oldbailey: Accessing The Old Bailey Historical Criminal Trials

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oldbailey fetches historical trial data from the Old Bailey API (April 13, 1674 - April 1, 1913). It parses and resolves ambiguous and inconsistent XML while adding valuable metadata, such as the name of the first-person speaker. It returns an analysis-ready data frame with fields for:

Trail Account ID: The unique ID assigned to a trial.
Defendant Name: The name of the defendant(s).
Defendant Gender: The recorded gender(s) of the defendant(s).
Victim Name: The name(s) of the victim(s) if present. Some trials never mention the victim.
Victim Gender: The recorded gender(s) of the victim(s) if present.
Crime Location: The location(s) where the crime took place.
Offence Category: The Old Bailey uses eight high-level categories of crime: "breaking peace," "damage," "deception," "kill," "miscellaneous," "royal offences," "sexual," "theft," and "violent theft."
Offence Subcategory: For narrowing the high-level category. The Old Bailey uses fifty-six subcategories of crime.
Punishment Category: The Old Bailey uses five categories of punishment: "corporal," "death," "imprison," "misc. punishment," "no punishment," and "transport."
Punishment Subcategory: For narrowing the punishment category. The Old Bailey uses twenty-six subcategories of punihsment.
Verdict: Guilt or not guilty.
Speech ID: A unique ID given to each speech, where a speech is considered a continuous recording until reaching a new speaker. The Speech ID starts at 0 for every trial.
Speaker Name: The first-person speaker of the written trial record.
Body Text: The written trial record.
Date: The year, month, and day of the trial.
XML Address: The address to the original XML file hosted by Old Bailey online.

Note: Not all trials mention the proper names of defendants or victims, or contain first-person speakers.

Optional parameters allow users to specify the number of results, the dates of the trials, and whether they contain key terms.

Install

Install from CRAN: (forthcoming)

install.packages("oldbailey")

Install from the rOpenGov universe:

# Enable repository from ropengov
options(repos = c(
  ropengov = 'https://ropengov.r-universe.dev',
  CRAN = 'https://cloud.r-project.org'))
  
# Download and install oldbailey
install.packages("oldbailey")

Return Old Bailey Trials in Two Steps

Use find_trials() to return a list of XML addresses for the trials coresponding to the search parameters. By default, find_trials() will return the addresses for all 197,752 trials.

xml_addresses <- find_trials()

Pass the XML addresses to parse_trials() to return an analysis-ready data frame with the Old Bailey trial data.

trials_df <- parse_trials(xml_addresses)

Examples

Users can choose the number of trials to return.

find_trials(n_results = 200)

Users can also search for trials that contain key terms. This requires the user to supply: a) the term's category; and b) the term itself.

find_trials(cat = "offcat", term = "deception")

Several categories and terms can be provided. Note: this causes the API to return trials that are tagged as BOTH "deception" and "theft." It does not return trials that are tagged just "deception" and just "theft."

find_trials(n_results = 200, cat = c("offcat", "offcat"), term = c("deception", "theft"))

Users can combine both steps in a single line of code.

parse_trials(find_trials(n_results = 15, cat = "offcat", term = "deception"))

Old Bailey only recognizes specific terms in relation to a category. Use old_bailey_api_terms() to see every possible term and its category name.

If you know the category name, you can supply it to old_bailey_api_terms() and see every term that belongs to it. Below is a list of all the categories recongized by Old Bailey:

defgen - Defence Gender
offcat - Offence Category
offsubcat - Offencive Subcategory
vicgen - Victim Gender
vercat - Verdict Category
versubcat - Subcategory of Verdict
puncat - Punishment Category
punsubcat - Punishment Subcategory
date - The dates on which trials were held, in YYYYMMDD format.

The following code returns all the terms pertaining to "defgen" (for defendant gender) and "offcat" (for offence category).

old_bailey_api_terms(cat = c("defgen", "offcat"))

# A tibble: 12 × 3
   name   type   terms        
   <chr>  <chr>  <chr>        
 1 defgen select female       
 2 defgen select indeterminate
 3 defgen select male         
 4 offcat select breakingPeace
 5 offcat select damage       
 6 offcat select deception    
 7 offcat select kill         
 8 offcat select miscellaneous
 9 offcat select royalOffences
10 offcat select sexual       
11 offcat select theft        
12 offcat select violentTheft

Usage

find_trials()

Argument	Description
`n_results`	Any positive number. To return all results, keep this empty or pass "all." (optional).
`cat`	Find trials pertaining to a category. (optional).
`term`	Find trials pertaining to a term. (optional).

Note: "cat" and "term" must be specified together. (In otherwords, a category cannot be specified without a term, and vice-versa.)

parse_trials()

Argument	Description
`xml_address`	One or more XML addresses.

old_bailey_api_terms()

Argument	Description
`cat`	Specify results for one or more categories. (optional).

Parsing Old Bailey XML

The XML parser handles issues with the XML tags while adding valuable metadata to the records. Many XML tags are ambiguous or inconsistent, and tagging conventions change for different periods. XML tags often miss person names, and they don't make a distinction between the names of people speaking and the names of people mentioned by others.

Crime Subcategories

Animal Theft
Arson
Assault
Assault with Intent
Assault with Sodomitical Intent
Bankrupcy
Barratry
Bigamy
Burglary
Coining Offences
Concealing a Birth
Conspiracy
Embezzlement
Extortion
Forgery
Fraud
Game Law Offence
Grand Larceny
Habitual Criminal
Highway Robbery
House Breaking
Illegal Abortion
Indecent Assault
Infanticide
Keeping a Brothel
Kidnapping
Libel
Mail
Manslaughter
Murder
Other
Perjury
Perverting Justice
Petty Larceny
Petty Treason
Piracy
Pocketpicking
Rape
Receiving
Religious Offences
Return from Transportation
Riot
Robbery
Seditious Libel
Seditious Words
Seducing Allegiance
Shop Lifting
Simple Larceny
Sodomy
Stealing from Master
Tax Offences
Theft from Place
Threatening Behaviour
Treason
Vagabond
Wounding

Punishment Subcategories

Branding
Branding on Cheek
Burning
Death and Dissection
Drawn and Quartered
Executed
Fine
Forfeiture
Hanging in Chains
Hard Labour
House of Correction
Insanity
Military Naval Duties
Newgate
Other Institution
Pardon
Penal Servitude
Pillory
Preventive Detention
Private Whipping
Public Whipping
Respited
Respited for Pregnancy
Sentence Respited
Sureties
Whipping

Citation

Please cite the package as follows:

Buongiorno S (2023). oldbailey: For Accessing The Old Bailey Open Data. https://github.com/stephbuon/oldbailey, https://ropengov.github.io/oldbailey/, https://github.com/rOpenGov/oldbailey.

BibTeX:

@Manual{,
  title = {oldbailey: For Accessing The Old Bailey Open Data.},
  author = {Steph Buongiorno},
  year = {2023},
  note = {https://github.com/stephbuon/oldbailey,
https://ropengov.github.io/oldbailey/, https://github.com/rOpenGov/oldbailey},
}

See my website for more projects.

Disclaimer

This package is not officially related to or endorsed by Old Bailey Online or the Government of the United Kingdom.