provided with a template in Excel to help them keep track of this information and remind them of what information they needed to record. In later class discussions, students identified even more categories beyond those provided on the Excel template that could help historians ask questions beyond the Salem trials in a study of general colonial life in New England. Overall, 30 students were able to record the information for nearly 600 different actors (nodes) and over 1,900 relationships (edges) between those actors.9
After merging students’ data into one master Excel file, we were ready to create a sociogram of the recorded connections and attributes of individual actors. We used Palladio—a free online visualization tool in active development by Stanford University.10 Like Annotation Studio, Palladio runs on all internet browsers and is, therefore, platform-independent. The website offers helpful tutorials for those wishing to learn the program, which is fairly intuitive compared to other social network analysis programs. For example, other programs require a separate file for nodes and one for edges; in Palladio, the master data set need only be saved as a single .csv file and then dragged and dropped into the program’s data window. My goal was not to make students experts at Palladio in a few weeks’ time but to familiarize them enough with the program’s filter functions so they could manipulate the visual map we had created and make some preliminary observations. (See fig. 1.2.)
Figure 1.2. A complete sociogram of individuals involved with the Salem witch trials, using Palladio.
FINAL ASSESSMENT
As the fourth and final assessment, students composed a longer (five to six pages) paper. This paper asked students to blend traditional qualitative sources (i.e., the Salem court documents) with analysis of their quantitative data. Like all good history papers, the research essay began with curiosity and a question. Once students had annotated trial documents and mined a substantial amount of data from those sources, they could begin to ask questions of their primary materials through social network analysis. Some options included but were not limited to: Who was most central or most important to the Salem witch trials? What was the role of gender and/or age or residency in determining the accusers, accused, and witnesses for and against? If they continued with the individual they identified for the preliminary paper, what was their importance/level of centrality in the witch trials? They could also challenge or confirm previous Salem scholarship (i.e., theses proposed by historians John Demos or Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum). Students continued to refine their working theses, revising as necessary based on additional findings from court documents in the Salem Witchcraft Papers and observations from social network analysis.
By now, in this process, students will have had more experience bringing qualitative sources, like court documents, into a persuasive essay to support a thesis. A separate class period where they received instruction and then practiced interpreting and writing about general quantitative sources (tables, charts, graphs, etc.) proved useful. Similar to the annotation activity at the front end of the assignment, this extra practice familiarized students with the kinds of skills they were expected to command in their longer research paper.
The skills employed in this multicomponent assignment are certainly not singular to the Salem witch trials. Annotation of challenging documents provides students with the tools and the confidence to interpret a variety of primary sources. Similarly, social network analysis has been used in disciplines other than history, for instance, to show connections between characters in books, television series, or movies. The creation of a visual map or graph of connections and relationships among historical figures could easily be translated to a variety of historical events or moments and be made all the more rewarding when it is the students themselves who are working together as a class to mine the data and create the final visualization.
NOTES
1. Social network analysis utilizes sociograms—a graph or picture of a network’s relations. A map that shows an airline’s flights and the airports it connects to is an example of a sociogram.
2. Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World: Being an Account of the Tryals of Several Witches Lately Executed in New-England and of Several Remarkable Curiosities Therein Occurring (London: John Dunton, 1693).
3. For example, Chadwick Hansen, Witchcraft at Salem (New York: Signet, 1969); Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954); Charles W. Upham, Salem Witchcraft: With an Account of Salem Village and a History of Opinions on Witchcraft and Kindred Subjects, 2 vols. (Boston, 1867).
4. See Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975); John Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); Richard Godbeer, Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987); Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare (New York: Vintage Books, 2002).
5. For a well-respected and more recent work, see Emerson W. Baker’s A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Witch Trials and the American Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
6. Geographic information systems (GIS) software has already been applied to the events of 1692 to confirm the suspected location of Gallows Hill—the location where convicted witches were publicly executed. Benjamin C. Ray also utilized GIS to challenge Boyer and Nissenbaum’s prominent Salem thesis regarding the economic and geographic relationship between the accused and their accusers. See, Benjamin C. Ray, “The Geography of Witchcraft Accusations in 1692 Salem Village,” William and Mary Quarterly 65, no. 3 (July 2008): 449–478.
7. Stephen Nissenbaum and Paul S. Boyer, The Salem Witchcraft Papers: Verbatim Transcripts of the Legal Documents of the Salem Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977).
8. Benjamin Ray, Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive, The University of Virginia. Accessed February 12, 2020. http://salem.lib.virginia.edu/home.html.
9. It should be noted that consistency and correct spelling across students is essential. This can prove challenging since the Salem Witchcraft Papers have a number of different spellings for the same persons. For example, Ann Putnam’s name might also be spelled Anne Putnam, Ann Putman, etc. Before individual student’s data sets can be merged successfully, it is necessary to have uniformity in name spellings. This can be a tedious and time-consuming task for the instructor, but it needs to be accomplished for this part of the assignment to work.
10. Humanities + Design, Palladio (version 1.2.4), Stanford University, Accessed February 12, 2020. https://hdlab.stanford.edu/palladio/.
Close Reading and Coding with the Seward Family Digital Archive
Digital Documentary Editing in the Undergraduate History Classroom
Andrew
