Seven ways to work the same record

Throwing Bones

Ask a question. See what gathers around it.

Throwing Bones is a search instrument within Witching. Begin with a person, place, or practice and cast it across the archive. The results reveal where your search intersects with other recorded details, and where apparently separate assertions gather around the same historical material.

It is especially useful when you already have a question but do not yet know the shape of its answer. Search narrowly, follow related material outward, and move from an individual assertion toward the people, places, sources, and circumstances surrounding it.

Reading Leaves

Begin without knowing what you are looking for.

Reading Leaves is Witching’s experimental pattern-reading instrument. Rather than beginning with a search term, it opens a bounded Reading drawn from the archive, allowing its assertions to gather according to the relationships encoded among them.

Some assertions gather strongly enough to form Formations, while others remain Unsettled. Recurrences that travel across otherwise different parts of the Reading may emerge as Currents. These arrangements do not claim historical certainty or imply that everything shown is directly connected. They offer a way to investigate what becomes perceptible when the same historical material is organized at several relational scales.

Then disturb it.

Read by Person, Place, Time, Magical Being, Source, or Pattern, and the assertions remain the same while the relationships holding them are reconsidered. Narrow the Reading with a filter, follow an assertion back to its source, or read around something you discover. Use Disturb to ask whether these same assertions can sustain another defensible pattern.

Reading Leaves is designed for the question that comes before the search box: What is here that I have not thought to ask about yet?

Mapping Witches

Put the archive back on the ground.

Mapping Witches places events and assertions from Witching in their historical geography, allowing the record to be read through counties, towns, and local concentrations.

Move between individual places and larger spatial patterns to see where accusations gathered, where particular practices or experiences recur, and where apparently similar phenomena appear far apart.

Geography is more than a backdrop to these histories. Place becomes a historical question in its own right, making local patterns, concentrations, absences, and unexpected proximities visible.

Witch Stats

Compare accusation activity across place and time.

Witch Stats concentrates on the temporal shape of recorded activity in the counties most strongly represented in Witching. It allows patterns that appear similar in aggregate to be compared place by place and period by period.

Use it to investigate whether activity rises together across regions, whether one county follows a markedly different chronology, or whether an apparent national pattern emerges from a small number of concentrated local histories.

Where Mapping Witches asks where, Witch Stats is particularly good at asking when, where — and compared with what?

Brimstone

Count what the archive contains — and watch it change.

Brimstone brings quantity and chronology to the foreground in Witching, gathering counts, dates, categories, and outcomes so that patterns difficult to judge from individual accounts can be examined across the corpus.

Use it to ask how often something appears, when activity rises or falls, how categories compare, and how recorded outcomes change over time.

The individual histories remain beneath the numbers. Brimstone offers another scale at which to encounter them, where frequency, distribution, and change become the object of investigation.

Witching Editions

Read the sources whole.

The Editions return to the primary texts from which much of Witching’s structured historical material emerges. They present full transcriptions of witchcraft pamphlets and accounts, allowing a source to be read continuously rather than encountered only through individual searchable assertions.

Here the order matters, as do repetition, pacing, narrative structure, contradiction, and the accumulation of detail across a text. These are features that necessarily change when a document is divided into data.

The Editions sit at the other end of Witching’s exploratory tools. After searching, mapping, counting, or following patterns through the archive, you can return to the document itself and read the historical account on its own terms.

Full Text

Go back to the words themselves.

Full Text searches the language of Witching’s primary sources directly. Look for a name, phrase, object, symptom, action, or unusual turn of speech, and follow it back to the text in which it appears.

The structured archive separates the historical accounts of early modern English witches into searchable assertions and relationships. Full Text returns those details to their textual setting: the sentences, pages, and printed narratives through which witchcraft was described and circulated.

It is especially useful for questions that depend on language rather than classification: how something was said, which words travelled together, whether a phrase recurs, or where the vocabulary of an accusation changes.