Presented as part of the Humanities Research Centre Seminar Series.

In the years following the Gordon Riots in 1780, the courtroom at the Old Bailey in London was rebuilt repeatedly.  This rebuilding occurred in dialogue with the evolution of the modern 'adversarial trial', and forms a component of the history of the bureaucratisation and professionalization of criminal justice.  In the process this theatre of justice was transformed from one in which the victim, defendant and jurors, formed the lead actors, into a set that placed barristers centre stage.  This paper and project uses the construction of 3D models of the courtroom in its evolving form, to explore the roles of all the actors involved - to model how their voices were heard in the courtroom.

Tim Hitchcock is Professor of Digital History at the University of Sussex.  With Robert Shoemaker and others, he is responsible for a series of websites giving direct and searchable access to a series of major collections of primary sources reflecting the social history of Britain, including: The Old Bailey Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org), London Lives (www.londonlives.org), Connected Histories (www.connectedhistories.org), and Locating London’s Past (www.locatinglondon.org).

With degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University, he has published books on the histories of eighteenth-century poverty, street life, sexuality and masculinity.  His most recent books include Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London (Hambledon and London, 2004/2007) and with Robert Shoemaker, Tales from the Hanging Court (Hodder Arnold, 2007).  With Shoemaker, he has recently completed an interactive e-monograph to be published in 2015 by Cambridge University Press, entitled:  London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City,1690-1800.  Hitchcock is currently working with Shoemaker, Barry Godfrey, Deborah Oxley, and Hamish Steward-Hamilton on an AHRC funded project, 'The Digital Panopticon', to tie together the records of the Old Bailey with Australian transportation records, and the records of imprisonment in the UK.

In 2011, with Shoemaker, he was given the Longman-History Today Trustees Award, for their substantial contributions to history as the ‘directors of the groundbreaking digital projects The Old Bailey Proceedings Online and London Lives.’

The Humanities Research Centre was established in 1972 as a national and international centre for excellence in the Humanities and a catalyst for innovative Humanities scholarship and research within the Australian National University. The HRC interprets the "Humanities" generously, recognising that new methods of theoretical enquiry have done much to break down the traditional distinction between the humanities and the interpretive social sciences; recognising, too, the importance of establishing dialogue between the humanities and the natural and technological sciences, and the creative arts.