and gender, sexuality and 'the body'. My research has focused primarily on witness narratives in legal records, as valuable sources not only for exploring the experiences and mentalities of early modern people but also for asking questions about authority, order and disorder from localities to the state. My PhD research on crime in early modern Wales focused on the rich criminal court archives of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Denbighshire and my subsequent post-doctoral research expanded on this work to explore violence in north Wales and Cheshire. This research produced conference papers, articles and a monograph.
More recently, my work has led me to focus on early modern petitioning and on the social history of eighteenth-century London, including using the records of the Old Bailey and London Lives projects to explore the voices of Old Bailey defendants, arson trials and fraud, petitioners, paupers and bastardy. I have been exploring data mining and visualisation techniques with this data.