Digital-humanities work on semantic shift often alternates between handcrafted close readings and opaque embedding machinery. We present a reproducible expert-system style pipeline that quantifies and visualises lexical drift in the Old Bailey Corpus (1720--1913), coupling interpretable trajectories with legally meaningful axes. We bin proceedings by decade with dynamic merging for low-resource slices, train skip-gram embeddings, align spaces through orthogonal Procrustes, and measure both geometric displacement and neighborhood turnover. Three visual analytics outputs, which are drift magnitudes, semantic trajectories, and movement along a mercy-versus-retribution axis, expose how justice, crime, poverty, and insanity evolve with penal reforms, transportation debates, and Victorian moral politics. The pipeline is implemented as auditable scripts so results can be reproduced in other historical corpora.

翻译：数字人文领域关于语义变迁的研究常在人工精细解读与不透明的嵌入机制之间交替。我们提出一种可复现的专家系统式流程，用于量化并可视化《老贝利法庭记录集》（1720-1913）中的词汇漂移，将可解释的演变轨迹与具有法律意义的维度相结合。本研究按十年区间对诉讼记录进行分箱处理，对低资源片段采用动态合并策略，训练skip-gram词嵌入模型，通过正交Procrustes方法对齐语义空间，并同步测量几何位移与邻域更替率。通过漂移强度、语义轨迹及仁慈-报应轴向上位移这三种可视化分析结果，揭示了司法、犯罪、贫困与精神错乱等概念如何伴随刑罚改革、流放刑争议及维多利亚时代道德政治而演变。本流程以可审计的脚本形式实现，其成果可在其他历史语料库中复现。