Digitization and Analysis of the Bills of Mortality Data Set

近代早期英国最可怕的疾病之一是瘟疫。1563年至1665年间，仅伦敦就有大约22.5万人死于瘟疫。作为政府追踪鼠疫爆发期间死亡人数的延伸，17世纪初，伦敦官员开始每周公开发布一系列死亡率统计数据，称为“死亡率账单”。伦敦人很快接受了这种纸币，将其作为评估自己即将死亡风险的工具，这导致了从1603年开始，纸币每周持续出版。这些公共账单还包含了所有的死亡人数和其他几十种死亡原因的数字，确保了它们在英格兰最后一次瘟疫爆发后的一个多世纪内的持续出版和广泛分发。该项目使用死亡账单来调查鼠疫爆发的生活经历如何与现代早期英格兰人民新兴的定量思维相交叉。它考察了普通人如何汇总、转换和解释死亡数字，以便得出关于早期现代对数字的使用和信任随着时间的变化的结论。在此过程中，该项目调查了当代对数字的看法，并将知识生成的定量方法历史化，这种方法已成为21世纪对世界理解的核心。这个项目的基础是死亡清单数据集，通过原始来源的数字化和随后在DataScribe中的转录创建：专门的软件设计用于从历史来源创建经过验证的结构化数据集。该项目在此数据集上部署自定义Python代码，以评估账单内部计算及其汇总统计的算术准确性。它将这种评估与对历史资料的仔细阅读结合起来，以便得出关于早期现代数字使用和信任的结论。在这些分析的基础上有两个问题：(1)人们是否相信账单内部总和的权威，并提取汇总统计数据，因为它们的编制在数学上是准确的，这反映了人们对正确量化死亡率对评估风险的重要性的信念？(2)人们相信账单上的数字是因为它们是数字，把账单和死亡率统计数据视为一种内在可靠的知识形式，因为它是数字基础吗？在探索这些问题的过程中，该项目扩展了认识论、数学、医学和公共卫生史上正在进行的讨论，并提供了新的见解，以了解人们在早期现代英格兰不断变化的数字景观的更大背景下对风险和死亡率量化的变化感知和反应。该项目还支持对数据集进行各种二级和学生驱动的分析，作为发布和宣传这个前现代城市死亡率纵向数据集的无数潜在重用的一部分。通过纳入学生及其研究兴趣，该项目为对历史和STEM研究感兴趣的学生建模跨学科路径，并展示了历史和STEM交叉领域的无数职业和研究选择。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

One of the most dreaded diseases in early modern England was plague. The city of London alone lost an estimated 225,000 people to plague in the century between 1563 and 1665. As an extension of government attempts to track plague deaths during outbreaks, London officials started publicly distributing a weekly series of mortality statistics called the Bills of Mortality at the turn of the seventeenth century. London's population rapidly embraced the bills as a tool for evaluating their risk of imminent death, which led to the bills' continuous weekly publication starting in 1603. These public bills also contained all-inclusive death counts and numbers for dozens of other causes of death, ensuring their ongoing publication and widespread distribution for over a century after the final outbreak of plague in England. This project uses the Bills of Mortality to investigate how lived experiences of plague outbreaks intersected with an emerging quantitative mentality among the people of early modern England. It examines how ordinary people aggregated, transformed, and interpreted death counts in order to draw conclusions about changes in the early modern use of and trust in numbers over time. In doing so, the project investigates contemporary perceptions of numbers and historicizes a quantitative method of knowledge generation that has become central to twenty-first-century understandings of the world.The foundation of this project is the Bills of Mortality dataset, created through the digitization of primary sources and their subsequent transcription in DataScribe: specialized software designed to create validated structured datasets from historical sources. The project deploys custom Python code on this dataset to assess the arithmetical accuracy of bills' internal calculations and their summary statistics. It combines this assessment with close reading of historical sources in order draw conclusions about early modern use of and trust in numbers. Underlying these analyses are two questions: (1) Did people put their trust in the authority of the bills' internal sums and extracted summary statistics because of the mathematical accuracy of their compilation, reflecting a belief in the importance of correctly quantifying mortality for assessing risk? (2) Did people put their trust in the bills' numbers because they were numbers, seeing the bills and their mortality statistics as an inherently trustworthy form of knowledge because of its numerical basis? In exploring these questions, this project expands ongoing discussions in the histories of epistemology, mathematics, medicine, and public health, and provides novel insights into people's changing perceptions of and reactions to the quantification of risk and mortality within the greater context of the changing numerical landscape of early modern England. The project also supports a variety of secondary and student-driven analyses on the dataset as part of publishing and publicizing the myriad potential reuses for this longitudinal dataset of mortality in a pre-modern city. Through the inclusion of students and their research interests, the project models interdisciplinary paths for students interested in both historical and STEM research and demonstrates the myriad career and research options available at the intersection of history and STEM.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.