This visualization shows the data quality patterns for Bills of Mortality records by parish and week. You can examine either illegible records (difficult to read or transcribe) or missing records (incomplete data) to understand temporal and geographic patterns in data quality issues.
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 about the smaller parishes packed into the dense population center versus the outlying parishes.
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 humanities data. Death By Numbers includes a database, data visualizations, and numerous blog posts that can provide additional context to the project and history.
This visualization illustrates the seasonality of causes of death across the year, allowing you to analyze patterns and compare different causes. You can select a single cause to view its seasonal distribution, or compare two causes side by side. Dashed lines indicate areas where there are gaps in the data, and represent an interpolation between existing data.
Because the range of total deaths varies significantly, it can be difficult to see the smaller counts on these graphs. Normalizing the data can improve visibility by removing drastic range differences. The two normalization options are log10(x+1) and normalized. Log10(x+1) transforms the data by adding one before taking the logarithm, which preserves zero values and mitigates right-skewed datasets, making them a more normal distribution. Normalized standardizes the data with mean normalization, which subtracts the average from each value. Both make smaller values more visible, and make comparison easier..
Interactive choropleth map analyzing geographical patterns of suicides, drownings, and killings in London parishes, with filtering options by cause and year range based on text analysis research.
Multiple sparkline visualization showing temporal patterns of parish deaths with data normalization options (log10, normalized) and filtering by burial type (burials, plague, both) for improved visibility of smaller count variations.
Interactive choropleth map of London showing burial and plague death patterns across parishes, with controls to filter by year range and count type for geographical mortality analysis.
Interactive calendar visualization showing weekly causes of death data for any selected year, allowing users to explore temporal patterns in mortality.
Histogram visualization displaying weekly mortality data by specific causes of death, with interactive controls to filter by year and individual causes.