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The darkness that drives an individual to commit murder has long been a mystery to all humanity. It is a taboo and curiosity drives audiences to the unknown. Crime is often reported in news sources for safety and to pique the interest of readers.

Working on the deliverables over the course of the semester, the question that kept popping in my head was “Why Egypt?” So, naturally, my first instinct when it came to my serial question was finding a way to connect it to the United States.

For my analysis project I decided to research weddings and their patterns and trends throughout the Egyptian Gazette. I ran many different XPath queries and got many different results, which I found to be very interesting.

Microhistory allows you to look at a small part of history and taking the information you find and applying it to a larger scale. With the Egyptian Gazette I was able to do just that.

The XPath query targeting the Tarif d’Exportation table, //div[@xml:id="deg-el-tdex01"] only came back with 11 items–should have returned about 20. The table comes out once a month, and there is about a year and a half of the newspaper encoded.

My serial question for the analysis project deals with the land battles reported in the Egyptian Gazette. Probably most people, even in the early 1900’s, could predict that Japan wouldn’t have any trouble with the Russian Navy.

I have decided to write my analysis projected on the bubonic plague, but more specifically, how hospitals were affected over the span of year (1905-1906). This was during the third major outbreak that occurred in Asia (more info here).

Throughout the Egyptian Gazette there are many different types of pages that convey different information to the reader in the early twentieth century. One page, the “Vade Mecum for the Homeward Bound,”" is particularly interesting and gives travel recommendations for people leaving Alexandria, Egypt to travel all over the world.

As an undergraduate studying actuarial science, I will be spending ample time learning about insurance and risk management in the future, from practicing financial mathematics to understanding sound business procedure.

For my Analysis Project I have decided to look at the Sports happening in the editions of the Egyptian Gazette 1905-1906 and determine what the most popular season for Sports was and how the time of the year affected which sports were being reported on or not.