Introduction: Counting the Dead 17th century outbreaks of the plague killed as many as 100,000 people in England, some without leaving a trace in the historical record, others memorialized in poetry or as a number in a mass grave. 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 texts are notoriously unreliable; consequently, we are not working to gather a “true account” of the plague but rather to understand the mechanisms of collective memory construction through an array of textual genres. We are taking advantage of the “fuzziness” of our data and using an exploratory model for schema development.

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 Borsuk. We have received financial support from the Mellon Foundation and have the enthusiastic support of Scripps College.

Multimodal Texts Part of our challenge is in dealing with a wide array of textual modalities. Often this is at the level of the archive, but in some instances it is at the level of individual text.The example below is particularly rich, including visual, poetic, numerical, and prose elements.

Questions going forward We are in the very earliest stages of this project – we are still in the process of developing the testbed and refining the schema. Consequently we have questions rather than conclusions. • Will the TEI guidelines and ODDs be flexible enough to deal with our numerical data? •  If not, can MathML help?

• All plague bills include a summary account like that in Figure 4, which are often not reconcilable across the collection. Do we actually want to analyze the numerical data?

•  Will we need multiple ways of modeling our data in order to capture the rich interplay between kinds of commemorative technologies? •  What kinds of discovery tools (visualizations, etc) will best help us conduct scholarly work with this archive? •  How do we discriminate between fictional and non-fictional accounts and how do we represent that difference in the archive? •  Is this a private research and teaching archive, or something of public interest?

Jacqueline Wernimont Department of English, Scripps College, Claremont CA 91711

Figure 2. A small sampling of the most common types of 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 parish and then by cause were enumerated; and 'A table comparing the increase of the Plague betwixt the year 1625 and this present year 1665.ʼ Images courtesy of the Wellcome Library. 

Figure 3. Make sure legends have enough detail to explain to the viewer what the results are, but donʼt go on and on. Donʼt be tempted to reduce font size in figure legends, axes labels, etc.—your viewers are probably most interested in reading your figures and legends!

For further information Please contact Jwernimo@scrippscollege.edu or @profwernimont More information on this and related projects can be obtained at http://jwernimont.wordpress.com/.

Exploratory Encoding in the “Counting the Dead” Project

Reproductions of various plague bills, including the major outbreaks of 1603, 1625, and 1636

Recipes or “receipts” to prevent and then cure the plague

Poem meditating on mortality

Psalm citation Religious Iconography

Figure 3. Reproduction of a plague broadside that was published along with memorials for the London Fire (1666). Image courtesy of Honnold-Mudd Special Collections.

Exploratory Encoding: “clearly the TEI wasnʼt built for this” The diversity of modalities makes this project particularly exciting as a pedagogical exercise. Students gain a sense of the flexibility of XML and the TEI guidelines, but also of the constraints built into any tool developed with literary texts in mind.

Exploratory encoding •  A Roma built TEI customization •  Small (10-15) testbed of documents •  Learning on the go via Oxygenʼs drop down menus •  Iterative schema development •  Collaborative decision making with respect to the collection and future interface •  < 5 hours a week work by students •  Meetings to discuss issues & insights

Multimodal data modeling and the archival impulse Creating a digital archive requires two kinds of transformation, both of which entail certain losses: data modeling and archival selection. We continue to ask ourselves the following:

Q: what is the overlap between

Q: What kinds of losses are tolerable and what kind of information must be preserved and to what ends?

Archives as a complete body of evidentiary records

Data modeling as an abstracted

representation ?

Figure 4. Detail of ʻA Table.ʼ It asserts that 25,428 deaths were recorded in1625 and that 1830 had been recorded through July 11 1665. Other accounts suggest a much higher number by this time in 1665.