Reverse Engineering The Salem Witch Trials Archive

http://salem.lib.virginia.edu/home.html

The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft. Fortunately, the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive has preserved much of the history from this time period in the 17^th century. This archive is essentially a digital collection of primary source materials from the witch trials of 1692. The website was created in 2002 by Benjamin Ray and by members from the University of Virginia.

Sources:

The online database includes court records, record books, contemporary books, and images of the original court documents from the days of the witch trials. All of this historical information has been compiled from various archival collections. Much of this preservation project derives from manuscripts and rare book collections from several participating historical societies, libraries, and archives.

Processes:

The historical accounts from 1692 have reached the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive by either maintaining their original form, or from becoming digitized. The archives that survived the past three centuries were scanned (see Figure 1), while the other accounts that didn’t took the form of text transcriptions (see Figure 2). Many scanned books from the witch trials are available on the online database, along with numerous digitized letters and court records.

Figure 1: A Scanned copy of Cotton Mathers

Wonders Of The Invisible World

 Figure 2: A Digitized Version of a letter to John Cotton’s from 1692     

Presentation:

This information is clearly presented through a website that displays multiple general categories with links that will take the viewer deeper into any particular topic. These categories cover all aspects of the witch trials as they consist of Documents & Transcriptions, Historical Maps, Archival Collections, Contemporary Books, and the Project Mission.