Patterns emerge in witch texts; pastiche produced by bleeding nipples, furry familiars, and bits of rope make up our composite understandings of what it means to be a witch. Produced from concepts and images, we layer like we would layer in photoshop. Numerous fragments are set over semi-transparent understandings of witchcraft until we have something human and material, which is witch and witchcraft, text and corpus. The body of the witch, the hidden parts, the malefic parts, is exposed in print publications which clearly articulated what made a witch. Rather than a cultural trickle down, where learned authors wrote to educate hoi polli about witchcraft, this textual creation of witches moved like the water table, ideas evaporating up and raining down: the production of published and unpublished print matter shows these patterns. These texts echo with the white noise of interrogators pushing women towards conviction by asking the questions that would condemn them, such as the shape and name of their familiars, things only a witch would supposedly know. The echoes themselves evolve, as the understanding of early English witchcraft took on European tropes that sexualized witches and made pamphlets even more sensational and, in all likelihood, even easier to sell. Our pop-cultural understanding of witchcraft evolved in part from early modern English pop-cultural understanding of witchcraft, producing patterns that stretched and doubled back upon themselves, until they wove a long enough rope with which they could hang a woman.
Visualizations can help us connect patterns in these texts. Our mapping tool will help us see the patterns which emerge over time, here, we can image other ways of interfacing with the texts.
Conceived of by Uszkalo as a way to visualize the pattens in witchcraft texts, Throwing Bones represents a theoretical interface for classification. Throwing Bones will allow the user to select a number of texts then search for results in the clusters. An example might be to look at witch's familiars and see what patterns emerge when narratives that include them are shown across time or located by geography. The interface design for Throwing Bones is based on a deck of cards metaphor, where the face cards are replaced with short lexia, then dynamically reorganized and grouped by the user. Each card represents an element of the text, such as a witch, familiar, or which has been tagged and can be retrieved as an object. In "throwing bones," users can look for specific elements in a text collection.
The WEME browser allows user moves from the other panes into the sandbox, which contains the library and the analytical routines, to run feature lists, keyword searches, word clouds, and the Mandala browser visualizations. Data is saved in the sandbox and presented in thumbnails which can be expanded; organized, and searches re-run and redisplayed across panes 1, 2, and 3. The general display is similar to the other three panes in that all of the research appears on one page in separate expandable boxes.
