All Posts and Essays

Infant Mortality In The Monarchical Bills of Mortality, 1665-1669

by Katie Kania, Jessica Otis

2023-10-25

During the early modern period, the city of London produced weekly mortality reports called bills of mortality. These bills—printed from 1603 onward—detail the number of deaths per parish; plague deaths per parish; and deaths citywide by cause of death. However printed bills were actually summaries of manuscript bills produced for the monarch, which contain a parish-by-parish breakdown of every cause of death throughout the city of London for the preceding week.

London, 1665: Living in a Deathtrap

by Cecilia Ward

2023-08-24

analysis

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.

A Starvation Death During the Great Plague of 1665

by Mary Shuman

2023-05-08

analysis

Figure 1. A photograph of the bill of mortality for the week of November 14-21, 1665. On the Bill of Mortality for the week of November 14-21st, 1665, plague deaths were finally decreasing from a horrific summer. The total number of plague deaths was still a staggering six hundred and fifty-two, but that did not stop parish officials from recording all the other ways that Londoners were dying. One death stood out as an intriguing mystery: starved in White Lyon prison at St George in Southwark.

What happens when 'Is Missing' becomes more literal?

by Emily Meyers, Cecilia Ward

2023-04-10

workflows

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.

Of Fires, Great and Small

by Jessica Otis

2023-03-14

analysis

At about 3am on Sunday, September 2, 1666, the diarist Samuel Pepys’ maid Jane awakened him to let him know about a fire that had started within the ancient city walls of London. He looked out the window, thought it was too far away to worry about, and went back to sleep. When he got up the next morning, Jane relayed the news that over 300 houses had already burned, so he went to the Tower of London and climbed to a high spot where he could see the extent of the threat: “an infinite great fire”1 which would rage for four days before being reduced to embers that ominously smoldered in cellars for several more weeks.

Death by Numbers at the Renaissance Society of America

by Jessica Otis

2023-03-08

announcements

PI Jessica Otis will be presenting on Death by Numbers at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America this week. For anyone attending the meeting, the presentation will be Friday, March 10th, from 4:30-6PM in the Caribe Hilton Gran Salón Los Rosales A - Gran Salón Los Rosales (Garage). Free notebooks and stickers with the project logo will be available for anyone who wants one. Figure 1. Our new swag!

Announcing Death by Numbers Beta

by Jessica Otis

2023-02-27

announcements

Welcome to the relaunch of our blog and the formal beta launch of the Death by Numbers database. While our blog has been quiet, we’ve been busy behind the scenes getting our code squared away and finishing transcribing some of the early datasets so that the project was in a good place for a public debut. We’re still hard at work adding data to the database and building our first visualizations, so don’t be surprised at how large some of the gaps are in the dataset.

12 Days of Death

by Bridget Bukovich

2023-01-22

announcements

We find a lot of very specific deaths in the London Bills of Mortality that are…well…meme-able. It isn’t that death is funny, but rather, the descriptions of death in the bills can be so that one can’t help but chuckle. And considering the heavy subject matter of our project, we relish those moments. So, while our team took a well deserved break from transcribing the bills, we shared “12 Days of Death” on Twitter

Building a Data API for Historical Research

by Jason Heppler

2022-11-21

workflows

We are in the process of building out a data API to support the data work we’re undertaking with the transcription of the plague bills. We anticipate hundreds of thousands of rows of data by the end of our transcription process, and we wanted an easy and efficient way to work with that data. As part of our work in data-driven historical research at RRCHNM, we are building a data API to store and access data from databases.

Visualizing the Bills of Mortality

by Jason Heppler

2022-11-11

workflows

One of the ways we are using the transcribed bills of mortality is in data visualization and mapping, in an effort to ask new questions and revisit old ones. At the Southern History Association’s annual meeting in Baltimore, we presented preliminary work on data visualization and the data API. An interactive notebook on this early work is available on Observable for perusal (note, the page may take a moment to load the 100,000+ records).

Infant Mortality In The Monarchical Bills of Mortality, 1665-1669

London, 1665: Living in a Deathtrap

A Starvation Death During the Great Plague of 1665

What happens when 'Is Missing' becomes more literal?

Of Fires, Great and Small

Death by Numbers at the Renaissance Society of America

Announcing Death by Numbers Beta

12 Days of Death

Building a Data API for Historical Research

Visualizing the Bills of Mortality

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