The History of Crime in Three Dimensions

Combining 3D modelling of London’s Old Bailey courtroom c.1800 with textual analysis of the recorded speech of defendants tried there, this paper explores how we might reconstruct the 'voices' of the dead, and locate them in an understandable material context. By combining a historical reconstruction derived from architectural drawings, contemporary images and archival research with a statistical analysis of one of the most extensive verbatim records we possess of speech acts prior to the twentieth century - The Old Bailey Proceedings (www.oldbaileyonline.org) - this papers seeks to both illustrate what 3D modelling can bring to our understanding of the past, and in the process revise the accepted historical account of the evolution of the trial process, and the experience of being tried.