Main URL

http://witching.org/

Description

Witches in Early Modern England provides a selection of witchcraft narratives from Early Modern England (1540-1700) which have been tagged to facilitate searching and mapping in a number of ways (authors, locations, events, people, preternaturals). The website's open-ended platform encourages users to visualise texts and discern patterns in different ways, for example through time lines and maps.

About three thousand individual 'nano-histories' are included, derived from printed texts about witches, medical manuals, and legal archives.

Strengths and weaknesses

The site provides access to a powerful collection of narratives which were generated during the witch prosecutions of sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. But it includes only a selection of documents and it is not clear how these documents have been selected. Fifteen texts are listed on the WEME Editions page. Texts have been broken up into fragments; if you wish to read entire texts, you should consult them on other websites, such as Early English Books Online.

Technical Methods

The text has been broken up into segments which have been tagged to indicate particular types of information. The method of transcription is unknown.

About the project

The project team, led by Kirsten C. Uszkalo, University of Alberta and Athabasca University (Edmonton, Canada) included both undergraduate and postgraduate research assistants. The project was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada and the IBM Software Group.

Contact

http: //witching.org/