Zoë Alker
Biographic Data
| ID | 5842072 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Zoë Alker |
| GIVEN NAMES | Zoë |
| FAMILY NAME | Alker |
| SIGNATURE | ALKER Z |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Liverpool |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0402-7297 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
AI and the Historian
Journal of Victorian Culture's Digital Forum has been leading discussions on digital transformations in Victorian Studies for well over a decade.From 2016-2019, I co-edited a series of issues with Dr Christopher Donaldson.In a 2017 forum, 'Workflow' , Christopher and I cautioned readers about historians' increasing dependence on digital sources, in particular, an over-reliance on that great open sesame of digital archives: the keyword search. 1 C…
Gender and the commission of violent street robbery in Liverpool, 1850–1870. A historic criminology approach
Instrumental studies of gender and the accomplishment of violent robbery in the United States (Miller, 1998) United Kingdom (Brookman, Mullins, Bennett, & Wright, 2007) demonstrated that whilst men's and women's motivations for committing street robbery were similar – to fund addiction, hedonism or to supplement meagre incomes – male and female robbers commissioned the offences in markedly different ways. By offering a historical counterpart to m…
Convicts and the Cultural Significance of Tattooing in Nineteenth-Century Britain
This article is based on a unique dataset of 75,448 written descriptions of tattoos on British criminal convicts who were either transported or imprisoned during the period from 1791 to 1925. Combining both quantitative evidence (provided as visualizations) and qualitative evidence, it shows that, rather than expressing criminal identities as criminologists and sociologists argued, convicts’ tattoos expressed a broad range of subjects, affinities…
Digital Literacy
Showing one's workings is, it turns out, a Victorian practice. Querying the OED Online proves the phrase was in circulation as early as the 1870s, and searching Google Books affirms that it was used in the puzzle pages of Annie Besant's Our Corner in the following decade. 'You should show your working of arithmetical puzzles', warns the Our Corner puzzler, 'or you lose many marks' . 1 Many of us will have first encountered some variation of this …
Digital Heritage
This short article introduces a new instalment of the Digital Forum adopts a curatorial focus in order to consider the roles played by digital resources in the creation and management of collections of relevance for the study of the Victorian age. Featuring contributions from Douglas Dodds (of the V&A), Peter Findlay (of JISC) and Jenny Mitcham (of the Borthwick Institute), this instalment of the DF explores issues ranging from the digitisation o…
Young Criminal Lives
Young Criminal Lives is the first cradle-to-grave study of the experiences of some of the thousands of delinquent, ‘difficult’, and destitute children passing through the early English juvenile industrial school and reformatory system. Applying biographical research methodologies to digital data, we have reconstructed the lives, families, and neighbourhoods of 500 children who were sent to reformatory and industrial schools in the north-west of E…
Our Sample and Our Sources
Chapter 3 sets out the methods we used to trace 400 children who passed through the four institutions covered in the study, as well as a smaller group of their siblings (50) and others who received alternative court disposals (50). Using some of the most comprehensive sets of official and personal data ever assembled for a historical study of this kind, we have constructed 500 personal life grids. While some of our life grids are skeletal, most a…
What Worked? Who Cared?
Chapter 8 is concerned with interdisciplinary debates across contemporary youth justice, life course criminology, and socio-economic history. It deals with the challenge of bringing historical insight to bear within contemporary criminal justice thinking. The ‘impacts’ of the system at the personal level, from the perspective of some of those who experienced child removal at first hand, are discussed. The chapter considers how those responsible f…
The National System and Local Delivery of Youth Justice
Chapter 2 outlines the emergence of new national and local strategies designed to try to reduce or at least contain child poverty and crime. It offers an overview of key moments in the emergence of the Victorian and Edwardian youth justice and care systems, and locates these within wider ‘child saving’ initiatives of the period. Industrial schools admitted those under the age of 12 found guilty of committing an offence, and those aged under 14 ju…
History, Child Removal, and Youth Justice Policy
Chapter 9 starts by summarizing the findings of the current study. Young Criminal Lives is the first study of its kind to use a life course approach to ask whether the early English youth justice system ‘worked’. Within that, it has focused on whether child removal to an institution ‘worked’. The chapter then considers the youth justice system in England and Wales today, which is overseen by the Youth Justice Board. There is then discussion of wh…
Workflow
Digital Pedagogy in and beyond the Classroom
Five years have passed since the Digital Forum featured its first installment dedicated to digital pedagogy.At that time, James Mussell reflected on how 'digital resources' were transforming teaching and learning across 'the various disciplines that constitute nineteenthcentury studies'-both by broadening access to primary materials and by enabling the development of new projects and methodologies. 1 Today, the integration of digital resources in…
The Future of Academic Journals
The Monster Evil
Convicts and the Cultural Significance of Tattooing in Nineteenth-Century Britain
This article is based on a unique dataset of 75,448 written descriptions of tattoos on British criminal convicts who were either transported or imprisoned during the period from 1791 to 1925. Combining both quantitative evidence (provided as visualizations) and qualitative evidence, it shows that, rather than expressing criminal identities as criminologists and sociologists argued, convicts’ tattoos expressed a broad range of subjects, affinities…
The Monster Evil
Digital Heritage
This short article introduces a new instalment of the Digital Forum adopts a curatorial focus in order to consider the roles played by digital resources in the creation and management of collections of relevance for the study of the Victorian age. Featuring contributions from Douglas Dodds (of the V&A), Peter Findlay (of JISC) and Jenny Mitcham (of the Borthwick Institute), this instalment of the DF explores issues ranging from the digitisation o…
The Monster Evil
Digital Pedagogy in and beyond the Classroom
Five years have passed since the Digital Forum featured its first installment dedicated to digital pedagogy.At that time, James Mussell reflected on how 'digital resources' were transforming teaching and learning across 'the various disciplines that constitute nineteenthcentury studies'-both by broadening access to primary materials and by enabling the development of new projects and methodologies. 1 Today, the integration of digital resources in…
The Future of Academic Journals
Young Criminal Lives
Young Criminal Lives is the first cradle-to-grave study of the experiences of some of the thousands of delinquent, ‘difficult’, and destitute children passing through the early English juvenile industrial school and reformatory system. Applying biographical research methodologies to digital data, we have reconstructed the lives, families, and neighbourhoods of 500 children who were sent to reformatory and industrial schools in the north-west of E…
Our Sample and Our Sources
Chapter 3 sets out the methods we used to trace 400 children who passed through the four institutions covered in the study, as well as a smaller group of their siblings (50) and others who received alternative court disposals (50). Using some of the most comprehensive sets of official and personal data ever assembled for a historical study of this kind, we have constructed 500 personal life grids. While some of our life grids are skeletal, most a…
What Worked? Who Cared?
Chapter 8 is concerned with interdisciplinary debates across contemporary youth justice, life course criminology, and socio-economic history. It deals with the challenge of bringing historical insight to bear within contemporary criminal justice thinking. The ‘impacts’ of the system at the personal level, from the perspective of some of those who experienced child removal at first hand, are discussed. The chapter considers how those responsible f…
The National System and Local Delivery of Youth Justice
Chapter 2 outlines the emergence of new national and local strategies designed to try to reduce or at least contain child poverty and crime. It offers an overview of key moments in the emergence of the Victorian and Edwardian youth justice and care systems, and locates these within wider ‘child saving’ initiatives of the period. Industrial schools admitted those under the age of 12 found guilty of committing an offence, and those aged under 14 ju…
History, Child Removal, and Youth Justice Policy
Chapter 9 starts by summarizing the findings of the current study. Young Criminal Lives is the first study of its kind to use a life course approach to ask whether the early English youth justice system ‘worked’. Within that, it has focused on whether child removal to an institution ‘worked’. The chapter then considers the youth justice system in England and Wales today, which is overseen by the Youth Justice Board. There is then discussion of wh…
Workflow
Digital Heritage
This short article introduces a new instalment of the Digital Forum adopts a curatorial focus in order to consider the roles played by digital resources in the creation and management of collections of relevance for the study of the Victorian age. Featuring contributions from Douglas Dodds (of the V&A), Peter Findlay (of JISC) and Jenny Mitcham (of the Borthwick Institute), this instalment of the DF explores issues ranging from the digitisation o…
Digital Literacy
Showing one's workings is, it turns out, a Victorian practice. Querying the OED Online proves the phrase was in circulation as early as the 1870s, and searching Google Books affirms that it was used in the puzzle pages of Annie Besant's Our Corner in the following decade. 'You should show your working of arithmetical puzzles', warns the Our Corner puzzler, 'or you lose many marks' . 1 Many of us will have first encountered some variation of this …
Convicts and the Cultural Significance of Tattooing in Nineteenth-Century Britain
This article is based on a unique dataset of 75,448 written descriptions of tattoos on British criminal convicts who were either transported or imprisoned during the period from 1791 to 1925. Combining both quantitative evidence (provided as visualizations) and qualitative evidence, it shows that, rather than expressing criminal identities as criminologists and sociologists argued, convicts’ tattoos expressed a broad range of subjects, affinities…
Gender and the commission of violent street robbery in Liverpool, 1850–1870. A historic criminology approach
Instrumental studies of gender and the accomplishment of violent robbery in the United States (Miller, 1998) United Kingdom (Brookman, Mullins, Bennett, & Wright, 2007) demonstrated that whilst men's and women's motivations for committing street robbery were similar – to fund addiction, hedonism or to supplement meagre incomes – male and female robbers commissioned the offences in markedly different ways. By offering a historical counterpart to m…
AI and the Historian
Journal of Victorian Culture's Digital Forum has been leading discussions on digital transformations in Victorian Studies for well over a decade.From 2016-2019, I co-edited a series of issues with Dr Christopher Donaldson.In a 2017 forum, 'Workflow' , Christopher and I cautioned readers about historians' increasing dependence on digital sources, in particular, an over-reliance on that great open sesame of digital archives: the keyword search. 1 C…
Political science (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Criminology (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · History (4 works) · History (4 works) · Criminal justice (3 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (3 works) · Economic Justice (3 works)