Investigations into including witchcraft, the wondrous, the prophetic, and the paranormal, and their effect on the cultural, literary, and legal landscapes, continue to fascinate and trouble scholars. The concurrent availability of open source computational and visualization tools has meant scholars can apply multiple techniques to their data sets to produce increasingly complex and meaningful results. The Early English Paranormal and Pop-cultural Project (eeppp!) will visualize, map, read, and mine the rich corpus of populous printed materials concerned with monstrophy and the study of the miraculous, and the elisions between the spiritual, the sensational, and the scandalous in early modern England. EEPPP will deliver a web-accessible platform for use by a wide breath of scholars inside and outside the academy, across different disciplines, with diverse research questions related to the paranormal and pop-cultural.
    This project is the second phase of the Witches in Early Modern England Project (WEME) and is made possible through the large scale digitization of texts Early English Books Online-Text Creation Project (EEBO-TCP) and Cornell University Library Witchcraft collection. Approximately four hundred texts have been made available by these projects allowing us to substantially expand our corpus to compute and visualize the intersections between related phenomena like bewitchment, possession, and hysteria. We have already integrated the University of Exeter’s shape file maps of early English parishes, into the University of Illinois’ multidimensional GIS system to facilitate the spatial positioning of texts, their contents, and relational networks which connect them. University of Alberta’s JiTR creates and stores catalogues and provide a middleware platform to launch tools. McMaster University's Voyeur project links feature lists, n-grams, and word clouds to produce multi-pane view of datamining results. We are now poised to connect and integrate open source dataflows allowing integrated datamining and visualizations.
    This culmination of tools, data, and researchers means we can refine existing data extraction, data display. The steep learning curve needed to work with many digital research tools often create barriers to their adoption by our user communities and our colleagues. As such EEPPP resources will be dedicated to information architectures which allow researchers to easily frame algorithmically answerable research questions, move through digital discovery workflows, and interpret related results. This can be accomplished in part by pushing results from one tool to the next (i.e. results the text clusters identified by the Mandala tool, will be moved to the mapping software) and allowing multi-pane interpretation akin to reading across a page, rather than placing pieces into a puzzle. We can generate a high end interface and visualizations which will be refined though iterative user testing and consultation by our growing community and which will work together to answer the questions our affiliated researchers want to ask.
    These tools are being brought together by an established partnership of multidisciplinary scholars, programmers, and designers who have been involved in creating the infrastructural framework, research and visualization techniques, and approaches to this content material and content for related projects. EEPPP will create an easy to use and expandable platform which will allow researchers inside and outside of the academy to perceive the thematic similarities between and spatial and temporal overlap between different paranormal and pop-cultural texts

(eeppp!) is currently in the process of applying for funding. Please contact us if you would like to become involved as a donor or part of the (eeppp!) team.