Ok so…
With some delays, I was able to craft my own internship with an organization that I would love to move forward with! I have enjoyed my time working with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) even before the internship so I knew this was a great opportunity to apply more energy to these projects I have worked for.
What is RRCHNM
It is a place for interdisciplinary work with a common goal to “use digital media and computer technology to democratize history.” Since 1994, they have been continuing to learn how to mix the work of the humanities and technology to always ask more questions with so many different perspectives. There are historians of math, science, art, and more! As a part of RRCHNM, I will be continuing that energy by researching and analyzing data into forms that the public can easily access and understand.
Wait I should say what project I am working on!
I have been working on Death by Numbers, a project to transcribe and more the London Bills of Mortality. As Dr. Jessica Otis, the PI for the project, states on the site “One of the major aims of the Death by Numbers project is to transcribe and publish the information in these bills in a dataset suitable for computational analysis.”
Analyze I have! I have seen a large amount of strange information in the Bills that I want to spend more time on. One interesting thing that I have wanted to do with the Bills is mapping or visualizations of the data found so far in the project. The data includes a list of causes of deaths, parish statistics, and descriptions of “other” deaths that did not fit in the previously mentioned list. These descriptions can be vague or specific as to whether the death was an accident or not. I would like to see if there is a connection to where these murders or accidents are happening.
With that map I will be writing some research blogs free for the public to read and understand more about early modern London. These posts will be based off some of the data in the Bills with a bit more research behind them. Why did murder (or accidents) happen more in one area than another? How does the project separate murder versus accidents when the Bills simply say “was kill’d?” Other visualizations may come out of that as well!