Recently we have been playing with Voyant in class and so far I enjoy it. I’m worried about my project though as I am not sure that it will reveal much about the text that I am using. I want to input all of the testimonies against Bridget Bishop as recorded during the Salem Witch Trials to see if there is anything in the language that reveals how women are represented in legal documents throughout the colonial period in New England. Hopefully it will show me something interesting- even if it’s just a really neat word cloud I can share on this blog later on.
Anyway, I want to talk about some of my favorite Digital Humanities projects and why I love them so much! The first one actually has to do with my voyant topic: it is the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project. Hosted by the University of Virginia, it offers access to all court records, letters, record books, sermons, and diaries that were recorded during the time period of the trials. They also offer access to maps that shows where the lines are drawn between counties, a very significant point of query when researching the trials. If it wasn’t for this archive, the only access to Salem Witch Trials records would be through a typical, codex book (which is not very convenient when you just want to look at one transcript) or through the Massachusetts Historical Society (which not all people have access to at all times). The project doesn’t have a fancy structure or display, but user interaction is simple and the assets are indispensable for early American scholars like myself. Overall, I appreciate its simplicity and effectiveness- there is nothing better than a super useful, non-overwhelming DH project.
Another one of my favorite DH projects is called Mapping the Republic of Letters hosted by Stanford University. The structure of this project is much more intricate and interactive than the Salem DH project. MRL provides several case studies on different men of the times, including Franklin and Locke, that analyzes their correspondence through letters. Some of the questions they pose, and provide answers to, for example, include “Who were Franklin’s top correspondents by volume of correspondence?” A graph, organized between the years 1756 and 1763, than visualizes where and how many letters were sent to Franklin between these years. The user interaction is fairly straight forward and the project offers links to publications and a blog.