In the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project established by the University of Virginia, the maps are only a small part of the database. That being said, the maps are perhaps the most effective pedagogical tool within the larger framework. The diaries, letters, and historical accounts documented by the project are highly useful and informative, but nothing allows users to enter the ‘memory space’ of the Witch Trials the same way the maps do. In the Township Accusation Maps, individual households light up in red at varying intervals through the use of a time-lapse tool (more on that later) to signify when they were under scrutiny by the community. Generally speaking, the project does a good job of creating the kind of multi-dimensional “spatial turn” experience that Bodenhammer feels is so integral to GIS in the humanities and issues of identity on the whole (Bodenhammer, 99).
The blame is centered around Salem, but spreads all the way up north, too!
The layering tools on all the Salem maps work actively towards the type of “deep mapping” that Bodenhammer explains. The geographic aspects of the different maps are accompanied by several different types of information such as number of accusations per town across 1692, names of the accused, and more. While there is little incorporation of other media like photos, portraits, testimony or oral history, it’s easy to see how those materials could factor in if the project were developed more. It does inspire the user to look more closely at the particular families, though that means navigating away from the map. It would have been a great addition if the developers had considered what Cooper & Gregory did, a “combination of two techniques: semantic tagging and collocation” (Cooper & Gregory, 18). If clicking on a house had brought up court records or information from the archives about that family, the project would feel more integrated and complete.
Drawing on some of the other techniques identified by Cooper & Gregory in their Mapping the Lakes enquiry, geographic features are present on the Trial maps, and evidence displaying the scope and range of certain villages’ accusational activity is prevalent. There is a lot of archival material on these trials, the database makes sure the users are aware of that, but the maps fall just short of capitalising on that wealth of knowledge. The maps are central to creating the kind of community awareness achieved by the work we read about in Taiwan and Indiana, but I saw a lot of potential for a more cross-medial experience in the Salem project than the one I had. Even the maps of the townships from the year of the trials in question were set as separate documents without GIS capabilities: the interactive maps were all quite illustrated-looking, though it must be noted that there were a variety of styles. The most interesting tool was the time-lapse bar, which manipulated the maps to show where, geographically, focus was placed by the trials throughout the year 1692. It becomes very easy to discover the nature of the trials this way, as we see how quickly and expansively blame and accusations spread during the scare, and the site guides you toward the time-lapse so it’s impossible to miss.
