{"id":218,"date":"2026-05-04T17:40:04","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T17:40:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/?p=218"},"modified":"2026-05-04T22:19:18","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T22:19:18","slug":"blog-post-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/?p=218","title":{"rendered":"Blog Post 5"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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 transcribe for professor Otis\u2019 Death by numbers project which examines and evaluates quantitative data associated with mortality rates in and around the parishes of London. Moving from Guildhall annual bills to Laxton annual Bills entailed much of the same responsibilities, however they also offered new opportunities, as well as new challenges. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My inital expectations for this internship was simply that I would be exclusively looking at deaths associated with the plague, however I have realized that apart from a few sporadic outbreaks such as in 1666, plague deaths were a tiny fraction of the total fatalities in early modern England. Unlike the Guildhall series which were copies of the original 17th century documents, the Laxton bills picked up at the beginning of the 18th-century which means that the plague has all but disappeared completely from England; so much so that Laxton does not even bother to include a category for it in most instances.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite originating from a later source, many of these bills suffer from print defects and bizarre typos; some of which are a result of the pre-standardization of the English language while others appear to be human error during the manufacturing process. Pre-standardization defects mostly arise in the form of minor inconveniences like I\u2019s replacing J\u2019s, N\u2019s where there should be U\u2019s, spelling errors, or discrepancies between spelling. Depending on how differently the causes of death are spelled one could be forgiven for thinking some of these were actually completely distinct terms. For instance, \u201cTissick\u201d turns into \u201cPhthisick,\u201d and goes back and forth for about twenty years in the mid 18th-century. These changes, while slightly annoying, do not significantly impact the job of the transcriber who simply has to make note of the correct spelling for that year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Manufacturing errors, on the other hand, offer significantly more challenges since there is a wider variety of things that can go wrong during the printing process.These include but are not limited to; ink blotting, ink spills, misalignment, and failure to press. Unlike simply grammatical errors, these particular kindness of defects do in fact hinder the work of the transcriber since it makes it more difficult, or even impossible in certain instances, to actually make out the words on the page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The image above was taken from a Laxton bill and shows an example of a failure to press. In this instance, there was most likely either there was not enough ink left on the plate which oftentimes happens when making large numbers of copies one after another, or there was not enough pressure applied to the press itself. No matter the reason, the transcriber ultimately has only one option which is to mark the data as “is illegible.” If enough of the bills suffer from defects such as this than the data can very easily become skewed and fail to represent an accurate picture of the numbers for that period. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/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-218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218","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=218"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":226,"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions\/226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}