After graduation in May 2023, I continued to work on the Death By Numbers project from my last internship. Death by Numbers: My professor encouraged my fellow grad students and me to submit our side projects. I have only been to two history conferences and had not presented before. Like my fellow students, digital humanities is lived online, not necessarily presenting posters at a conference that was more geared towards papers, books, and traditional mediums of historical research. We presented our posters at a small panel that mainly consisted of my fellow students as digital humanities/digital history had not had a presence in this society before. We were the first posters presented per our panel leader. Hearing other professors’ research and participate in this conference for the first time was fun.
My topic focused on the sex ratio documented from London’s Bills of Mortality and John Graunt’s numbers with his observations on what biologists now call the primary sex ratio. Other significantly more knowledgeable historians know the historical context of John Graunt and his life, so this work was explicitly on the numbers published in London’s Bills of Mortality and Graunt’s observations. Graunt seems to be the first in Western literature to notice that more males are born, or rather more males in the numbers were at christenings than females. Graunt made conjectures that are not dissimilar to later biologists’ theories of why more males are born than females across populations. The poster took a sample of four years from the Bills of Mortality from the Death By Numbers project, and I placed it in Excel to do a cursory statistical analysis and just historical observations like Graunt did in his work. Once more of the front of the Bills are transcribed, I plan to do more of these numbers for evaluation. Graunt was correct that more males were born than females, realizing that christening numbers may not be fully substituted for births due to religious dissenters or deaths before christenings. The fascination with the sex ratio at birth and a comparison to the adult sex ratio in biology and history has lasted until today, with biologists studying multiple populations of humans and animals with theories of why there are always more males than females. Why the fascination? Why so many theories? A future project lies in reviewing the long history of biological science, fascination with the sex ratio, and Graunt’s role as the first Western observer of the now natural law that more males are born than females in all populations.
https://github.com/mss2111/Christenings-data
This is where my excel data, blog, and graphs are located for further review.
