Cecilia Ward was a Digital History Research Assistant on the Death by Numbers project from 2022 to 2024.
2024-03-13
Recently, I had the pleasure of presenting original research and maps about early modern death at the 2024 American Historical Association in San Francisco. I showcased maps between 1656 and 1680 based on general bill data. That span of years offered interesting data to showcase, including the major plague outbreak in London in 1665 and the Great Fire of London a year later in 1666. But how did I actually map these years?
2023-08-24
Samuel Pepys is primarily remembered for his decade-long diary, which recorded major events in 17th century English history including the Great Plague Outbreak (1665).1 Just before the height of the plague, on September 7, 1665, Pepys wrote in his diary, “[I] sent for the Weekely Bill, and find 8,252 dead in all, and of them 6,878 of the plague; which is a most dreadfull number, and shows reason to fear the plague hath got that hold that it will yet continue among us.” 2 While Pepys’ remark over the number of plague deaths was numerically incorrect (our records indicate the number of plague deaths was actually 6,978), Pepys was right to worry about the amount of death and the vice grip that plague held in London.3
2023-04-10
As Death by Numbers has evolved and developed, there have been some slight changes to our workflow, which caused us to reconsider how to work through and present our data. One of those shifts came about because we set up our workflows using early 18th century bills as a model, before shifting to work with the bills from the mid and late 17th century.
As a team, we quickly realized that the older bills were falling apart and had more missing information than the bills produced later. This caused some issues in our workflow, however, because previously we were using Datascribe’s ‘is missing’ marker for parishes who did not report any death information from that week. This was because the longer the bills were printed, the less reliable they became, especially by the 1700s. When we started, we felt our original method was a reasonable way to denote possible unreported deaths. However, when looking at bills that were literally missing sections due to degradation, we had to reevaluate how to use that flag. This new use was much simpler: only using ‘is missing’ flags when parishes were literally missing from the bills (usually because they didn’t exist yet), and use a combination of the ‘is missing’ and ‘is illegible’ flags for the parts of the page that are nonexistent and affect the readability of the data.