Dan Howlett is a PhD student and a 2019-2021 Digital History Fellow at CHNM. He researches race, gender, and disability in early America.
2025-08-20
Use Death By Number’s ‘Mapping Burials and Plague’ visualization to explore the spread of plague in the city of London. Look at parish level data for various years and compare how plague deaths versus other burials in each parish change over time. Ask students what they notice …
2025-07-24
Death By Numbers is a data transcription project turning the London Bills of Mortality into structured data from primary sources. This lesson plan will use the Bills and the Death By Numbers project to introduce students at the high school or college level to thinking about historical sources as …
2022-08-29
God’s Terrible Voice in the City by Thomas Vincent describes the disastrous judgments of plague and fire that devastated London in 1665-1666. Today, two different editions of this work appear in the collections of Early English Books Online and Evans Early American Imprint Collection, the former …
2022-05-23
Figure 1. Bills of Mortality Workflow. Once items are added to DataScribe and the datasets are ready for transcription, the transcription workflow begins. The project owner can assign users one of two roles: reviewer or transcriber. Reviewers can edit all records and items, regardless of the item’s …
2022-04-11
So you want to start transcribing data from historical documents? The task seems easy! However, there are quite a few issues that can pop up which can create problems for other parts of the project. Below are some of the expected errors our transcribers on Death By Numbers frequently run into and …
2022-01-31
Plague epidemics were a recurring threat in late medieval and early modern Europe. While plague could and did strike anywhere, the most well-documented epidemics were often in cities. Responses varied across time and space, as city leaders and other political authorities attempted to avoid …