Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive

3. PROJECT NARRATIVE

Transformation Enhancing and Extending of the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive

SIGNIFICANCE

“To change scholarship, we need scholarship,” to quote historian Edward Ayers in a report on digital scholarship.[1] By this statement Ayers means thatThat is to say, scholars who have produced digital resources in the humanities now need to move forwardtake the initiative and develop those tools and resources to enable research that will create opportunities, excitement, and credibility in their scholarly fields. In the narrative presented below, I propose to transform, expand, and fully document the current Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project( This development of the Archive will take a collection of unintegrated and incomplete digital source material that is currently unintegrated and incomplete, and transform it from the ground up into a historical research environment that will advance significantly advance the study of the historically complex and culturally important Salem witch trials episode.

It has recently been estimated that tThe pace of Salem research has has increased from roughly one important study every three years in the 1980s to about one per year in the 1990s. While this tempo will probably not continue, the scholarly attention given to the publication of Mary Beth Norton’s masterful work In the Devil’s Snare in 2002 indicates that Salem’s appeal to scholars remains strong. TIndeed, the William and Mary Quarterlyhas also has devoted most of its July, 2008 issue to a research forum titled “Salem Repossessed.” The forum presents a discussion of recently published work, including articles by Professors Benjamin Ray and Bernard Rosenthal, the principal researchers of the NEH- supportedSalem Witch Trials Documentary Archive Transcription Project. This recenteir work involved the first scholarly transcription of the Salem court records, chronological arrangement of the court records, comparativee analysis of the court records, identification of the numerous authors of the court records, and detailed analysis of the geography of the Salem episode using GIS maps. This —all taskstype of research that would have been considerably more complicated, less accurate, and in some respects impossible without the digital resources of the Salem Archive. The project proposed here would develop the Salem Archive’s range of primary source materials, search tools, documentation, and information structure far beyond its present capacity.

Improved search tools and finding aids that can now be built into the Salem Archive will create a research laboratory in which scholars can pose new questions to the sourcesquestions that would take days, or weeks, to explore by conventional archival means. Indeed, this new environment will stimulate more ambitious inquiries given its comprehensiveness both about the Salem episode itself and its later literary expression. The ultimate empowerment for the individual scholar (and for the general public) is the ability to conduct an integrated word-search though thousands of pages of primary source materials, information on GIS maps, and illustrative materials to discover new information and develop new interpretations.

At the most basic level of archival research, for example, it has been previouslyhas beenis otherwise impossible for any single scholar to view the manuscripts of the original court records, since they are dispersed across five major archives in Massachusetts and several institutions elsewhere. As part of the an NEH grant, the Salem Archive digitized microfilm images of these records, although unfortunately roughly forty percent later turned outproved to be of poor quality. ULater, under a separate grants, approximately seventy-five percent of all the original records were digitized. These new high- resolution images can now be linked to the web pages of a recently revised and corrected version of the Salem Archive’s edition of The Salem Witchcraft Papers, originally edited by Paul Boyer and Steven Nissenbaum.

The project proposed here will develop the Salem Archive’s range of primary source materials, search tools, documentation, and information structure far beyond its present capacity. Improved search tools and finding aids will create a research laboratory in which scholars can pose new questions to the sourcesquestions that would take days or weeks to explore by conventional archival means. Indeed, this new environment will stimulate more ambitious inquiries, by providing comprehensive resources about the Salem episode itself and its later literary expressions. A The criticalultimate toolempowerment which this reconstruction of the Archive wfor the individual scholar (and for the general public) ill provide is the ability to conduct an integrated word-level search though thousands of pages of primary source materials, information on GIS maps, and illustrative materials to discover new information and develop new interpretations.

The Salem witchcraft episode is one of the most widely recognized events of the American colonial period among the general public, and it is also a universal feature of national K-12 SOLs. This is due to the continued popularity of the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Arthur Miller in the public school curricula and to the near universal coverage by American history textbooks. During National History Week, middle school students and their teachers use the Salem Archive’s documents to write reports and essays about what they have learned. Recently, a third-grade teacher in a California told me that her students wrote a new play about Sarah Good by using the Salem Archive’s name-search tool to look for Good in all the court records. But with fully integrated searching, a high school or middle school student, for example, will be able to enter the term “Negro” or “Indian” and retrieve not only the references to African and Indian slaves in the court records—there are several—but also all references in the Archive’s online edition of the massive Records of Essex County Court Records (9 Vols.), via their comprehensive indices, to get a fuller picture of African and Indian slavery in the period 1637-87, as well as other primary sources, such as Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World (1693) in digital form.

Our goal is to Ttransformation of the Salem Archive will change it from being a set of discrete, incomplete, and unconnected set of documents, maps, and images that only advanced scholarsa few Salem specialistshave been able tocan fully exploit, to a maximallyn integrated collection with single- and multiple-point access to all its materials in multiple formats (e.g., texts, manuscript images, images of artistic representations, GIS maps, and images of buildings and cultural objects) for a wider range of scholars and students. WeThe project will also establish an optimal database and online search system, in order to enable relational use of all its primary sources and, several standard historical works, together with information displayed by means of GIS maps and artistic representations. Additional attributes of this project are itsThe resulting archive will have sustainable access tools and products that are interoperable interoperability foramong scholars, teachers, and students and the long-term sustainability of its access tools and products.

More specifically, this will mean: (1) restructuring the Salem Archive around ananalytic descriptive database and XML information structure; (2) providing complete documentation for the Archive’s primary sources; (3) implementing a comprehensive chronology for the Archive; (4) incorporating new facsimile images of the original court records as well as hundreds of pages of recently digitized (and XML- tagged) primary sources in both manuscript and transcribed form. Restructuring the Archive in this wayThis work will give scholars unprecedented command over the source documents and enable both specialist and generalist researchers to tackle old questions in new ways, take up new topics of research, and utilize the Salem Archive in their classrooms as a teaching environment.

The Salem witchcraft episode is one of the most widely recognized events of the American colonial period among the general public, and it is also a universal feature of national K-12 SOLs. This is due to the continued popularity of the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Arthur Miller in the public school curricula and to the near universal coverage in American history textbooks During National History Week, middle school students and their teachers in a variety of school districts use the Archive’s documents to write reports and essays about what they have learned. Recently, a third grade teacher in a California told me that her students a new play about Sarah Good by using the Archive’s name-search tool to find Good’s role in all the court records. With fully integrated searching, a high school or middle school student, for example, will be able to enter the term “Negro” or “Indian” and retrieve not only the references to African and Indian slaves in the court records—there are several—but also all references in the Archive’s online edition of the massive Records of Essex County Court Records (9 Vols.), via their comprehensive indices, to get a fuller picture of African and Indian slavery in the period 1637-87, as well as other primary sources, such as Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World (1693) in digital form.

Access to full- color images of the original court records will also enable students and the general public to get the feel of the legal and dramatic features of the Salem episode by reading facsimiles of the original manuscripts. For example, I assign a short transcription exercise in my class on the Salem witch trials. This simple exercise, which requires extremely close and patient reading of the 17thcentury handwriting, enables brings the drama and tactics of the Salem courtroom to come alive in the students’ imagination and sets a foundation for the study of related primary sources for the rest of the semester. Professor Mary Beth Norton of Cornell University has used the manuscript images to “both to teach the students how to read 17thcentury handwriting and to show them the importance of comparing the sometimes flawed published transcriptions with original documents.”

Norton’s students have also used the Salem Archive’sresources to write classroom research papers. Some of their essays resulted in “truly original contributions” later presented by the students at an academic conference.[2] Students in this and subsequence classes have written outstanding papers that are now posted in the “Notable People” section of the Salem Archive, together with those written by my students.[3] One of the proposed enhancements of the Archive will enable students to post their own work directly into the Archive’s database (in a monitored way), a feature that will encourage more classrooms to engage in the Archive. [Ben: we need to discuss this feature, I think (DP)]

HISTORY, SCOPE AND DURATION

History

The Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project( began in 1999, when Project Director Benjamin Ray was awarded a fellowship at the University of Virginia’s renowned Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), to develop a web-based thematic research archive. Later Professor Ray, in conjunction with Professor Bernard Rosenthal, later received an NEH Collaborative Research Grant (# RZ-20610-00) in 2000 to provide scholars, students, and the general public with the full range of primary sources in digital form, including the current transcriptions of the witchcraft court records, The Salem Witchcraft Papers (published in 1972), in addition to a new scholarly edition of all the extant court records. The Salem Archive also provided digital images of microfilm copies of the original manuscripts and created digital texts of contemporary 17th and early 18th century accounts, interactive web-based maps, selections of popular 19th century literature, and selected images and biographical profiles. The digital aArchive continues to serve as the basis for several NEH EdSitement 9-12 lesson plans.

To assist the Transcription Project the Salem Archive digitized five microfilm reels of the court records and made digital scans of the manuscripts at the Boston Public Library, Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Maine Historical Society that had never been microfilmed, under a separate grant from the American Academy of Religion. To solve the problem of poor quality microfilm images, a summer grant made it possible to digitize additional manuscripts at the Massachusetts Archives and the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum for the editors of the print edition from 2003-06. This digitization project occurred only after the completion of the NEH grant. These images were of immense assistance to the editors of the new transcriptions whose work continued after the NEH grant but were created too late to be incorporated into the Archive and remain unavailable. With proper archival documentation in the rebuilt Archive, these manuscript images can now be probably integrated into the master database.

The NEH funded project was completed in 2003 with the following outcomes and results:

Electronic text of The Salem Witchcraft Papers (published 1974), fully indexed and searchable.

Digitization of four reels of microfilm images of the Salem witch trials court records from five different archives and digital scanning of the small collections in the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston Public Library, and the Maine historical Society.

XML tagging of 1,284 personal names in the court records (including all variations of spelling), to retrieve every court document according to the names recorded in them.

Page images of original 17th and early 18th century published accounts of the Salem witch trials by I. Mather, C. Mather, R. Calef, J. Hale, and S. Willard.

Creation of digital text of Narratives of the Witchcraft Trials 1648-1706, by George Lincoln Burr, 1914, containing relevant abridgments of contemporary works by I. Mather, C. Mather, D. Lawson, R. Calef, and J. Hale, XML- encoded.

Discovery of approximately fifty previously unidentified manuscripts of court records and the location of dozens of other previously published transcriptions for which manuscripts no longer exist, to be incorporated in the new edition.

Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, 1637-1687, Vols. 1-9 (1911-75): page imaged, with indices XML- encoded.

Creation of three interactive maps of 17th century Salem and Massachusetts Bay Colony, to permit study of the geographic scope and chronological sequence of the trials across Salem Village and eastern Massachusetts and containing a full household census of Salem Village and Andover for 1692.

Creation of electronic texts of nine volumes of 19th century literature (plays, short stories, and poetry) related to the witch trials, by Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier, and Holmes, in addition to miscellaneous poems by New England authors.
Completed first-round transcriptions of the court records. (This work continued until 2007 after the end of the NEH grant together with ongoing research on the legal chronology of the witch trials.)

Creation of electronic texts of nine volumes of 19th century literature (plays, short stories, and poetry) related to the witch trials, by Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier, and Holmes, in addition to miscellaneous poems by New England authors.

Completed first-round transcriptions of the court records. (This work continued until 2007 after the end of the NEH grant together with ongoing research on the legal chronology of the witch trials. )

With more than 8,000 digitized pages of primary and secondary source material,the Salem Archive is the largest online thematic archive of source material for 17th century Massachusetts currently available.

In a published review of the Salem Archive in the Journal of American History, historian Mary Beth Norton wrote that she made use of the Archive’s resources and tools while researching her book, In the Devil’s Snare(2002) and indicated that the word search capability and the images of the original documents were of “tremendous assistance.”

Digitization, database, and research work completed after the initial NEH grant but not subsequently integrated into the Archive

The transcription component of the same NEH Collaborative Research Grant, supervised by Professor Bernard Rosenthal, was the creation of a new scholarly edition of the court records titled The Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. Work on this edition continued after the end of the NEH Collaborative grant and is now in the final stage of production and scheduled for publication by the Cambridge University Press in early 2009. To assist the transcription work, the Salem Archive digitized five microfilm reels of the court records and made digital scans of manuscripts at the Boston Public Library, Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Maine Historical Society that had never been microfilmed, under a separate grant from the American Academy of Religion. To solve the problem of poor quality microfilm images, volunteer effort in 2004 and aa UVA summer grant in 2007 made it possible to digitize additional manuscripts at the Phillips Library and Massachusetts Archivess and the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum for the editors of the print edition. from 2003-06. This digitization project occurred after the completion of the NEH grant in 2003. These images were of immense assistance to the editors of the new transcriptionns, whose work continued after the NEH grant, but were created too late to be incorporated into the Salem Archive and remain unavailable. With proper archival documentation, these manuscript images can most likely now be integrated into the master database.