London Lives offers the viewer a massive collection of data relating to crime, poverty and social policy in one of the world’s most fantastic cities, London, between the years of 1690 through 1800. The sources this site used contain over 240,000 fully digitalized manuscripts and painted pages from 8 London archives and is supported with 15 datasets. This webpage is extremely interactive and encyclopedic as it allows the user to search for, in digitized form, the lives on commoners living in London and how their lives ultimately contributed to the development of the great city. They also include functions such as Automated Matching which allows users to combine all the names tagged in one group of documents. However, specifically this project is designed to “assess the role of plebeians in the evolution of social practices.”
Here you can see a document:
This document was a sermon produced by most likely a member of the clergy. Most of the documents found on this site will look like this and are presented in a chronological fashion utilizing timeline features. These images were digitized by starting out with microfilms of the original manuscripts and then the pages were scanned to create high-definition, 400dpi JPEG files. The manuscript texts were manually typed by the process known as double rekeying whereby the text is transcribed twice, by two different typists, and then the two transcriptions are compared by computer. The manuscripts and other sources were collected from different libraries and educational institutions. Items to be researched are presented in a list on the home page which one can then choose to delve into further study. A wealth of information exists on this site ranging from the historical background of churches, hospitals, courts, and guilds. All of these items have their own links.
Overall, I found this project to be very interesting and user friendly. I was immediately able to navigate the site and find the documents that I wanted to read. This site looks like it took a lot of time and money to make and I think the final result is fantastic. Anyone can search this site at http://www.londonlives.org