Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker. London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690–1800.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The title London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690–1800, was clearly chosen for its connection to the London Lives website. It emerges as part of the Economic and Social Research Council–funded project that enables combined searches of manuscript sources and datasets for millions of people in the metropolis from 1690 to 1800. Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker are to be applauded for the way they have harnessed technology to piece together material from disparate sources. The book is exceptionally well researched and goes far beyond the London Lives site, combining quantitative analyses of such things as prosecution rates and the gender and age of relief recipients with more anecdotal evidence of personalities and events. The title takes on a new significance if “lives” is understood in its connotations of vitality. London really “lives” in this book. The authors present various vignettes that bring the eighteenth-century city to life, from the claustrophobia of the near-naked women pounding on the low ceiling of the St. Martin’s Lane roundhouse cell for water in 1742 (158) to the savvy eleven-year-old girl who drew upon popular sympathies for abused apprentices in the aftermath of the Brownrigg case in 1767 (289–290). Scenes such as these are the colorful backdrop of an overarching narrative that reveals “a new model of pauper and criminal agency … shaping the evolution of policy” in criminal justice and poor relief for the long eighteenth century (16).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".