We are in the process of checking the arithmetic of the Bills of Mortality, both its internal consistency as well as the accuracy of our work, and are making our Jupyter notebooks of our analysis public. The notebooks take into account transcription errors, printing mistakes, illegible data, or …
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 …
The Bills of Mortality were weekly reports that recorded the number of deaths in London, beginning in 1603 and continuing consistently until 1819. These bills reported the number of burials and plague deaths in each London and surrounding parish. They also reported the different causes of death, …
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. …
Content Warning: This post contains subject matter that some may find sensitive or disturbing, be advised. If uncomfortable with this topic, you may support Death By Numbers in other posts. This blog post will be a bit different than a few of our previous posts. Now that we have discussed our …