Sharon Howard

Contact me

Contents

• Employment
• Education
• Experience and skills
  • Digital History Projects
  • Research Interests
  • Teaching
  • Computing and Internet
  • Support and Outreach
    • Websites
• Publications and Papers
• Grants and Prizes
• Leisure interests

Employment

Project Manager

• August 2006 – present
• Department of History, University of Sheffield
• Based in the Humanities Research Institute, project management for several important digital history projects including Manuscripts Online 1000-1500, Old Bailey Proceedings Online 1674-1913, London Lives 1690-1800, Locating London’s Past, and Connected Histories 1500-1900

Developer for Digital History Resources

• November 2011 – present
• University of Hertfordshire
• Ongoing development work on the Old Bailey Online and London Lives projects, including work on site updates

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship

• October 2003 – July 2006
• University of Wales Aberystwyth, Dept. of History and Welsh History
• Postdoctoral research on crime and violence in seventeenth-century Wales and Cheshire; undergraduate teaching

Part-time Tutor

• May – July 2003
• UWA, Centre for Continuing Education
• Teaching a Cont.Ed. history course on crime in eighteenth-century Wales

Postgraduate Tutor

• September – December 2000
• UWA, Dept. of History and Welsh History
• Seminar teaching for the department’s core second-year undergraduate course on historiography

Education

PhD, History

• 1999-2003
• University of Wales Aberystwyth, Dept. of History and Welsh History (‘Crime, community and authority in early modern Wales: Denbighshire, 1660-1730‘, pdf)

MA, Women’s and Gender History

• 1998-99
• University of York, Dept. of History

BA (Hons), History

• 1995-98
• UWA, Dept. of History and Welsh History

Experience and Skills

Summary

• Project management: successfully managed several large digital history projects
• Research: early modern crime, women and gender, British and Welsh history
• Grant proposals: successful record in writing individual and collaborative grant proposals
• Outreach: extensive use of blogs and social media to communicate history beyond academic audiences and support networks of historians
• Technical skills: wide experience of using Web2.0 software (blogs, wikis, etc), designing websites; experienced HTML/CSS; basic PHP, Javascript, SQL
• Teaching: undergraduate teaching in general history modules and specialist research areas

Digital History Projects

Manuscripts Online: Written Culture 1000 to 1500

• www.manuscriptsonline.org
• I am currently project manager for this JISC-funded sister project to Connected Histories. My work includes preparation of project documentation, liaison with the partner institutions in the project, negotiations with source providers, supporting the programmers with preparation and analysis of data.

Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online 1674-1913

• www.oldbaileyonline.org
• I managed the project through the AHRC-funded (2006-2008) phase to digitise the Proceedings for 1834-1913 and complete the work begun (2003-2005) with digitisation of the 1674-1834 Proceedings. Main responsibilities included: liaison with the company that carried out scanning and rekeying of the original volumes, and monitoring the quality of their work; managing the storage, organisation and backup of project data; working closely throughout the project with the programmers who were responsible for the technical process, from the automated XML markup of the rekeyed texts to the production of the database and final website, which was completely redesigned from the 1674-1834 version; work on integrating the original and new data (eg, adding new offence and punishment categories); supervision of the team of staff who carried out additional manual markup to the texts, prioritising the allocation of work and monitoring project progress; development of online tools and wikis to facilitate collaborative work by project staff who were geographically widely separated, including documentation of the criteria for manual markup and production of the historical background pages for the final website.
• My ongoing work on this project includes responding to queries from site users, working on site updates, and use of social media to promote the site and communicate with audiences.

London Lives 1690-1800: Crime, Poverty and Social Policy in the Metropolis

• www.londonlives.org
• Project management for this ESRC-funded (2006-2010) project generally involved very similar work to the Old Bailey Online project. However, the materials digitised were much more varied in type and structure, making this in some respects a considerably more complex project; additionally, we built into the project and website a much more significant role for user-generated content, enabling users to link records about named individuals in order to trace their lives and interactions with different London institutions. I developed a user wiki (using Tikiwiki) for writing biographies, as an adjunct to the built-in site facilities.

Connected Histories: Sources for Building British History, 1500-1900

• www.connectedhistories.org
• Work on this JISC-funded (2009-11) project to create a federated search engine for a range of digital resources for British history has been highly challenging, as it has involved bringing together and processing massive amounts of data from a number of publishers of digital sources, both commercial and non-profit; moreover, responsibility for the project is shared across multiple institutions and locations, with the backend of the search engine at Sheffield and the public website hosted by the Institute of Historical Research in London. Among other responsibilities, I worked with the source providers and university research office in negotiations for license agreements, and supervised the delivery of data and metadata to the project’s technical staff. I worked closely with the programmers at Sheffield on the indexing and processing of data, including the application of natural language processing to unstructured text sources to add markup for structured searching.

Crime in the Community: Enhancing User Engagement for Teaching & Research with the Old Bailey Online

• One of the case studies in the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources (TIDSR).
• This JISC-funded project (2010-11) had two elements. Firstly we carried out a rapid user impact analysis to provide information for the second part of the project, a number of enhancements to the website to facilitate its use in academic research and teaching. For the analysis my responsibilities included: logfile analysis of the website’s traffic since 2003; implementation of an online survey; detailed bibliometric analysis of publications citing the OBPO; interviews of academics and focus groups of students; drafting the analysis report. For the second part of the project, in addition to liaising with the technical staff in developing technical enhancements to the Old Bailey Online website, my responsibilities included producing a number of tutorials and research guides for the site and building a new Zotero-based bibliography which will facilitate future group collaboration.

Locating London’s Past: A Geo-Referencing Tool for Mapping Historical and Archaeological Evidence,1660-1800

• www.locatinglondon.org
• Project blog
• Locating London’s Past is a JISC-funded project (2011) to create an intuitive GIS interface that will enable researchers to map and visualize textual and artefactual data relating to seventeenth and eighteenth-century London against a fully rasterised version of John Rocque’s 1746 map of London and the first accurate modern OS map (1869-80). My work on this includes preparation of datasets for inclusion in the resource and georeferencing tagged placenames in Old Bailey Online and London Lives.

Research Interests

• Within a broad concern with British social history from c.1550-1850, my main research interests to date concentrate on a number of areas: in particular, early modern crime, disputes and violence, women and gender, sexuality and ‘the body’. My research has focused primarily on witness depositions and similar documents in legal archives, as valuable sources not only for exploring the experiences and mentalities of early modern people but also for asking questions about authority, order and disorder from localities to the state. My PhD research on crime in early modern Wales focused on the rich criminal court archives of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Denbighshire and my subsequent post-doctoral research expanded on this work to explore violence in north Wales and Cheshire. This research produced published articles and a monograph. Further articles relating to this research are in preparation. More recently, my work has led me to focus on eighteenth-century London. In particular, I have been using the records digitised by the Old Bailey and London Lives projects to explore sexuality and bastardy and am writing up an article for publication.

Teaching

• The focus of my teaching has been small group work. I have participated in seminar teaching of departmental undergraduate courses and have taught two modules of my own, one to second-year undergraduates and one course of evening classes for adult learners (formally accredited at first-year undergraduate level). I have supervised and guided second-year students in choosing and researching projects for a ‘skills and sources’ module focusing on early modern crime.

Computing and Internet

• I have designed my own databases for both quantitative and qualitative analysis in my PhD and postdoctoral research.I have used the internet extensively as an educational and research tool for the last decade, and I have several years’ experience in the use of HTML and CSS through designing my own websites. I have a general understanding of the principles and use of XML markup. I also have experience with using content management software and some basic knowledge of PHP, MySQL and Javascript; I have flirted with Python and Ruby. I have extensive experience with setting up and customising open source web software including WordPress, Drupal, MediaWiki, PmWiki and TikiWiki, and with using online tools such as Google Docs, Zotero and Delicious. I have started learning to use APIs such as those provided by Delicious and Twitter.

Research Support and Outreach

• I built and maintain a substantial gateway website for resources relating to early modern history. I regularly wrote about my research and historical interests for a substantial academic and general audience on a weblog for several years and although I have not had much spare time for my own blogging in the last year or two, I continue to experiment with ways in which to communicate and inform online and I use Twitter extensively for this purpose. I co-ordinate two popular history-related blog ‘carnivals’, which provide showcases of quality blogging for and by academics and non-academic historians alike. I am deeply committed to the use and importance of blogging and other ‘Web 2.0′ tools for disseminating historical research to general audiences and creating community support networks for historians.

• Websites

  • Sites designed and built using WordPress:
  • Early Modern Resources: gateway website for free-to-access resources for early modern history. (Also used to occasionally publish primary sources, original content and other resources for educational purposes and as teaching resources.)
  • Early Modern Commons: an aggregator for early modern blogs (including a page dedicated to conference announcements by bloggers)
  • Early Modern Notes: my blog, established 2004
  • History Carnival: monthly blog carnival for the history blogosphere
  • Carnivalesque: blog carnival for pre-modern history (alternates monthly between ancient/medieval and early modern topics)
  • The Broadside: tracks and aggregates the latest blogging and news about history shared by historians on Twitter; also provides resources to help historians make more effective use of Twitter in research and teaching.

Publications and Papers

Published Books

• Law and Disorder in Early Modern Wales, 1660-1730, University of Wales Press: Cardiff, 2008.

Published articles

• [Full text of some of these can be accessed here]
• ‘Servants in early modern Wales: co-operation, conflict and survival’, Llafur: the Journal of Welsh People’s History, 9 (2005), pp. 33-43.
• ‘Investigating responses to theft in early modern Wales: communities, thieves and the courts’, Continuity and Change, 19 (2004), pp. 409-30.
• ‘Imagining the pain and peril of seventeenth‑century childbirth: danger and deliverance in the making of an early modern world’, Social History of Medicine, 16 (2003), pp.367-82.
• ‘Riotous community: crowds, politics and society in Wales, c.1700-1840’, Welsh History Review, 20 (2001), pp. 656-86.

Selected reports, reviews and other publications

• with Tim Hitchcock, Robert Shoemaker, Katherine Rogers and Jane Winters, Chapter 7 (Connected Histories case study), Content Clustering and Sustaining Digital Resources (2011)
• with Robert Shoemaker and Tim Hitchcock, Crime in the Community impact analysis report (pdf) (2010)
• Review of Garthine Walker, Crime, gender and social order in early modern England, Gender & History, 18:1 (April 2006).

Writing for the Web

• [examples of online essays and presentations in non-traditional formats]
• Sarah Gale, c. 1767 (a pauper biography in London Lives)
• Arson in eighteenth-century London (a two-part essay exploring the topic in the Old Bailey Proceedings Online)
• Thinking about duels and violent gentlemen (thoughts about research in progress on ‘gentlemen behaving badly’)
• A seventeenth-century detective (a short essay about an aspect of my research, for a non-specialist audience)
• Women’s lives in the British Civil Wars (commentary and extracts from primary sources written by women on both sides of the conflict about their experiences, hopes and fears)
• Early Modernity on Film

Selected conference papers and presentations

• ‘London Lives and bastardy’ (workshop session), London Lives Unconference, University of Hertfordshire, July 2010.
• ‘Unmarried mothers in eighteenth-century London’, North American Conference on British Studies (NACBS), Louisville, November 2009.
• ‘Making lives digital: the challenge of creating Plebeian Lives’, British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies annual conference, Oxford, January 2009.
• ‘Internet sources for local population history: the Old Bailey Proceedings and Plebeian Lives’, Local Population Studies Society Conference, Sheffield, November 2008.
• ‘Digital History 2.0? Collaboration, community and interactivity in the digitisation of history’, The Metropolis on Trial, Open University, July 2008.
• ‘Gentlemen and interpersonal violence in seventeenth-century Britain’, Icons and Iconoclasts: The Long Seventeenth Century, 1603 to 1714, Aberdeen, July 2006.
• ‘”Common quarrellers” and disputing neighbours: everyday violence in its local contexts in seventeenth-century southern Britain’, Assaulting the Past: Placing Violence in Historical Context, University of Oxford, July 2005.
• ‘Abuses of authority? Local communities, law officers and the courts in north-east Wales, c.1660-1720’. Themes in the History of Crime, Justice and Policing in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Britain, Open University, March 2005.
• ‘Studying crime in early modern Wales’. Study Day on the History of Crime in Wales, University of Wales Swansea, March 2005.
• ‘Maidservants in the court records of early modern Wales: co-operation, conflict and survival’. Re-Presenting the British Past: Women, Gender and History in the British Isles, University of Glamorgan, April 2004.
• ‘Investigating theft in early modern Wales’, University of Wales Welsh History Conference, Gregynog, October 2003.
• ‘ “Furiously attached to the Stuart interest”: the politics of religion in Wrexham, c.1660-1730’. Understanding Urban Wales, University of Wales Swansea, September 2003.
• ‘Communities policing “criminal” bodies in early modern Wales’. Controlling Bodies: The Regulation of Conduct 1650-2000, University of Glamorgan, June 2002.
• ‘The “usual suspects”? Servants and their masters in the crime records of early modern Denbighshire’. University of Wales Welsh History Conference, Gregynog, March 2002.
• ‘Early modern criminal law in practice: murder and manslaughter in seventeenth-century Denbighshire’. Fifteenth British Legal History Conference, Aberystwyth, July 2001.
• ‘Angry men and violent bodies in early modern Wales: fatal confrontations and dangerous masculinities’. History, Gender and the Body, University of Essex, June 2001.

Grants and Prizes

• British Academy post-doctoral fellowship, 2003-06.
• Arts and Humanities Research Board: Three-year PhD studentship, University of Wales Aberystwyth, 1999-2002.
• Susan Anderson Memorial Prize in Women’s History, University of York, 1999 (MA Dissertation, ‘Gender and defamation in York, 1661-1700: reputation, authority and the power of words’).
• AHRB: One-year MA studentship, University of York, 1998-99.

Leisure Interests

• I enjoy cooking (but not cleaning up afterwards), listening to music, and reading crime novels. I’m not a very sporty person, but I follow cricket, tennis and (as an undoubted masochist) Welsh rugby. I’ve been keen on horses and riding since I was a teenager, though I rarely get to indulge.