Digitization and Analysis of the Bills of Mortality Data Set

鼠疫是近代早期英格兰最可怕的疾病之一。在1563年至1665年的一个世纪里，仅伦敦市就估计有22.5万人死于瘟疫。作为政府追踪鼠疫暴发期间死亡人数的努力的延伸，伦敦官员在17世纪之交开始公开发布每周一次的死亡统计数据，称为死亡清单。伦敦人迅速接受这些钞票，将其作为评估其即将死亡的风险的工具，这导致这些钞票从1603年开始连续每周出版。这些公共法案还包含了包罗万象的死亡人数和数十种其他死因的数字，确保了这些法案在英格兰最后一次鼠疫爆发后一个多世纪的持续出版和广泛分发。这个项目使用死亡清单来调查鼠疫暴发的生活经历如何与早期现代英格兰人中新兴的量化心理相交。它考察了普通人如何汇总、转化和解释死亡数字，以便得出结论，说明早期现代对数字的使用和信任随着时间的推移而发生的变化。在这样做的过程中，该项目调查了当代对数字的认知，并将一种量化的知识生成方法载入史册，该方法已成为21世纪对世界的理解的核心。该项目的基础是死亡数据集，它是通过对原始来源及其随后在DataScribe中的转录进行数字化而创建的，DataScribe是一种专门软件，旨在根据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了定制的Python代码，以评估票据内部计算及其汇总统计数据的算术准确性。它将这一评估与仔细阅读历史资料相结合，以得出关于早期现代对数字的使用和信任的结论。这些分析背后有两个问题：(1)人们是否信任钞票内部总和的权威性，并因为其编制的数学准确性而提取汇总统计数据，这反映出人们相信正确量化死亡率对于评估风险的重要性？(2)人们之所以信任钞票数字，是因为它们是数字，因为钞票及其死亡率统计数据是一种内在可信的知识形式，因为它的数字基础？在探索这些问题时，这个项目扩展了认识论、数学、医学和公共卫生历史中正在进行的讨论，并提供了新的见解，以了解在早期现代英格兰不断变化的数字格局的更大背景下，人们对量化风险和死亡率的看法和反应的变化。该项目还支持对数据集进行各种二手和学生驱动的分析，作为出版和宣传这一前现代城市死亡率纵向数据集的无数潜在重复使用的一部分。通过纳入学生和他们的研究兴趣，该项目为对历史和STEM研究感兴趣的学生建立了跨学科的道路，并展示了历史和STEM相交的无数职业和研究选择。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.