Joseph Priestley · 1765
A digital edition of Priestley’s chart, in progress. This first set of tools takes a specimen of its classical lives — the figures Priestley placed between roughly 550 BC and AD 14 — and reads them from both the engraving and the printed index it was built from.
The chart
The engraving, live open →Priestley’s 1765 plate, made interactive. Roll over any of the classical lives wired so far to read its record — the verbatim index reading, profession, lifespan, region, and a short biography.
Redrawn from the index open →The specimen redrawn line by line from Priestley’s own printed index, in the idiom of the original engraving.
Engraving vs. index
Triptych open →The engraved lives in black, the lives implied by the index in red, and the two laid one over the other.
Comparison views open →Three analytic readings of where the two sources diverge — by figure, by residual, and by category of life.
Bland–Altman open →How closely the engraving’s lines agree with the index’s dates — birth end, death end, and lifespan, with the outliers named.