ASLH Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize to "The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, Version 9.0"

Continuing our round-up of the prizes and award announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to a prize named for the LHB's founder. The Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize "is awarded annually to an outstanding digital legal history project."

This year's award went to The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, Version 9.0. The citation:

The Committee unanimously selected The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, Version 9.0, (https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/). Project Directors Tim Hitchcock, Professor Emeritus of Digital History, University of Sussex, and Robert Shoemaker, Professor Emeritus of Eighteenth-Century British History, University of Sheffield, submitted this nomination on behalf of the project team, which also included Jamie McLaughlin (software engineer), Sharon Howard (data manager), and Nick Phipps (web designer). First launched in 2003, the site hosts hand-corrected transcript accounts of around 200,000 criminal trials conducted at London’s Old Bailey from 1674 to 1913. While the underlying records, known as the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, had been consulted sporadically by social historians in the twentieth century, the digitization and search apparatus provided by the Old Bailey Online has become a definitive landmark in English legal history.

The Committee is awarding the Dudziak Prize to the newest iteration of this project, Version 9.0 This major upgrade, which was launched in 2023, is significant for three reasons. First, it makes the site more accessible and sustainable. Second, the site now allows for more user interaction and manipulation of data through Elasticsearch and in response to feedback from scholars making use of their dataset. These enhanced searching features include the presentation of results in a macroscope format as well as more categories to allow for more advanced statistical modeling. Third, the curators have added new background pages that address the historiographical developments since the site was originally created twenty years ago.Congratulations to the entire team behind this important project!

-- Karen Tani