Historical crime and criminal justice classifications: Data and methodological considerations

This article reports on a large-scale historical criminology project to create longitudinal datasets of Australian prosecutorial data. We reflect on the decade-long process of digitization, transcription, classification, and aggregation that transformed hundreds of thousands of handwritten manuscript records into open-source, machine-readable data now readily available for analysis by researchers. Secondly, we explore the possibilities of developing historically relevant offense, verdict and sentence classification systems to analyze longitudinal data globally and offer comparisons to other available classification systems. We propose that this approach is a necessary next step to ensure we develop robust and replicable scholarship in historical criminology, but the development of such a framework needs to be highly attentive to issues of missing data and changing historical contexts.