Idly vanity-querying a website that was new to me, 15 years ago, I was amazed to find that my namesake (“a lusty woman”) was a prisoner at London’s Old Bailey in 1764, accused of stealing a gold ring set with diamonds from the Royal Exchange.

Fortunately, she was acquitted. Unfortunately, she’d been sentenced for something else (what??) the day before for transportation (penal exile to the American colonies or Australia).

See the full account here: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17640502-70.

Mrs. McCabe’s story is available on the glorious Old Bailey Proceedings Online, a “fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,752 trials held at London’s central criminal court, and 475 Ordinary’s Accounts of the lives of executed convicts.”

I was first introduced to Old Bailey Proceedings Online by Professor Tim Hitchcock, Emeritus Professor of Digital History at the University of Sussex, when I was studying historical research at the University of London 2011-2012. The project struck me as a stunning example of how to make primary sources accessible, and I’ve never forgotten it.

Lately (and always), I’ve been considering directions for future study which combine my interests. Digital Humanities has emerged as one area to explore, and so I’m reminded of Professor Hitchcock’s (and colleagues’) exemplary project, as well as their London Lives and the delicious Locating London’s Past, among others.

What is Digital Humanities?

University of Toronto’s Wordsworth College website says, “Digital humanities (DH) is a discipline at the intersections of the humanities with computing. DH studies human culture – art, literature, history, geography, religion – through computational tools and methodologies; and, in turn, DH studies the digital through humanist lenses. Digital humanists analyze languages through digital text collections; build digital archives of forbidden books; construct video games to study literature; or resurrect historical cities through digital maps.”

The field has obviously developed enormously since I was first exposed, and I’m very excited to learn more. (Oh, when I think of the tools available now, such as high-resolution smart phone cameras for scanning archival documents, and Optical Character Recognition, not to mention Artificial Intelligence, etc…) What great synergy that my favourite professional development platform, Library Juice Academy, has Introduction to Digital Humanities for Librarians starting on February 2.

I’ve signed up. We’ll see how we go.

In the meantime, I wonder what became of Londoner and thief Sarah McCabe of 250 years ago…. Perhaps a Digital Humanities project will enable me to find out.