Curriculum Vitae
Work history and skills
Employment
Research Fellow in Digital Humanities
August 2023-present, University of Southampton. Data analysis and visualisation for the Beyond Notability project.
Research Associate: Skin and Bone
December 2022-August 2023, University of Lancaster. Data development and analysis for a project on accidents, injury, and violence in industrialising London, 1760-1901.
Research Associate: Alice Thornton’s Books
Sept 2021-present, University of Edinburgh. Research and XML markup and linkage for a digital scholarly edition of the four autobiographical texts of Alice Thornton.
Research Assistant
July 2021-November 2021, University of Reading. Creation of a corpus from EEBO-TCP texts and digital textual analysis for a project on polarisation in the early stages of the English Civil War.
Research Associate: Transatlantic Networks pilot project
April-July 2020, Animating Text Newcastle University. XML markup, entity linkage and exploratory visualisations of the correspondence of David Bailie Warden.
Research Associate: Power of Petitioning in 17th-century England
January 2019-March 2020, Birkbeck, University of London. Research for a project on 17th-century petitions, including a case study of Cheshire.
Research Associate: Nineteenth-century Criminal Tattoos
October 2018-September 2019, Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield. Research on 19th-century tattooing, experimenting with data analysis and visualisation techniques.
Digital History Project Manager: Old Bailey Online, London Lives, et al
August 2006-December 2017, Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield. Projects include The Digital Panopticon, Old Bailey Proceedings Online 1674-1913, London Lives 1690-1800 and Connected Histories 1500-1900
Research Associate: History DMT
March-August 2013, Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield. Research and writing for online course material for the History Data Management Training project (lead institution: Institute of Historical Research, London).
BA Postdoctoral Fellowship
October 2003-July 2006, University of Wales Aberystwyth, Dept. of History and Welsh History. Postdoctoral research on crime and violence in seventeenth-century Wales and Cheshire; included undergraduate teaching (early modern crime and first-year introductory courses).
Digital and Technical Skills
Key skills
- Data analysis and visualisation
- Data management, cleaning, conversion, etc
- Database modelling and design
- XML, XQuery/XPath, XSLT
- Linked open data, SPARQL, Wikidata
- Digital project management
- Writing and editing web content
I first designed and built databases (using Microsoft Access) for my PhD and postdoctoral research. In recent years I’ve used R and MySQL 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 used the internet extensively as an educational and research tool since the late 1990s, and have been designing my own websites for almost as long. 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.
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.
Public Engagement and Communications
Selected Writing Online
- At the Margins of Alice Thornton’s Books
- Encoding Alice Thornton’s Books
- The petition of Elizabeth Skory (for the UK Parliament Petitions Committee blog)
- Old Bailey Voices: gender, speech and outcomes in the Old Bailey
- Blogging about the London Lives Petitions Project
- Sarah Gale, c. 1767
- Arson in eighteenth-century London
- Thinking about duels and violent gentlemen (about research in progress on 'gentlemen behaving badly')
- A seventeenth-century detective
- Women's lives in the British Civil Wars
Websites and Blogs
- Early Modern Resources
- Research projects
- Blogs
- Early Modern Notes
- In Her Mind's Eye (history data exploration)
- BN Notes
Publications and Papers
Books
- Law and Disorder in Early Modern Wales, 1660-1730, University of Wales Press: Cardiff, 2008.
Articles and chapters
- ‘The local power of petitioning: petitions to Cheshire quarter sessions in context, c.1570-1800’ in Brodie Waddell and Jason Peacey, eds, The Power of Petitioning in Early Modern Britain (UCL Press, 2024.) OA book
- ‘Introduction’, Petitions to the Cheshire Quarter Sessions, 1573-1798 (British History Online)
- 'Bloody Code: Reflecting on a decade of the Old Bailey Online and the digital futures of our criminal past', Law, Crime and History 5:1 (2015) (OA journal)
- 'Abuses of Authority, Local Officers and Communities in Early Modern Denbighshire', Denbighshire Historical Society Transactions 63 (2015), pp. 37–53.
- with Tim Hitchcock, Robert Shoemaker, Katherine Rogers and Jane Winters, Chapter 7 (Connected Histories case study), Content Clustering and Sustaining Digital Resources (2011)
- 'Servants in early modern Wales: co-operation, conflict and survival', Llafur: the Journal of Welsh People's History, 9 (2005), pp. 33-43.
- 'Investigating responses to theft in early modern Wales: communities, thieves and the courts', Continuity and Change, 19 (2004), pp. 409-30. pdf
- 'Imagining the pain and peril of seventeenth‑century childbirth: danger and deliverance in the making of an early modern world', Social History of Medicine, 16 (2003), pp.367-82. pdf
- 'Riotous community: crowds, politics and society in Wales, c.1700-1840', Welsh History Review, 20 (2001), pp. 656-86. pdf
Selected conference papers
- ‘A new digital edition of Alice Thornton’s Books’, UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association First Annual Event, London, June 2023.
- ‘Alice Thornton’s Books’ (with Cordelia Beattie and Suzanne Trill), How to Do Things with Early Modern Words, Loughborough, July 2022.
- ‘Where the Social Historian Meets the Data Scientist’, session on Medieval and Early Modern Studies in a digital climate, Leeds International Medieval Congress, July 2021.
- ‘The local power of petitioning’, The Power of Petitioning in Early Modern Britain, online workshop, September 2020.
- '"A matter soe shamfull and unnaturall, as the lyke by anie woman hath seeldome bine offred": women, gender and non-lethal violence in petitioning narratives in early modern England and Wales', Gender and Violence in the Early Modern World, Cambridge, November 2019
- Gender, institutions and the changing uses of petitions in 18th-century London Petitioning in Context: when and why do petitions matter?, London, April 2019
- Defendants’ voices and silences in the Old Bailey courtroom, 1781-1880, Digital Panopticon launch conference, Liverpool, September 2017
- Settlement and Removal: Poor Relief and Exclusion in 18th-century London, Cultures of Exclusion, Warwick, May 2017
- London Lives Petitions Project: Remixing and Remaking Digital Histories, Digital Humanities Congress, Sheffield, September 2016
- What can you do with 10,000 petitions? (web presentation of talk) Addressing Authority: Petitions and Supplications in Early Modern Europe (London, March 2016)
- 'The Digital Panopticon', Transforming research through Digital Scholarship, British Library, November 2013 (slides)
- 'Bloody Code: reflecting on a decade of Old Bailey Online and the digital future of our criminal past', Our Criminal Past: Digitisation, Social Media and Crime History AHRC Network Event, London Metropolitan Archives, May 2013.
- 'Unmarried mothers in eighteenth-century London', North American Conference on British Studies (NACBS), Louisville, November 2009.
- 'Making lives digital: the challenge of creating Plebeian Lives', British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies annual conference, Oxford, January 2009.
- 'Internet sources for local population history: the Old Bailey Proceedings and Plebeian Lives', Local Population Studies Society Conference, Sheffield, November 2008.
- 'Digital History 2.0? Collaboration, community and interactivity in the digitisation of history', The Metropolis on Trial, Open University, July 2008.
Education
- PhD, History, 2003, University of Wales Aberystwyth. ('Crime, community and authority in early modern Wales: Denbighshire, 1660-1730', pdf)
- MA, Women's and Gender History, 1999, University of York.
- BA, History, 1998, UWA.