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.