Some new graphs

This weekend I’ve added two new types of graph to the site, to help visualise some information. One shows Pepys’ increasing wealth during the diary period and the other shows how often an Encyclopedia topic has been referenced in the diary.

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Pepys family tree

I’ve put together a Pepys family tree as an alternative way of accessing Encyclopedia pages for all the Pepyses. It’s also hopefully useful as a way of getting an overview of how everyone’s related — it’s a big family!

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Mark annotations for attention

Keeping the annotations tidy requires occasional tending. Despite all the spam filters a few spam annotations get through occasionally, and these only get deleted when someone notices them and emails me. And occasionally there are accidentally duplicated annotations which need tidying up. Also, an unfortunate number of annotations have been truncated during past database moves.

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New contextual pop-up help

I’m not really sure what to call this. Tool-tips? Hover help? Anyway, you should now notice something new if you hover your mouse cursor over any of the linked words in Diary entries. Here’s an example:

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Temperature and politics

I have added a bit of extra contextual information in the sidebar next to every diary entry. You can now see:

  • The average temperature for that month (daily data isn’t available until 1772) as recorded by Gordon Manley of the Royal Meteorological Society. You can view the full dataset on the Met Office’s website.

  • Links to the relevant daily Journals for the House of Commons and House of Lords from British History Online. These will hopefully give some context to Pepys’ more political activities.

My thanks to Terry Foreman for finding both these sources of information that help bring Pepys’ world alive. If anyone can suggest anything else, do let me know.