Drowned in the Thames: A Spatial Analysis of the Drowned Data on the London Bills of Mortality, 1665–1752

This poster explores drowning incidents in the Thames River in Early Modern London. It draws on the data collected by the Death by Numbers project, which is the first large-scale effort to make the information contained in the London Bills of Mortality available for computational analysis. The poster will analyze both the spatial distribution of drowning incidents and the historical time-series movement of submersion deaths, with a focus on the causes associated with these events recorded in the London Bills of Mortality. It will provide a spatial representation of deadly drowning accidents in London’s historical parishes adjacent to the Thames’ riverbanks, along with visualizations intended to track the movement of drowning instances from the late seventeenth-century to the mid eighteenth-century.

Analyzing the data about dying in the Thames offers a window to a whole set of historically situated cultural practices and economic activities that revolved around the Thames river in Early Modern London. Drowning accidents were a byproduct of the vivid working landscape along the Thames’ riverfront. Merchants, fishermans, washerwomen and dock-workers were constantly at risk of an accidental stumble into the Thames’ waters, that would lead to a fatal submersion death. The poster will analyze how the drowning numbers and descriptions stored in the Bills of Mortality’s causes of death sheds light into the daily working routines in wharfs, warehouses, shipyards and fish markets.

Due to the sheer volume of textual and numeric information extracted by the Death by Numbers project, the data will be analyzed using computational methods. By applying text analysis techniques such as Named Entity Recognition and N-gram modeling, I will extract the precise locations of the drowning incidents, along with the context surrounding the immersion deaths. With the aid of spatial analysis methods, I will georeference and map drowning events according to the Parishes located along the river where the deaths took place. In sum, the poster seeks to construct a meaningful contextualization of the drowning data, by highlighting the connection between the Thames’ vibrant industries, and the likelihood of accidentally dying on its waters.