An important aspect of creating digital knowledge representations around domains like ealry English Ephemera is the flexibility with which other digital assets can be integrated to discover connections that remain otherwise hidden. For example, through the use of GIS data overlay techniques, known geographic locations of witchcraft related events could be easily compared with data sets from other fields such as economic information or movements of ethnic groups. In the case of document analysis, document collections from other domains can be co-analyzed across time, information, and theme to suggest to researchers hitherto unknown relationships. Such analytic capabilities are far superior to those employed prior to digital information and techniques. These technologies not only allow researchers to save labor, easily share data and analytic constructs, and perform more comprehensive analyses, but they also empower researchers to examine research assets with increased novelty and intensity. Our preliminary work with mapping published witchcraft tracts illustrates an unexpected difference between the locations where witchcraft trials actually happened and where published tracts suggested there were peaks in witch-hunting (Figure 2). The witches' information was placed within a relational database, which contained information including biographical, temporal data, and geospatial data. Each witch was mapped to a given town and county within England, based on the GIS data supplied to us by the UK data Archive. This project will move beyond the kind of defining, tracing, searching, and complying which James IV, Joseph Glanville, and Matthew Hopkins did to find witches. Rather, by combining an interpretive schema with the GIS, we hope to give voice, to research subjects; to embody, rather than flatten them out (McLafferty 39-40), providing new, sympathetic, and critical analyses of the role of witchcraft in Early Modern England. Moreover, with the implementation of datamining and GIS, we believe that this study will build a framework for the visualization of Early English texts which will help change the way scholars conduct early modern textual analysis.

We have begun working with Richard Raiswell (UPEI) and Michal Ondrejcek (NSCA) on historic mapping. Please see the first working prototype here

England and Wales January 1, 1644. From "The Public Schools Historical Atlas" by Charles Colbeck, 1905. Digitized and held in the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas at Austin.

Mapping done by Mark Bieber. See full size image

Early Mapping trials with GIS.