Undergraduate student contribution

DHUM 491: Remediating Bills of Mortality

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DHUM 491: Remediating Bills of Mortality

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Introduction

DHUM491 is a directed studies course in Digital Humanities at the University of Victoria. Joey Takeda designed this iteration of the course, which is being supervised by Janelle Jenstad in Summer 2015, through the department of English.
The Bills of Mortality were printed broadsides listing the numbers of deaths and christenings. The earliest collections of these in London date to the early 16th century; from 1625 on, they were privately printed on a press owned by the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks and specially licensed by Star Chamber. In 1662, John Graunt compiled and analyzed a collection of these documents, ushering in the field of demography and population statistics. In this course, we attempt to read these bills of mortality not for numbers but for toponyms (placenames). We are interested in the following questions: How does reading the bills of mortality for place help shape our understanding of place, death, and the printing press in Early Modern London? How can we map this data? How does compiling the data in the digital environment change the nature of the documents we are remediating? And how do our digital remediation processes help us understand the nature of these broadsides and the early remediations of data gathered by women, compiled by parish clerks, printed on London’s only legal private press, and then recompiled by the first demographer?

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this directed reading, Takeda will:

Assignments

Written Assignments

There will be four written assignments for this course. The first three will be in the form of a position paper (each 1000 words), which will describe a particular aspect of the course (historical, theoretical, digital humanities). The final paper (4000 words) will synthesize and expand on the position papers in order to form a sustained argument regarding the Bills of Mortality as exercises in remediation. It will include historical context, literature review, and methodology from the position papers.
Assignment▼ Details▼ Weight▼
Position Paper 1 Historical context: What do we know about Bills of Mortality and the gathering and printing of death statistics in early modern London? This position paper will be included in the critical apparatus of the edition of the mortality bills. 8%
Position Paper 2 Making an Intervention: What critical work has been done? What work needs to be done on the Bills of Mortality? (Takeda anticipates that his research question will ask how taking a spatial approach and a generic approach will change our understanding of these texts.) 8%
Position Paper 3 Methodology: These texts were already a remediation of data. Given that Takeda’s project is also a remediation of data, he will take the opportunity to think through the critical implications of aggregation, analysis, and remediation. How are these processes critically significant, similar, and/or different? What difference does an interface make? 8%
Final Paper A synthesis and an expansion of the position papers, offering an answer to the research question posed in Position Paper 2 using the methodology outlined in Position Paper 3. 33%

Encoding Assignments

Summary

There will be two encoding assignments. The first will be a chronological finding aid for the Bills of Mortality, listing all known bills (extant and lost). There is no readily accessible list of the Bills of Mortality; MoEML will publish this list for the benefit of other scholars. The second encoding assignment is to transcribe, transform, edit, and anthologize the extant Bills of Mortality. Takeda will devise new remediation tools with Excel, XSLT, and CSS. His edition will be a critically-informed remediation of the data.
Assignment▼ Details▼ Weight▼
Encoding Assignment 1 Finding Aid of all known Mortality Bills for London from the earliest up to John Graunt. Takeda will submit this as an encoded MoEML table. 10%
Encoding Assignment 2 Encoding, Editing, and Anthologizing the Bills. Takeda will submit the encoded texts and the anthology incrementally, as a new section in MoEML’s Library. 33%

Schedule

Week▼ Date▼ Due▼
Week 1 May 4
Week 2 May 11 Finding Aid
Week 3 May 18 Position Paper 1
Week 4 May 25
Week 5 June 01 Position Paper 2
Week 6 June 08
Week 7 June 15 Finish encoding the bills for EA 2
Week 8 June 22 Finish anthology for EA 2
Week 9 June 29
Week 10 July 6
Week 11 July 13 Position Paper 3
Week 12 July 20
Week 13 July 27
Exam Period August 15 Final paper due

Readings

Note: these primary and secondary sources will all be added to MoEML’s bibliography.

Primary Documents

  • The Bills of Mortality
  • John Graunt
  • John Bell
  • Totaro, Rebecca, ed. The Plague in Print: Essential Elizabethan Sources, 1558-1603. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP, 2010. Print.
  • Birch, Thomas, ed. A Collection of the yearly bills of mortality, from 1657 to 1758 inclusive. London: A. Millar, 1759. Web. Open. Hathi Trust.

Resources

  • Early English Books Online
  • The Wellcome Library
  • Folger Shakespeare Library
  • The National Archives

Secondary

I have categorized the bibliography under multiple headings for convenience. Often items in these categories overlap in some way (Greenberg’s essay for example) so I have assigned it under the category that I think is most suitable.

Early Modern

History of Parish Clerks and the Printing Press
  • Clegg, Cyndia Susan. Press Censorship in Caroline England. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. Print.
  • Clegg, Cyndia Susan. Press Censorship in Elizabethan England. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 1997. Print.
  • Plomer, Henry Robert. A Short History of English Printing, 1476–1898. London: Kegan Paul, 1900. Print.
  • Siebert, Frederick Seaton. Freedom of the Press in England, 1476-1776: The Rise and Decline of Government Controls. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1952. Print.
Space/Disease/Mortality (Historical Readings)
  • Adams, Reginald H. The Parish Clerks of London: A History of the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks in London. London and Chichester: Phillimore, 1971. Print.
  • Bayatrizi, Zohreh. Life Sentences: The Modern Ordering of Mortality. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008. Print.
  • Champion, J.A.I. Epidemic Disease in London. London: Institute of Historical Research, 1993. Print. Web. Open. University of London. [Each essay is linked in .pdf form at the end of the page.]
  • Christie, James. Some account of parish clerks, more especially of the Ancient Fraternity (Bretherne and Sisterne) of S. Nicholas, now known as the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks. London: 1893. Print. Web. Open. Hathi Trust.
  • Engel, William E. Mapping Mortality: The Persistence of Memory and Melancholy in Early Modern England. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1995. Print. [Section 1 is titled From Gioto to Broadsides and features the interesting (and titular) document The Map of Mortalitie.]
  • Farren, Edwin James. Historical Essay on the Rise and Early Progress of the Doctrine of Life-contingencies in England, Leading to the Establishment of the First Life-assurance Society in which Ages Were Distinguished. London: Smith, Elder, & Co, 1844. Web. Open. Google Books.
  • Greenberg, Stephen. Plague, the Printing Press, and Public Health in Seventeenth-Century London. Huntington Library Quarterly 67.4 (2004): 508-527. Web.
  • Harding, Vanessa. Burial of the Plague Dead in Early Modern London. Epidemic Disease in London. Ed. J.A.I. Champion. London: Institute of Historical Research. Web. Open.University of London.
  • Harding, Vanessa. The Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500-1670. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.
  • Holmes, Basil. The London Burial Grounds. New York: Macmillan, 1896. Web. Open. Hathi Trust.
  • Kreager, Philip. New Light on Graunt. Population Studies 42.1 (1988): 129-140. Web. DOI: 10.1080/0032472031000143156.
  • Maitland, William. The history and survey of London : From its Foundation to the Present Time. Vol. 2. London: 1756. Web. Open. Hathi Trust.
  • Munkhoff, Richelle. Reckoning Death: Women Searchers and the Bills of Mortality in Early Modern London. Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England. Ed. Jennifer C. Vaught. Surrey: Ashgate, 2010. 119-134. Print.
  • Newman, Karen. Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2007. Print. Read Ch.7, Death, Name, and Number.
  • Plomer, Henry Robert. Literature of the Plague. The Library 1 (1891): 209-228. Web. DOI: 10.1093/library/s1-3.1.209.
  • Robertson, J.C. Reckoning with London: Interpreting the Bills of Mortality before John Graunt. Urban History 23.3 (1996): 325-350. Web. DOI: 10.1017/S0963926800016898.
  • Slauter, Will. Write Up Your Dead: The Bills of Mortality and the London plague of 1665. Media History 17.1 (2008): 1-15. Web. DOI: 10.1080/13688804.2011.532371.
  • Sullivan, Erin. Physical and Spiritual Illness: Narrative Appropriations of the Bills of Mortality. Representing the Plague in Early Modern England. Ed. Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman. New York and London: Routledge, 2011. Print. Web.
  • Twigg, Graham. Plague in London: Spatial and Temporal Aspects of Mortality. Epidemic Disease in London. Ed. J.A.I. Champion. London: Institute of Historical Research. Web. Open.University of London.
  • Wilson, F. P. The Plague in Shakespeare’s London. London: OUP, 1963. Print.

Digital Humanities

Issues in Digital Humanities and Remediation (Methodological Readings)
  • Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2000. Print.
  • Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things Out: Classifications and Its Consequences. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000. Print.
  • Burnard, Lou, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and John Unsworth, eds. Electronic Textual Editing. New York: Modern Language Association, 2006. Print.
  • Byrant, John. The Fluid Text. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002. Print.
  • Cummings, James. The Materiality of Markup and the Text Encoding Initiative. Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture. Ed. Brent Nelson and Melissa M. Terras. Toronto: Iter; Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012. 49-81. Web.
  • Galey, Alan, Richard Cunningham, Brent Nelson, Ray Siemens, and The INKE Team. Beyond Remediation: The Role of Textual Studies in Implementing New Knowledge Environments. Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture. Ed. Brent Nelson and Melissa M. Terras. Toronto: Iter, Inc.; Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012. 21-48. Web.
  • Hayles, N. Katherine, and Jessica Pressman, eds. Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era. Minneapolis and London: U of Minneapolis P, 2013. Print.
  • Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature. Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 2008. Print.
  • Jockers, Matthew L. Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: U of Illinois P, 2013. Print.
  • Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. London and New York: Verso, 2013. Print.
  • Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees. London and New York: Verso, 2005. Print.
XSLT
  • Tennison, Jeni. Beginning XSLT 2.0: From Novice to Professional. Berkeley, CA: Apress, 2005. Print.