This session was streamed live.
Abstract (taken from the History SPOT blog)
The Old Bailey Proceedings Online is a heavily used resource by historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who want to look at social and cultural history, particularly of the ordinary people. The ‘from below’ perspective that the proceedings can provide especially due to its mark-up online has truly moved the discussion forward. However, as the project was originally underway at least one person saw another possibility for the resource.
Magnus Huber is an historical-linguist and he viewed the Old Bailey corpus as a largely untapped resource for rediscovering spoken English in a period before audio or visual recordings. Huber has analysed the texts for long variations and change in spoken English as expressed in the court trials. He has asked and attempted to answer how accurate such a study can be. Does the written record accurately record spoken English? Even where the scribe has noted down direct speech, can we be sure that this is correct? What about the problem of summarising or changes in word-forms such as “can’t” rather than “cannot”? From an historians point of view some of this is not important to gaining an historical sense of what the resource is telling us. However, from a linguists point of view there are important differences and the records cannot entirely be trusted to tell us everything that we would like to be able to assume. A lack of internal consistency in the text is a problem and even comparing to other parallel documents cannot necessarily tell us the entire story.
Nevertheless, Huber’s study of the Old Bailey records has enabled him to reconstruct much more than would otherwise be possible. The quantity of material of the same form over a lengthy period of time that the Old Bailey records provide is a gold mine of information. Now marked-up with the latest digital technology and using digital tools to analyse and ‘mine’ the evidence, the Old Bailey proceedings are continuing to provide almost endless possibilities for research.
Resources
Magnus Huber profile
The Proceedings of the Old Bailey website
Article: Magnus Huber, ‘The Old Bailey Proceedings, 1674-1834: Evaluating and annotating a corpus of 18th-and 19th-ccentury spoken English’, Varieng: studies in variation, contacts and change in English (2007) Website
Magnus Huber video
This video is edited from the original live stream.
Note: In the first few minutes there is a blank screen for approximately 1 minute. The final half of the Q&A session also suffers from a dip in quality.