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.” Hidden in these bills are a vast array of clues which provide invaluable insight not only into how diseases and causes of death were understood, but also how the methods for recording these deaths evolved over time. Since we are working with data compiled from both primary and secondary sources, a further aim of this project is to analyse how accurate the subsequent transcriptions of original records were, and to understand why certain grouping of causes of death changed over time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My work on this project began with transcription of the Millar General Bills which re-recorded causes of death from the year 1657 to the year 1751. These are not the original documents from the 17th and 18th centuries, but rather a compilation of that data which was created roughly a century later. Therefore it is necessary to compare these re-recordings with the original documents and to perform computational analysis of how the numbers align with one another. On the surface, my task appeared easy enough as it mainly required inputting data from photographs of the Millar documents into a pre-designed format with the website Omeka, which were created by Professor Jessica Otis. However I quickly realized the importance of accuracy since one wrong input could mean a skewed analysis of the entire year’s data. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
One particular aspect of this that took some getting used to was the language , spelling, and physical quirks of the documents themselves which create somewhat of a barrier when it came to transcribing. Many of the causes of death are not only alien to our vocabulary today, but the ones which are recognizable are spelled in rather antiquated ways such as Stilborne, Murthered, Stomacke, etc. Additionally the physical nature of print block type combined with the age of the bills results in many instances of illegibility or ink blotting which make it almost impossible to discern the number or cause of death provided. Once I had gathered more experience with the language, I was abl to overcome some of these issues by predicting what the cause of death was even if it had become illegible. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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.” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=210"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":211,"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions\/211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}