Treason, Trials, and Teaching Archives

                        

The above word jumble comes from a search into the Old Bailey Online project's records for the word "treason".  Then, using zotero to save the search, I exported the data to VoyeurTools.org to do an instant search through the results.  This was the desired result of the Data Mining With Criminal Intent project, headed by Dan Cohen, to make the tools for intricate data visualization and research available to everyone.  The Old Bailey project was an obvious choice, as it was the largest single repository of non-elite stories available.

The Old Bailey project had a very ambitious goal, to digitize millions of pages of documentation stretching back to the 1600s.  Never fully complete, the project has spawned countless projects from the high school to doctoral level.  While not perfect, the level of accuracy is commendable, with less than 1 error in 3000 words.

Some scanned documents are old and hard to read.
Courtesy of the Old Bailey Online project

The scans are not perfect, as indicated in the above image.  But the site gives a machine read version as well, which can be cross checked with the scan.  The easy use of the project has enabled many interesting and creative projects to be built around it, such as this one, which encouraged students to do comparisons of results after changing a single search input.

Data visualization is something we tackled a bit in our class in the Dead of Spokane Project.  The tools we used were just the tip of the iceberg, as is shown in Shawn Allen's interesting article on the subject.  He takes us from the early history of charts and graphs to the present Renaissance of interactive digital visualizations.  

The unemployment rates for people like myself (white, male, college graduates)
Image courtesy of the New York Times.

The above visualization calculates and shows the unemployment levels for different groups of people.  While people like myself have relatively low levels of unemployment, if I were to change a single value (race), the rate doubles.  Does this indicate that racism still exists at high levels among employers?  Or is it a mere accident of geography, with minorities more likely to live in economically depressed urban areas?  The visualization tools used by the NYTimes presents the figures in an interesting and stark way.