The jury trial is a critical point where the state and its citizens come together to define the limits of acceptable behavior. Here we present a large-scale quantitative analysis of trial transcripts from the Old Bailey that reveal a major transition in the nature of this defining moment. By coarse-graining the spoken word testimony into synonym sets and dividing the trials based on indictment, we demonstrate the emergence of semantically distinct violent and nonviolent trial genres. We show that although in the late 18th century the semantic content of trials for violent offenses is functionally indistinguishable from that for nonviolent ones, a longterm, secular trend drives the system toward increasingly clear distinctions between violent and nonviolent acts. We separate this process into the shifting patterns that drive it, determine the relative effects of bureaucratic change and broader cultural shifts, and identify the synonym sets most responsible for the eventual genre distinguishability. This work provides a new window onto the cultural and institutional changes that accompany the monopolization of violence by the state, described in qualitative historical analysis as the civilizing process. Part of a formal theory of cultural development designed to explain the emergence of the modern Western state, this civilizing process is taken to include a wide variety of forms of interpersonal relationships ranging from the rise of the concept of politeness to the relationships between classes. The core claim of the theory is that the state effectively monopolized the use of violence over the course of the 16th to 20th centuries, becoming an important actor in both the control of the cultures that encouraged violence, and in the direct policing and control of violence itself.The bureaucracies that characterize this shift undertook information gathering on an unprecedented scale, designed in part to inform later decision making, and the digitization of these records makes it newly possible to study the civilizing process in a quantitative fashion. The data here come from the detailed records of the Central Criminal Court, or Old Bailey, in London (11, 12). The Old Bailey has heard trials for serious crimes in London and the surrounding counties since the 16th century, and forms one of the longest-running bureaucracies in the modern Western world.We analyze the 112,485 trial records, encompassing more than 20 million (semantic) words of testimony recorded between 1760 and 1913, a period during which trial reports were at their most comprehensive. We focus on the lexical semantics of spoken testimony: the meaning-laden words used by speakers that can be grouped as synonyms at different thresholds of similarity. Our methods allow us to study the explicitly named semantic structures of these texts over more than 2 orders of magnitude in resolution, from the word-stem level (2.6 × 10 4 categories) to a synonym set level, with 1,040 categories, to a highly coarsegrained representation with only 116 categories.We report...

We characterize the statistical bootstrap for the estimation of informationtheoretic quantities from data, with particular reference to its use in the study of large-scale social phenomena. Our methods allow one to preserve, approximately, the underlying axiomatic relationships of information theory-in particular, consistency under arbitrary coarse-graining-that motivate use of these quantities in the first place, while providing reliability comparable to the state of the art for Bayesian estimators. We show how information-theoretic quantities allow for rigorous empirical study of the decision-making capacities of rational agents, and the time-asymmetric flows of information in distributed systems. We provide illustrative examples by reference to ongoing collaborative work on the semantic structure of the British Criminal Court system and the conflict dynamics of the contemporary Afghanistan insurgency.

This discussion piece argues that the design and structure of online historical resources and the process of search and discover embodied within them create a series of substantial problems for historians. Algorithm-driven discovery and misleading forms of search, poor OCR, and all the selection biases of a new edition of the Western print archive have changed how we research the past, and the underlying character of the object of study (inherited text). This piece argues that academic historians have largely failed to respond effectively to these challenges and suggests that while they have preserved the form of scholarly good practice, they have ignored important underlying principles.We are halfway through what has frequently been described as a revolution. In the last fifteen years trillions of words of printed text have been digitized and delivered to an eager audience in a keyword searchable form. Google books alone has digitized some seven million of what it estimates are 1.3 billion volumes, 1 and in the next ten years the pre-1900 archive of printed materials in most major languages will be available for keyword searching. 2 We are witnessing the creation of the Western print archive, second edition. Even now it is possible to research and write credible, evidence-based history on many topics using exclusively online sources. This is not to imply that the process is complete, or even nearly so. We have only just begun to digitize manuscript materials, ephemera, images and objects. There also remain serious issues about what should be digitized next, and what impact that selection has on the direction of scholarship. 3 But what has been achieved is nevertheless remarkable. Britain has been at the forefront of the international campaign to make this happen, and its academic community -and the wider community of scholars working on British subjects -

Social History in Penpective is a series of in-depth studies of the many topics in social, cultural and religious history for students. They also give the student clear surveys of the subject and present the most recent research in an accessible way.

London Lives is a fascinating new study which exposes, for the first time, the lesser-known experiences of eighteenth-century thieves, paupers, prostitutes and highwaymen. It charts the experiences of hundreds of thousands of Londoners who found themselves submerged in poverty or prosecuted for crime, and surveys their responses to illustrate the extent to which plebeian Londoners influenced the pace and direction of social policy. Calling upon a new body of evidence, the book illuminates the lives of prison escapees, expert manipulators of the poor relief system, celebrity highwaymen, lone mothers and vagrants, revealing how they each played the system to the best of their ability in order to survive in their various circumstances of misfortune. In their acts of desperation, the authors argue that the poor and criminal exercised a profound and effective form of agency that changed the system itself, and shaped the evolution of the modern state.