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 duplicate data to capture a comprehensive analysis of the data.

Checking for duplicate transcriptions: This notebook analyzes duplicate transcriptions in the Bills of Mortality dataset to estimate the overall accuracy of our transcribed data. It does not differentiate between data that was mistranscribed and data that was printed differently in two separate copies of the same bill of mortality; both are considered “inaccurate” data.

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. Following the process of transforming the DataScribe transcriptions into tidy data, the resulting data is uploaded to a PostgreSQL database where we can take advantage of relational connections among the different datasets we’ve compiled.

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). You may also make a copy of this notebook to your own Observable account to edit.