Analyzing Data
In continuation of my work at RRCHNM, I focused my internship on Death by Numbers. This is a project attempting to gain a better understanding of the Bills of Mortality and early modern English life. If you want to read through how I chose this topic and my process, here is my original post!
Ok so I wanted to take some time to play with the data started to collect from the Laxton collection. I decided to not overwhelm myself and stick to only looking at a 5 year span of 1700-1705. Once that was decided, it was time to take the information transcribed from the Bills and separate the murders versus other deaths. Other deaths, for this exercise, did not include medical and diseases deaths but accidents and other odd deaths. This separation was a bit easy because Death by Numbers has made that a distinction in the transcriptions exports. An example of a reported “other” death would be “Burnt accidentally at St Andrew in Holborn” in 1700.
My goal was twofold. The first was that I wanted to learn how to play with data and learn QGIS. But my second was that I also wanted to see if murders and accidents from 1700-1705 followed the normal socioeconomic patterns or not.
The Findings:
The maps did not show anything out of the norm from 1700-1705. I believe this reinforces the socioeconomic understanding of London and other major cities both then and now. In the murders map, there seems to be the most reports in or near Cheapside with only one report in the much larger parishes outside the walls of the city. For the other deaths, we see the opposite. There are more deaths on edges of London, closer to the Thames and farmable lands.
Below are the maps I created. In each map, white equals no death, then lightest to darkest shows numbers of deaths from 1-4 reports in total.