Methodologies

Ambiguous Bills and Anonymous Commentators: Reflections on My Experience Transcribing the Bills of Mortality

by Laszlo Taba
2024-09-10
workflows

I have had the pleasure over the last several months of transcribing Bills of Mortality for the Death by Numbers team, and what initially most surprised me is the amount of interpretation my role requires. Just because the bills are what historians would describe as “primary sources,” transcribing them is more complicated than just copying them word-for-word. While it helps that the original bills are in English, I still routinely run into textual issues that require me to pause and think carefully and critically about how to approach the text.

How Can You Map with Bills of Mortality Data?

by Cecilia Ward
2024-03-13
workflows

Recently, I had the pleasure of presenting original research and maps about early modern death at the 2024 American Historical Association in San Francisco. I showcased maps between 1656 and 1680 based on general bill data. That span of years offered interesting data to showcase, including the major plague outbreak in London in 1665 and the Great Fire of London a year later in 1666. But how did I actually map these years?

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.

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.

Workflows introduction. The following posts and essays describe our methods and workflows for working with the London bills of mortality.

Methodologies Tags

brett (3) data (1) geography (1) heppler (2) howlett (2) metadata (2) meyers (2) mitchell (2) omeka (1) taba (1) transcription (3) tropy (2) visualization (2) ward (2)