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This document has been superseded by a revised version of the directed reading plan.
DHUM491 is a directed studies course in Digital Humanities at the University of Victoria.
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 sixteenth 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?
By the end of this directed reading,
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.
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.
Note: these primary and secondary sources will all be added to MoEML’s bibliography.
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.