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General:Old Bailey Database Interface

From CWRC

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Ingredients 3 Steps 3.1 Example 4 Suggested Activities 5 Discussion

Introduction

The Old Bailey Online is a database of 197,745 XML-encoded records of criminal trials held at London's central criminal court. The Old Bailey Database Interface provides a way for users to create customized visualizations of the Old Bailey site.

Ingredients

1. Nothing special is needed.

Steps

1. Point your browser to http://ra.tapor.ualberta.ca/~digging2data/cgiTestForm6.html.
2. Choose data that you would like to visualize by selecting options from the dropdown menus on the left.
3. Click on the "show subcategories" boxes to the right of the dropdown menus if you would like to create separate visualizations for the subcategories of the options shown in the dropdown menus.
4. You can also filter by words. Type a word into the "Filter Words" box in order to show only results that include that word in the text. There is a radio button that allows you to search for the exact forms of words as well as one to search for multiple words using "and/or."
5. "Track Words" allows for the comparison of instances of particular words as they occur in different trials.
6. Dropdown menus in the "Output" section allow you to select the way in which the results are visualized. Depending on the parameters selected above, certain options will produce more readable results than others.

Example

If you would like to investigate the occurrence of cases in which the death penalty was handed down for royal offences over time, you could select "Royal Offences > All subcategories" from the "Offence" dropdown menu, and "Death > All subcategories" from the "Punishment" dropdown menu. Clicking the "Show subcategories" checkbox next to the "Offence" menu would allow you to compare the results for particular crimes.

Suggested Activities

1. Try submitting the three sample queries, and view the results. Click on "Want to build it yourself" to see how you would build these queries yourself using the options provided.
2. Try to find what kind of offence included the word "witch" most often in the trial text.
3. Try to find when the verdict of guilty by reason of insanity became popular.

Discussion

It should be remembered that this is a proof of concept rather than a polished tool for professional use. Some bugs can be expected.

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