Addressing Authority: What Can You Do With 10,000 18th-Century Petitions?

This is a web presentation of the paper and slides I put together for the workshop on Addressing Authority: Petitions and Supplications in Early Modern Europe at Birkbeck, University of London, 18 March 2016. It was a great event and I'm very grateful to Brodie Waddell for inviting me along!

The title of the paper was a question because I don't have many answers yet... In the very early stages of the project, thinking about ways to approach a dataset of this size and nature - in the world of humanities 'big' data, 10,000 petitions (totalling a couple of million words) isn't anything like Google's million books. But it's still a challenge.

But the title is also an invitation! I'm making the data public because I hope that others will take up the challenge.

Slides and Notes

Six Petitions

Six examples that help to illustrate themes covered in the slides.

Project Resources