Jacqueline Wernimont, Assistant Professor of English, Scripps College During the 17th century, as many as 100,000 people died in England during the major plague outbreaks. Working with Scripps undergraduates, the “Counting the Dead” project is encoding a wide range of texts that commemorate or count the plague deaths in order to understand the varied relationships between numerical and poetic accounts of the outbreaks. Plague-related texts are notoriously susceptible to inflation or exaggeration; consequently, we are not working to gather a “true account” of the plague but rather to understand the mechanisms of collective memory construction through a wide array of textual genres. This entails the development of a schema flexible enough to handle census-like data alongside elegiac poetry. This poster will present our early-stage work and discuss the challenges we face as we proceed.

1. Exploratory Encoding in the “Counting the Dead” Project
Jacqueline Wernimont
Department of English, Scripps College, Claremont CA 91711
Introduction: Counting the Dead
Multimodal Texts
Exploratory Encoding: Questions going forward
17th century outbreaks of the plague killed as many Part of our challenge is in dealing with a wide We are in the very earliest stages of this project
as 100,000 people in England, some without leaving array of textual modalities. Often this is at the “clearly the TEI wasnʼt built – we are still in the process of developing the
a trace in the historical record, others memorialized level of the archive, but in some instances it is
in poetry or as a number in a mass grave. Working at the level of individual text.The example below
for this”
testbed and refining the schema. Consequently
The diversity of modalities makes this project we have questions rather than conclusions.
with Scripps undergraduates, the “Counting the is particularly rich, including visual, poetic,
particularly exciting as a pedagogical • Will the TEI guidelines and ODDs be flexible
Dead” project is encoding a wide range of texts that numerical, and prose elements.
exercise. Students gain a sense of the enough to deal with our numerical data?
commemorate or count the plague deaths in order to
Reproductions of flexibility of XML and the TEI guidelines, but
understand the varied relationships between
also of the constraints built into any tool • If not, can MathML help?
numerical and poetic accounts of the outbreaks.
various plague bills,
including the major developed with literary texts in mind.
• All plague bills include a summary account
Plague texts are notoriously unreliable; outbreaks of 1603, like that in Figure 4, which are often not
1625, and 1636 Exploratory encoding
reconcilable across the collection. Do we
consequently, we are not working to gather a “true
• A Roma built TEI customization
actually want to analyze the numerical data?
account” of the plague but rather to understand the
• Small (10-15) testbed of documents
mechanisms of collective memory construction
• Learning on the go via Oxygenʼs drop Figure 4. Detail of ʻA Table.ʼ It asserts
through an array of textual genres. We are taking
down menus
that 25,428 deaths were recorded
advantage of the “fuzziness” of our data and using
• Iterative schema development
in1625 and that 1830 had been
an exploratory model for schema development.
• Collaborative decision making with recorded through July 11 1665. Other
respect to the collection and future accounts suggest a much higher
interface
number by this time in 1665.
• < 5 hours a week work by students
• Will we need multiple ways of modeling our
• Meetings to discuss issues & insights
data in order to capture the rich interplay
Recipes or between kinds of commemorative
“receipts” to technologies?
prevent and then Multimodal data modeling
cure the plague • What kinds of discovery tools
and the archival impulse
(visualizations, etc) will best help us
Creating a digital archive requires two kinds conduct scholarly work with this archive?
Figure 3. Make sure legends have enough detail to of transformation, both of which entail certain
explain to the viewer what the results are, Poem meditating on
but donʼt go on losses: data modeling and archival selection. • How do we discriminate between fictional
mortality
and on. Donʼt be tempted to reduce font size in figure
We continue to ask ourselves the following:
and non-fictional accounts and how do we
legends, axes labels, etc.—your viewers are probably
most interested in reading your figures and legends!
represent that difference in the archive?
Q: what is the overlap between
• Is this a private research and teaching
archive, or something of public interest?
Archives as a Data modeling
complete body as an abstracted
of evidentiary ?
representation
records Acknowledgments
None of this work would be possible without the intellectual
curiosity, keen insight, and encoding work of my students, in
particular Sarah Murtagh, Beatrice Schuster, and Amy
Q: What kinds of losses are tolerable and Borsuk. We have received financial support from the Mellon
what kind of information must be preserved Foundation and have the enthusiastic support of Scripps
Religious
Figure 2. A small sampling of the most common types of Psalm citation and to what ends?
College.
Iconography
plague texts. From left to right: 'Dr Burges his Directionns in
tyme of Plagueʼ from Lady Ann Fanshaweʼs recipe book
(1651); A general weekly bill from 1665 in which deaths by Figure 3. Reproduction of a plague broadside that was For further information
parish and then by cause were enumerated; and 'A table published along with memorials for the London Fire
(1666). Image courtesy of Honnold-Mudd Special Please contact Jwernimo@scrippscollege.edu or
comparing the increase of the Plague betwixt the year 1625 @profwernimont
and this present year 1665.ʼ Images courtesy of the Collections.
More information on this and related projects can be
Wellcome Library. obtained at http://jwernimont.wordpress.com/.