‘What are the odds?’ (WATO) was an interdisciplinary collaboration between political scientists and human-computer interaction researchers at Swansea University to try to bring elements of big data to the world of political forecasting. The project used page scraping to gather data on political bets on gambling websites to form a picture of the likely outcome of large public votes.

In recent years, the politics of predicting political events has been front and centre of debates thanks to surprise results in the UK general elections.

While the data collected in WATO was initially intended for presentation to political sciences researchers it was also made available to individual members of the public on a front facing website – tell me the odds.

Designing and building the WATO system raised more questions than it has answered for us; we still need to better understand:

• The role that trust plays in intensely political areas of research and design
• The best ways to present complex gambling data to members of the public without misleading them about it’s reliability
• How we can help members of the public to engage with the analysis of this data in complex, real time transparent ways
• How we can help researcher make use of the large amount of archival data we have and, more generally, what the techniques are to harvest data that is in the public domain, but which doesn’t necessarily want to be

This session will seek to explore all of these issues and more and should be of interest to data scientists, political scientists; social scientists with an interest in big data; or anyone with an opinion on the intersection between politics and research.

by James Gillray, published by Hannah Humphrey, hand-coloured stipple engraving, published 28 July 1792

The theme of this event is ‘scale’. Lately in digital humanities, we’ve tended to think about big scales – big data, longue durée. But what about the very small? In this session, I propose that we work together to ‘digitise’ a single day from the past, thinking about not only what that challenge means, but also what we can find out about the value of computers for understanding the small and the mundane. What does a digitised day look like? How much survives? Can we build a coherent picture? Picture of what?

I’d like to propose Friday 6 February 1789 as our case study. For most people then living, it was a very normal day. But for King George III, it was the first day his doctors allowed him to use his knife and fork, after an extended period of mental health problems. Thus, for George, it was an extraordinary day.

Drawing on our various experiences and disciplinary backgrounds, I hope you’ll help me explore the challenge of bringing together the various digital traces of a scant 24 hours from long ago. In the process I suspect we will be reorganizing the archive from one typically categorised by creator into one that emphasises a moment with innumerable perspectives.

I hope you’ll join me.

Adam Crymble,

Digital History Research Centre,

University of Hertfordshire