Blog

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

Recent Posts

How Can You Map with Bills of Mortality Data? Cecilia Ward · 2024-03-13
Death on Two Legs: Analyzing the initial 20 weeks of the 1636 London plague outbreak using time-to-event analysis Hernan Adasme · 2023-12-04
Comparing the Bills of Mortality and Old Bailey Proceedings Savannah Scott · 2023-11-27
Death by Numbers: the Monarchical Bills of Mortality, 1665-1669 Katie Kania Jessica Otis · 2023-11-07
Infant Mortality In The Monarchical Bills of Mortality, 1665-1669 Katie Kania Jessica Otis · 2023-10-25

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