Output details
30 - History
University of Hertfordshire
London's Lives, 1690-1800
http://www.londonlives.org/
The London Lives website is designed to facilitate research into the role plebeian Londoners played in the development of modern social policy. It contains 40 million words of digitised text about the lives of the eighteenth-century London poor, including 240,000 manuscripts from eight archives and fifteen externally created datasets, giving access to 3.35 million name instances. The site provides facilities for record linkage, and contains 93 webpages (229,000 words) providing background information, search instructions, and 77 plebeian biographies ('lives'). These background pages have been created on the basis of detailed research primarily conducted using the website itself. London Lives was the winner of the 2011 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Prize for Digital Resources.
As joint project directors, Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker (Sheffield) shared equally in the design of the project; the selection of manuscripts and datasets to be included; development of the XML markup schema; search facilities and Nominal Record Linkage methodologies. They also oversaw the processes of transcription, tagging, and website design; as well as writing almost all the background texts. On the basis of both prior research and research conducted on these newly digitised sources, Hitchcock was the principal author of fourteen historical background pages on poverty and local government, thirty guides to different document types, three research guides, and nine guides to external datasets. He also researched and wrote the 'lives' of Paul Patrick Kearney among others and sourced and processed all illustrations and graphs.
The website brings together Hitchcock and Shoemaker's understanding of the archives of eighteenth-century London built up over thirty years of detailed research, with technical expertise generated in the creation of the Old Bailey Online to create a resource and research environment in which new historical questions can be asked and answered.
