Mapping
The witch map prototype is now live, but should be used with caution. It is an unedited work-in-progress. An important aspect of creating digital knowledge representations around domains like early English witchcraft ephemera is the flexibility with which other digital assets can be integrated to discover connections that remain otherwise hidden. For example, through the use of GIS data overlay techniques, known geographic locations of witchcraft related events could be easily compared with data sets from other fields such as economic information or movements of ethnic groups. In the case of document analysis, document collections from other domains can be co-analyzed across time, information, and theme to suggest to researchers hitherto unknown relationships. Such analytic capabilities are far superior to those employed prior to digital information and techniques. These technologies not only allow researchers to save labor, easily share data and analytic constructs, and perform more comprehensive analyses, but they also empower researchers to examine research assets with increased novelty and intensity. Our preliminary work with mapping published witchcraft tracts illustrates an unexpected difference between the locations where witchcraft trials actually happened and where published tracts suggested there were peaks in witch-hunting (Figure 2).
The WEME Witch Map moves beyond the defining, tracing, searching, and complying which James IV, Joseph Glanville, and Matthew Hopkins did to find witches. It give voices to research subjects by providing new, sympathetic, and critical analyses of the role of witchcraft in Early Modern England. To achieve this, Uszkalo has placed the witches' information within a relational database, which contains information including biographical, temporal data, and geospatial data. Each witch is mapped to a given parish and county within England. Uszkalo argues that the historic maps visually and metaphorically link the histories of map-making to the histories of witch-finding. See below some of our early trials.
Figure 1: Historic map of England overlaid on Google Earth. |
Figure 2: Detail of East Essex done in ARCGIS illustrating the location of a number of published witchcraft case |