CMEMS/History Public Lecture: “The Evolution of Record-Keeping as a Means of Understanding Criminality, 1780–1860”, by Professor Robert Shoemaker (The University of Sheffield)

Date: Tuesday 28 June, 2016
Time: 6:00pm-7:00pm
Venue: Webb Lecture Theatre (Geography & Geology Building), University of Western Australia

All Welcome – you don’t need to RSVP. For other enquiries, contact joanne.mcewan@uwa.edu.au.

This paper seeks to understand why detailed personal information about accused criminals, the data which makes the Digital Panopticon project (http://www.digitalpanopticon.org/) possible, started to be collected from the late eighteenth century. Whereas little information beyond the name of most criminals was kept at the start of this period, by 1860 information about their personal and criminal histories and physical descriptions was routinely recorded. The initiative to start keeping such records came from both new official requirements and personal and local initiatives. Records were often compiled to meet functional requirements to assist with the prosecution of crime and punishment of criminals, but this explanation does not explain why information was kept about so many personal characteristics, in such detail, and often long before it was officially required. This paper argues that such record-keeping was often driven by local initiatives and imperatives, and that this reveals the development of a grass-roots information-gathering culture. Ultimately, the substantial amount of information generated reveals a strong and widely held desire to understand crime, long before the self-conscious enterprise of ‘criminology’ was invented.

Bob Shoemaker is Professor of Eighteenth-Century British History at the University of Sheffield and Co-Investigator on the Digital Panopticon project. For more information, see: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/history/staff/robert-shoemaker.