OXFORD University researchers are using a new online resources to trace the lives of British convicts transported to Australia.

Family historians, teachers and academics can now follow the lives of people convicted and transported to Australia or imprisoned in Britain using a vast, free online resource, the Digital Panopticon website.

Researchers, including Prof Deborah Oxley of Oxford University’s Faculty of History, have discovered that many convicts did not serve the punishments as originally laid out, including many sentenced to transportation who never left Britain.

Prof Oxley, her colleague Dr David Meredith and their research team built a dataset of more than 80,000 convicts transported to Australia.

Prof Oxley said: “One of the biggest puzzles we can try to solve is who was actually sent to Australia.

“Many people sentenced to transportation never left Britain. “We want to know who was chosen, and hopefully why.

“By building these stories, and those of people subjected to other punishments, such as imprisonment, we can understand the long-term consequences of different types of punishments, including what led to reform.”

Prof Oxley said the website brought together a huge investment in building many different historical databases.

She added she was ‘excited’ to see how digital history was opening up new ways of understanding the past.

The new website draws on over four million records to allow users to uncover how punishment affected the lives of individuals convicted of crimes at the Old Bailey between 1780 and 1925.

People can find out more by visiting the website digitalpanopticon.org