Criminocorpus : a website of resources for the history of crimes and punishments
Résumé
This paper will present the project of creating a website on the history of crime and justice. The goal of the project is to create or make more widely accessible information services related to the birth of French criminology at the end of the 19th century. This theme is deeply linked with present-day concerns about crime and punishment, security, and the scientific study of delinquency. Moreover, it is not confined to a single academic discipline. The development of such a website therefore leads to a reflection on the constitution of criminological knowledge at the intersection of several fields that sometimes converge, other times are in conflict: legal medicine, criminal law, psychology, sociology, anthropology. The structure of the website will provide three types of data :
- a bibliographic database on the history of the French administration of justice from 1789 to 2003
- a digitalized version of the influential journal Archives d’anthropologie criminelle (1886-1914)
- various syntheses and historical analyses on the birth of criminology at the end of the 19nth century.
The team responsible for the website attempts to examine in an integrated manner the Archives as a major source for the history of criminology, the limits of the bibliographic database, and its own historical practices. Is the history of science the best way to provide a critical approach to the area of criminology? Is a website an adequate tool to reach at the same time the scholarly community and a larger non-professional but interested audience? Should scholars work with specialists in cultural communication? The paper will focus on three points: the institutional context of the project, its current state, and future perspectives.