Jessica Otis, Associate Professor of history and Associate Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, was awarded The Renaissance Society of America’s Digital Innovation Award for 2026 for her project Death by Numbers. The RSA's Digital Innovation Award recognizes excellence in digital projects that support the study of the Renaissance.
Death by Numbers is a project focused on London's historical Bills of Mortality, a series of weekly documents that recorded cause-of-death statistics in the city. The bills began publication in 1603, initially to track plague mortality, but eventually expanded to cover dozens of other causes of death. This project's goal is to transcribe and publish data from nearly 8,000 weekly bills published between 1603 and 1752, creating an open-access dataset that makes these extensive historical records available to scholars for new analyses.
The selection committee was impressed by Death by Numbers for its exceptional combination of scholarly rigor and pedagogical value. The project, they remarked, "offers an intuitive and well-conceptualized digital environment that makes a vast and complex body of historical data (the London bills of mortality) accessible and meaningful for both research and teaching. The data is presented in multiple formats and accompanied by rich contextual information, enabling users to explore patterns of disease, plague and urban life in early modern London while modeling how such data can be analyzed and repurposed in new research and pedagogical contexts."
The committee described Death by Numbers as "a model for digital projects that successfully integrate archival research, methodological transparency, and the reuse and interpretation of historical data."