CSI:Dixie has been awarded a Digital Extension Grant from the ACLS to fund "Big, Bad Data and the Birth of Death As We Know It: How Our Mortality Became Disciplined to Science, the State, and Actuarial Tables." The public health system of the early United States struggled not just with medical problems -- adopting a germ theory of disease, for instance -- but with logistical, statistical, and conceptual problems in learning how to aggregate, analyze, and visualize good data. Science, the state, and private industry fly relatively blind until they can "see at scale"; datafication turns out to be one of the least appreciated, and most important, planks in the bridge to modernity. A dramatic scaling up of a project funded by a Digital Innovation Fellowship from ACLS in 2013, "The Birth of Death As We Know It" collects and analyzes a variety of early public health records -- coroners’ inquests, mortality censuses, and death certificates—to help lay bare the process by which our modern public health system was born. Look for project launch in Spring 2019.