This semester I started a new internship closer to home at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. I learned last semester about museum work and brainstorming as a team for science communication at the Health Museum. This semester I am working as a digital public humanities intern on a project called “Death by Numbers.” The project led by Dr. Jessica Otis involves multi-step transcription, data analysis, and historical evaluation of the bills of mortality from London for 150 years, ending when the calendar changes in 1752. Dr. Otis has been working on the bills of mortality for over a decade, and I am excited to be a small part of the transcription team and write a blog on a research topic of my choice from the bills. One segment from the grant is the plan to digitize and transcribe all the bills into a dataset that will be free for researchers that I am proud to be a small part of.
My interest in quarantine historiography and medical history fits well with this project. Being part of this project will help increase my knowledge of early medical history in Europe and increase my technical knowledge of statistical analysis, website building and design, and transcription of primary sources. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to transcribe primary sources from London’s bills of mortality. These documents provide a unique window into the lives and deaths of people in the past, and I am eager to learn more about the history of London and the use of numbers that they followed, which is eerily similar to how people followed the numbers of Covid early on in the pandemic. As Dr. Otis explains this well, “There was a transformation in symbolic systems, the culturally agreed upon symbols and syntax used to represent numbers; there was a transformation in mathematical education, enabled by increasing literacy rates and the printing revolution; and most importantly there was a transformation in technologies of knowledge, specifically the way the people of early modern England conceived of and used numbers in their daily lives.” (Otis 2013)
From a technical knowledge base, I am actually excited to transcribe. In the past, I have joined open crowd-sourcing projects online for transcription. Open projects that anyone can help transcribe are listed on these two websites I have been a part of. By the People Active Campaigns (loc.gov) and FromThePage. Transcribing primary sources requires close attention to focused detail while feeling like a part of a team to improve access to future researchers’ work on this subject. I am excited to be able to bring these important documents to life and to contribute to the larger goal of digital preservation that will be available to future researchers.
