- Division: Humanities
- Unit: History
- Sub-Unit: History Faculty
The Digital Panopticon is a collaboration between the Universities of Liverpool, Sheffield, Oxford, Tasmania and Sussex. Led by an international team of established researchers, it will use digital technologies to bring together existing and new genealogical, biometric and criminal justice datasets held by different organisations in the UK and Australia. It will explore the impact of the different types of penal punishments on the lives of 66,000 people sentenced at The Old Bailey between 1780 and 1875, develop new and transferable methodologies for understanding and exploiting complex bodies of genealogical, biometric, and criminal justice data and create a searchable website.
The project is funded by the AHRC’s Digital Transformations programme, which aims to exploit the potential of digital technologies to transform research in the arts and humanities, and to ensure that arts and humanities research is at the forefront of tackling crucial issues such as intellectual property, cultural memory and identity, and communication and creativity in a digital age.