Plebeian Lives and the Making of Modern London, 1690 to 1800, uses recent technical advances in the creation and analysis of multiple digital resources to create a comprehensive electronic edition of primary sources on criminal justice and the provision of poor relief and medical care in eighteenth-century London. This will make it possible for the first time to reconstruct how 'ordinary' Londoners interacted with various government and charitable institutions in the course of their daily lives. By examining how individual Londoners participated in and manipulated these agencies for their own ends, this project will demonstrate how end users contributed to the development of these institutions. More generally, it will assess the role of plebeians in the evolution of social practices in the modern metropolis.
A large and diverse collection of manuscript and some printed materials, comprising over forty million words of text from twelve London archives, has been digitised by the Higher Education Digitisation Service at the University of Hertfordshire and then transferred to the Humanities Research Institute for mark up and analysis. A combination of automated markup and manual tagging was used to identify names, places, and dates. Similarly, an automated record matching facility combined with user filtering allows separate records pertaining to individual persons to be linked together.
The digitised sources, combined with the Old Bailey Proceedings Online and other existing datasets, will be posted on the internet in March 2010 at www.londonlives.org, with a search engine and workspace which will allow users to link together records pertaining to the same individual. Detailed background pages will provide information about the document series included, the institutions which created them, and the major historical themes addressed in the documents. Individual biographies will be provided of the most fully documented individuals, and a wiki will allow users to contribute their research findings. In addition to the website, project outcomes will include journal articles, a project conference in 2010, and a major monograph.
