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The Patowmac Guardian, And Berkeley Advertiser Domestic News October 28, 1793
Martinsburg, Berkeley, West Virginia
What is this article about?
Letter from Philadelphia reports the malignant fever is abating due to colder weather; over 2000 funerals in eight weeks, half the inhabitants fled.
Quality green show the numbers
Measured from the scan
— how cleanly the OCR engine read the characters
- Mean ink quality
- 99.0% The length-weighted average confidence across the OCR lines — the mean of exactly the per-line scores whose tails the two figures below report. Typical is 99%.
- Illegible ink
- 0.0% Text sitting in OCR-detected lines that scored below 80% confidence — very shaky reads. Weighted by line length, so one long bad line counts for more than a short one.
- Uncertain ink
- 0.0% Text in lines that scored 80–90% — somewhat shaky reads.
- Matches source
- 96.17% How closely the served text matches the raw OCR of the same boxes, letter by letter, after collapsing spacing and case. This measures agreement, not correctness: the OCR is often wrong and the extractor corrects it, so 100% does not mean perfect, and a low figure usually means poor scan text was rewritten rather than that text was lost (length vs source shows loss).
- Length vs source
- 98.84% Below 100% means text was dropped from the OCR; above means text was added to make it read.
Assembled by the extraction model
— whether the stitched-together text holds up; catches layout and segmentation errors, which the scores above cannot see
- Transcription confidence
- 94.0% (typical 96%) How cleanly the extractor could assemble what it was given. Low here with clean ink scores points at layout analysis — the characters were read correctly but grouped or ordered wrongly.
- Comprehension
- 90.0% Whether the piece reads coherently start to finish. Can stay high while transcription confidence drops, when only part of the component is affected.
Clipping
Full Text
Extract of a letter from Philadelphia, dated October 17.
"I may at length venture to assert that the malignant Fever does not rage so violently as it did: the weather has, for three or four days past, grown rather cold, with high winds and frosts at night; rain, however, we have not had (except in drizzles,) for eight weeks past, by which not only the city but the country also has suffered much.
I can inform you, from good authority, that the number of funerals, during the last eight weeks, amount to upwards of 2000; more than half the inhabitants have fled the city, so that this desolation has been confined to about 20,000 inhabitants; therefore the fatality has been full as great, in proportion, as that of the plague in London, in the time of Sydenham."
"I may at length venture to assert that the malignant Fever does not rage so violently as it did: the weather has, for three or four days past, grown rather cold, with high winds and frosts at night; rain, however, we have not had (except in drizzles,) for eight weeks past, by which not only the city but the country also has suffered much.
I can inform you, from good authority, that the number of funerals, during the last eight weeks, amount to upwards of 2000; more than half the inhabitants have fled the city, so that this desolation has been confined to about 20,000 inhabitants; therefore the fatality has been full as great, in proportion, as that of the plague in London, in the time of Sydenham."
What sub-type of article is it?
Disease Or Epidemic
Death Or Funeral
What keywords are associated?
Yellow Fever
Philadelphia
Epidemic
Funerals
Where did it happen?
Philadelphia
Domestic News Details
Primary Location
Philadelphia
Event Date
October 17
Outcome
over 2000 funerals in eight weeks; half the inhabitants fled.