What happens when 'Is Missing' becomes more literal?
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.
