The Reading Room

Hundred-year-old death notices, four questions each. No account, no email, and you can stop after one.

What this is, and what it is for

We are measuring whether obituaries have come to sound alike, and what they have stopped saying about the person. Some of that a machine can count. The rest needs someone to read the thing and decide, which is where you come in.

Everything here is a public-domain newspaper notice from the 1890s to the 1920s. Everyone in them died more than a century ago. Nothing about a recent death appears in this room, and it never will.

Every notice is read by several people independently and the answer we use is the one most of you gave. That is deliberate. It means no single reading carries a finding, and it means being unsure is genuinely fine.

What we hold: a random id your browser made, your answers, and a handle if you choose to give one. No name, no email, no account, no tracking of any kind. Clear your browser data and you are gone from here entirely.

What comes back: the findings get published openly, the corpus goes into a public archive, and everyone who leaves a handle is credited. This is run by a small end-of-life support practice on Bainbridge Island, which is to say a business, and it seemed better to tell you that than to let you find out.

A note before you start: these are real deaths, plainly described in the language of the time. Some are children. Some are accidents at work. It is quiet, absorbing reading, and it is also not nothing.

Finding you a notice.