About This Project

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Defining a field as interdisciplinary and expansive as the digital humanities is certainly challenging, and it’s fair to say that debating what is digital humanities is just as significant in the field as the work that comes out of it. Yet, after examining many so-called digital humanities projects and reading the theory of many so-called digital humanists, it seems that the digital humanities is not really a difficult field to define at all. It’s the exploration of humanities subjects, and either doing research into those subjects through digital methodologies or problematizing those subjects through their relationship to digital technologies. That is probably not the only valid definition, but it is at least a workable one and an inclusive one. The humanities would here be defined here as “the study of how people process and document the human experience,” per The Stanford Humanities Center, and this umbrella includes the arts, philosophy, linguistics, religion, history, and more. This website constitutes a digital humanities project because the topics of research are about how humans, at a particular time and place, interpreted the world around them: the nature of certain folk cultures and customs, the creation and observance of calendrical time, the phenomenon of prejudice and scapegoating, the existence or belief in witchcraft.

To address these questions about early modern Scottish witch trials and folk beliefs, methods of digital data analysis were employed. The raw data of this project would be the actual archival documents recording the details of witch trials in Scotland from 1563 to 1736 - the justiciary records, court books, presbytery and kirk session minutes, and confessions. Taking the text of these manuscripts and quantifying them somehow was the project of Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, Joyce Miller, and Louise Yeoman at the University of Edinburgh. They are the original creators of "The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft Database," a project completed in 2003 that culled as much available information on accused Scottish witches of the 16th-18th centuries and translated that information into a public, searchable database. The database includes almost 4,000 individuals, both named and unnamed, and gives as much detail as is available on the characteristics of their purported crimes, the proceedings of their trials, and their punishments.

“The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft” is a perfect example of a digital humanities project, in that it takes qualitative accounts about historical and cultural events and quantifies that information as data in order to provide a different perspective for researchers and a new tool or methodology for answering humanities questions. What this project does, “A Witch's Calendar, 1563-1736,” is take a further step back from the original information. This project is asking what, if anything, can be learned about Scottish calendrical folk customs by looking at accusations of witchcraft associated with those holidays. However, the data for this project are not the primary sources themselves, but rather metadata compiled from and about those sources. The disadvantage here is that the metadata was created to answer as broad a range of questions as possible; it is not designed to answer very granular questions about just calendar customs or folk beliefs. This made it difficult to draw concrete conclusions from the data, and in some situations no amount of manipulation could force from the metadata anything clearly pertinent. However, the advantage of working with this metadata was that it allows for an interrogation of the authenticity of data itself. Even the primary source documents are a kind of unreliable metadata: they are transcriptions of events during which hearsay, false confessions, and outright lies were taken as fact. They are not authentic or truthful representations of real events. Then, researchers working on “The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft” took these accounts and further abstracted them into a datasheet where the details of testimonials about possibly fabricated events are represented in binary code. So with information, this abstracted from real events, is it even possible or advisable to use it for serious research?

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For “The Witches’ Calendar, 1563-1736,” only certain parts of the original “Survey of Scottish Witchcraft” database were used. The datasheets for “Calendar Custom,” “Accused,” and “Case” were relinked using Tableau Public, creating one sheet with all the cases attributed to specific calendar customs and their characteristics and notes. Some further editing was done to make the data more streamlined and usable for the purposes of this project. The original “Case” sheet listed 53 different possible characteristics of the accusations, and attributed them to the case as either “primary” or “secondary” characteristics. For this project, primary and secondary characteristics were consolidated into a single field marking any presence of the trait. Another notable edit was to remove any fields that were obviously just notes for the researchers and not notes on the actual cases themselves. When it came to mapping the cases, geotags were added by hand and frequently correspond to the nearest still-existing settlement in the instance of small villages that are no longer in existence. This is the state of the data as it is represented throughout this project, transmuted to the point where it could be argued to be only the smallest representation of any real truth about Scottish witchcraft or folk belief. And yet, it is still fascinating and evocative and hopefully useful in forming some kind of impression, however blurred, of what was happening in Scotland during this time period.