Petition of Ester Cutler (1715)
LL ref: LMSMPS501460090
London Metropolitan Archives MJ/SP/1715/07
Introduction
The London Lives Petitions Project is a digital history project by Sharon Howard which aims to explore approximately 10,000 petitions (and petitioning letters) addressed to magistrates, contained in the voluminous records of eighteenth-century London and Middlesex Sessions of the Peace which were digitised for London Lives, 1690-1800. These are important sources for the social history of eighteenth-century London, which have been difficult to access within the existing London Lives resource because of the sheer size and variety of the Sessions Papers documents.
- In the first phase of the project, I focused on discovery of petitions in the Sessions Papers, and the creation of new metadata that would facilitate access and analysis. This discovery stage is largely complete (February 2016), although there may be smaller future additions and corrections (particularly to deal with duplicates and multiple copies of petitions). The resulting data, consisting of structured metadata and plain text files, has been released as open data under a Creative Commons licence.
- Work on the data is ongoing to add tagging that will further aid access and re-use, particularly subject tagging and re-incorporating London Lives' existing tagging for petitioners' names. I also plan (eventually) to link the petitions to related documents (court orders, pauper examinations, etc) in the London Lives archives.
- Project research starts from the question: What can you do with 10,000 petitions? Can large-scale distant reading techniques tell us things that we didn't already know from close reading of smaller, personally-crafted collections of petitions? I'll be experimenting with various methods and data visualisations.
- But also: what can you not do with them? Understanding what doesn't work for data like this is important. For one thing, the quality of the transcriptions does not match up to traditional scholarly standards: is it good enough for 'big data' methods? And there are problems with uneven survival of the original records. Do quantitative methods produce results that are meaningful, insights of any significance?
- All of this doesn't mean the abandonment of good old-fashioned close reading - far from it. The sheer size of the collection means that even smaller niches can find plentiful material for qualitative analysis, and quantitative analysis enables close readings to be understood in their wider contexts and connections. I'm particularly interested in women petitioners and prisoners; but, by making the new data as re-usable as possible, I hope to enable and encourage other researchers to pursue their own interests and to experiment in their own ways.
