This project is the result of an insight development grant from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The goal is to fund new research questions, and to encourage scholars try out new research methods. This project fell under the category of a pilot initiative. And while it is important to post results and celebrate successes, it is also useful to publicize what hasn’t worked. Peer-reviewed academic articles often only reveal the successful research results; there isn’t always room to talk about what went wrong. A benefit to a project website is that I can share what I have learned, both positive and negative, in the hopes that others can benefit.
Scope
As is often the case, the project began with wildly broad ambitions. The original plan was to have multiple layers to the map charting different points of view: media, law and order, and local residents. However, it quickly became evident that this would not be possible. The first dead end was court records. I visited the London Metropolitan Archives to explore the Middlesex Sessions papers. These are an invaluable resources, constituting all judicial and administrated processes (excepting serious criminal matters that were reserved for the Old Bailey). Criminal history is often a rich vein of research, providing insight into the day to day lives of a population. What these records lack, however, is geographic specificity. Records of crimes in Middlesex record the parish, but nothing more. Addresses of criminals or even where crimes were committed were simply reduced to “Whitechapel” or “Stepney”.
The media research was far more successful, which brought its own issues. At the beginning of the project, student researchers were using the Times Digital Archive, the Illustrated London News Historical Archive, and the 19th Century British Library Newspapers collection through our library subscriptions. The British Newspaper Archive was released after a year of research, adding even more material. This invaluable resource has digitized millions of pages from the nineteenth-century press. There were so many stories about Whitechapel in this ten-year period it became clear that even covering that limited scope would be a challenge. Even excluding advertisements, the BNA lists 113,904 articles including the term “Whitechapel.”
For a small team of researchers, this is far too many articles to read. The first cull was to only include articles where the text was substantial enough to merit assessment. Articles that were a single line or two were often advertisements that were mislabelled. The second major cut was any article that did not contain a specific street address. As a mapping project, an article had to contain a building address or landmark in order to be included in the final project. This necessarily omits a large number of articles that might provide useful analysis of Whitechapel as a whole, without referencing a specific building, street, or region. As such, conclusions on just how representative these results are muted.
Making the Big Conclusions
In my initial proposal, I hoped that the tools of Digital Humanities would be able to solve some of the temptations to cherry-pick in historical research. Yet there is a major caveat right off the bat. The newspaper archive can only give us a sense of how newspapers were printed; it does not tell us how they were read. The same newspaper might publish a positive and negative story of Whitechapel, but a reader might not engage with both. The map flattens out all news stories as if they all had the same impact. However, it is difficult to believe that a reader would read a lengthy story titled “Mysterious Murder in Whitechapel” and a brief article on “Art in Whitechapel” to the same effect.1
This project is better at forcing you to look at the full range of media of coverage surrounding Whitechapel for good and ill. The sheer volume of data on crime, immigrant life, philanthropic missions, poverty, and prostitution is so great as to have stymied a synthetic understanding of the East End. If you want stories on the dark side of Victorian London, it is easy to find such results; in particular when using digitized sources and keyword searching. And yet an article on the horrors of poverty in an overcrowded lodging house on Wentworth street might appear in the same newspaper as an article praising the residents of the Hanbury Street Salvation Army Shelter. The concern is that confirmation bias leads to researchers seeking out what they want to find. The map, with is positive, negative, and neutral stories, does make it clear that we need to be careful in generalizing media representations.