Autumn: Season of Death?

Over the past few weeks, I've been compiling a database based on Benjamin Drew's transcriptions of Plymouth epitaphs. Hopefully, when I'm done, I will be able to quantify some of the patterns that I have observed anecdotally.

I am nowhere near done with this work, but I took a little break today to run some early statistics. One of the patterns I noticed as I was entering the data was that more people seemed to die in the autumn than in the summer. A graph of the month of death for the first 1,400 individuals in my database showed that there was a noticeable pattern:

There seems to have been a dip in the death rate during the late spring and summer and a peak in the early autumn. I will have to do more detailed analysis when I am done entering all of the data (only 1,500 gravestones to go!). After seeing this overall pattern, I will want to break the death months down by age, decade, gender, etc. I suspect that the month has less of an effect on babies who die in the first month after birth and adults ages 15-50, but may have a pronounced influence on those most susceptible to epidemics: young children (age 2 months-5 years) and the elderly.

We'll see.

Statistics

Last semester, I was working on a project that involved some demographic statistics from seventeenth-century Windsor, Connecticut. I soon realized that I did not know enough about statistics to make sense of them. Thus, this semester finds me taking an intro-level statistics course. Although it is sometimes difficult to hear the lecturer over the inane babble of the undergrads who refuse to stop chattering just because class has begun, I am learning quite a lot and enjoying it.

Today, I came across this art installation:



Who says statistics and humanities don't mix?
Bravo, Icaro Doria.