Author: admin

Because of my internship, I am now much more confident in what I want to do with my history career moving forward as well having the skills necessary to do it. For the past decade or so, I have known I wanted to work with history in some capacity, weather that be as a professor,…

Some new insights I have gained as a result of working on Professor Otis’ Death by Numbers project is an appreciation for “making personal the impersonal aspects of the past.” Additionally, I have gained a new appreciation for microhistories when it comes to their ability to teach us more about society as a whole. In…

One of the skills I have been able to utilize during the course of this internship was my ability to absorb myself into history, something that is surprisingly easy when you surround yourself with primary source records. I found myself noticing statistical and mathematical trends that would have otherwise seemed invisible had I not spend…

This internship has been an eye opening experience for me in a number of different ways, not least of which because it gave me the opportunity to recognize the potentials of quantifiable historical data and how it can fundamentally alter our understandings of the past. During the spring semester of 2026, I have continued to…

After completing over 150 hours of death and mortality record transcriptions of the 17th and 18th centuries, it is both fitting and necessary to take a step back and humanize the numbers. Given the sheer quantity of deaths as well as the temporal distance between us and them, it can be easy to forget that…

One aspect of the Death by Numbers project which is perhaps the most interesting to me personally are the trends that I have begun to notice from year to year. After transcribing over 100 years of death records, you begin to recognize patterns not only between the same causes of death, but also the differences…

The Death by Numbers project is a database of bills of mortality and plague records from the various parishes in and around the city of london during the 17th and 18th centuries. The goal of this project is ultimately to “transcribe and publish the information in these bills in a dataset suitable for computational analysis.”…

Although the legacy of the plague dominates much of the discussion around death records from early European history, there are many interesting casualty recordings from the same era which can inform us about the lives of the people who inhabited this time frame. By becoming accustomed with the the ways these individuals perished, we can…