Convict Bodies: An exploratory data analysis of a nineteenth-century language of coercion

Across multiple historical contexts, we encounter a recurring fantasy: using language to conjure an image of a person out of place to enable the apprehension of said person in real life. An especially fantastical version is encountered in the otherwise middling James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only (1981), in which the protagonist, played by Roger Moore, encounters a villain unknown to him. Later, at MI6 headquarters, a clerk suggests to a somewhat baffled Bond that he go into “the identigraph room”. Q, played by Desmond Llewelyn then in his late 70s, leads Bond into a computer lab and places him in front of a monitor, by early eighties’ standards sizable. Q then hunches in front of a computer and asks Bond to describe the man he encountered. Bond provides a series of generic descriptors (“caucasian”, “brown hair”) while Q enters the data. A face, rendered as a simple line-drawing, appears on the monitor. At one point, the nose grows comically large, suggesting that Q does not yet fully master the software. Bond adds: “glasses”, and a set of spectacles appears on the screen; “octagonal”, Bond adds, and the glasses change shape. In the end, Q presses a button, and a dot matrix printer starts printing an image of Emile Leopold Locque, a Belgian henchman and murderer, who, according to Bond, has “escaped from Namur Prison by strangling his psychiatrist. He has worked for drug syndicates in Marseilles and Hong Kong. Now reported working for Greek smugglers.” Now, the hero knows whom he is chasing. Technologies for identifying wanted individuals through language and drawing go back centuries, but at the time, the scene and the otherworldly powers it ascribed to the computer appear to have been inspired by technologies for creating images using composites of different photos, so-called photofit. ¹

This essay is about such fantasies in early nineteenth-century Copenhagen and attempts to craft a system for identification of convicts escaping from a Copenhagen prison, known to its contemporaries as the Stockhouse Slavery or simply the Slavery.2 The essay presents an exploratory analysis of a dataset of about 1500 unique convict descriptions of men, as only men were subjected to this form of convict labour. The dataset is available on this platform. 3 The originals are found in the Danish National Archives in Copenhagen. The essay is the collective product of a digital history class held at Aalborg University in the autumn of 2021. The class was taught by Johan Heinsen for fifth-semester students in the BA-programme in history. The class consisted of 7 workshops in which we first used Transkribus to digitise a corpus and subsequently explored the data presented here with methods inspired by social data science.4 We worked in the programming language R.