Research note: The founders and survivors project

Bradley, James; Kippen, Rebecca; Maxwell-Stewart, Hamish; McCalman, Janet; Silcot, Sandra

doi:10.1016/j.hisfam.2010.08.002

Cited by 20 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Collectively, we have an interest in exploring the impact of forced migration and unfree labor on life course outcomes. 14 The ways in which the supply of available labor and management practices shaped colonial environments formed an important parallel research agenda. 15 Finally, we are motivated by a desire to better understand the way the past can influence the lives of subsequent generations.…”

Section: The Challenge Of Digitizing the Colonial Archivementioning

confidence: 99%

Crime, Penal Transportation, and Digital Methodologies

Godfrey¹,

Homer²,

Inwood³

et al. 2021

Journal of World History

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This article argues that the ability to systematically analyze hundreds of thousands of life course events provides an opportunity to explore the ways in which an Australian convict archive was originally intended to be used, as well as a means of placing information supplied by subalterns within context. We also show how the digital reconstruction of the bureaucratic instruments of colonial labor management can be used to shed light on state actions. Using a combination of longitudinal and cross-sectional techniques, we place the experience of transported men and women within the colonial context of evolving labor markets, policing, and criminal justice systems, exploring questions of colonial class formation, gender, and labor mobility in the process. We end by pointing to how such datasets might be used in future undergraduate teaching and digitization initiatives.

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Section: The Challenge Of Digitizing the Colonial Archivementioning

confidence: 99%

Crime, Penal Transportation, and Digital Methodologies

Godfrey¹,

Homer²,

Inwood³

et al. 2021

Journal of World History

Self Cite

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“…Tasmania's Founders and Survivors project, for instance, relies on genealogists to help recover the Australian life courses, families and generations of some 73,000 transportees to the colony. 20 Like British projects, The Old Bailey Online and the Digital Panopticon, it is mostly concerned with people and patterns in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While such endeavours provide valuable insight into our personal and collective past, they stop short of the twentieth century and the recent history of the criminal trial in its everyday operation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Prosecution Project

Finnane

Smaal

2018

QRE

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Family and local community historians have always made use of criminal justice records. Increasingly available as digital files, these documents are accessible to anyone with access to an internet-linked computer or even smartphone. In many cases, the fragmented nature of these records means their richness remains a potential rather than reality. The Prosecution Project1links these records as a large-scale Australian exercise in unlocking the criminal justice records of all the states. We seek to digitise and eventually make publicly accessible the records of the criminal courts, documenting not only the names of the accused but of magistrates, judges, lawyers, police and victims and other witnesses. The project is a significant collaboration between university researchers and a large and growing community of volunteers. This paper outlines what the project is doing, how we are doing it and illustrates its potential use for family and local historians interested in Australia's past.

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“…Since 2008, the project Founders & Survivors: Australian Life Courses in Historical Context has been building a prosopographical life course dataset of that population transported to Van Diemen's Land, starting from the surviving usable records: an archive that comprises around 68,000 individuals (Bradley et al 2010). Between 1803 and 1853 almost 73,000 men, women and children were transported to the island prison of Van Diemen's Land, now the Australian state of Tasmania.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Population Reconstruction

Kirby¹,

Carson²,

Dunlop³

et al. 2015

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PrefacePeople shape societies. They are linked to each other by family ties and networks with social, economic and religious dimensions. People live together in households and form communities. Some own a house, land and other properties, often related to their profession. And all this is in continuous change. People are born, marry, have children and die, and they change houses and addresses, and build careers. For the study of a society in all aspects, people are at the heart of the problem and should be known in the context of their complex relationships. Even today, it is not easy to get this information in an all-enfolding way, but for populations in the past, it is a real challenge. And that is what this book is about. The book addresses the problems that are encountered, and solutions that have been proposed, when we aim to identify people and to reconstruct populations under conditions where information is scarce, ambiguous, fuzzy and sometimes erroneous.It is not a single discipline that is involved in such an endeavour. Historians, social scientists, and linguists represent the humanities through their knowledge of the complexity of the past, the limitations of sources and the possible interpretations of information. The availability of big data from digitised archives and the need of complex analyses to identify individuals require the involvement of computer scientists. With contributions from all these fields, often in direct cooperation, this book is at the heart of digital humanities and hopefully a source of inspiration for future investigations.The process from handwritten registers to a reconstructed digitised population has three major phases which shape the three sections of this book. The first phase is that of data transcription and digitisation while structuring the information in a meaningful and efficient way. Little of this phase can be automated. With archives that comprise easily tens of millions of records, the help of volunteers for transcription and digitisation is indispensable, but requires a rigorous management. Experiences from Denmark demonstrate the complexity of this task in Chap. 1. Spelling variation, aliases, abbreviations, errors and typos all generate difficulties in further processing and require data cleaning. Similarity measures can be helpful to v

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Research note: The founders and survivors project

Cited by 20 publications

References 24 publications

Crime, Penal Transportation, and Digital Methodologies

Crime, Penal Transportation, and Digital Methodologies

The Prosecution Project

Population Reconstruction

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