A New Map has been created by a team at ‘The Data and Visualisation Internship Project’ at the University of Edinburgh, showing various locations across Dumfries and Galloway and the rest of Scotland where over 3000 Scottish women from the 16th and 17th centuries were accused of witch craft.
The Data and Visualisation internship project at the University of Edinburgh had as its core aim to geographically locate and visualise the different locations recorded within the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft Database.
Some of The Dumfries and Galloway Women listed include –
Katharine Major
Investigation Date: 27/06/1630
Gender: female
Occupation: unknown
Social Class: unknown
Investigation Date: 03/05/1671
Gender: female
Occupation: unknown
Social Class: unknown
Investigation Date: 03/06/1658
Gender: female
Occupation: unknown
Social Class: unknown
Mawsie Stowane
Investigation Date: 15/06/1628
Gender: female
Occupation: unknown
Social Class: unknown
Investigation Date: 18/09/1644
Gender: female
Occupation: unknown
Social Class: unknown
In 2017, Anne-Marie Scott, Deputy Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services at the University of Edinburgh, suggested that if course leaders on the Data Science for Design MSc were looking for students to learn about data science from working with a ‘real-world’ datasets as part of their annual ‘Data Fair’ then the much-loved (but relatively static) Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database would be an ideal dataset.
During the 2017/2018 and 2018/2019 course programme, the University of Edinburgh’s Wikimedian in Residence, Ewan McAndrew, supported Data Science for Design MSc students to surface selected data from the original MS Access database to Wikipedia’s sister project, Wikidata, as structured, machine-readable, linked open data. The success of this project, and the engaging visualisations created as a result, made the case that an internship dedicated to geographically locating the places recorded in the database as linked open data would be the next logical step.
Emma Carroll, a Geology and Physical Geography undergraduate student, was recruited in May 2019 as the new Data and Visualisation intern, or ‘Witchfinder General’, as part of a three month long Equate Scotland internship.
The bulk of the project work undertaken by Emma was to geographically locate the residence location of these accused witches. There were locations recorded within the dataset for 3141 different accused witches and from these locations there were 822 different place-names. The places of residence which were correctly identified were to be recorded onto each accused witches’ Wikidata page. Wikidata is a sister project of Wikipedia which acts as a hub of structured and machine-readable linked open data. By adding the place of residence to the accused witches’ Wikidata page, it would allow for these places to later be queried using the Wikidata Query Service and then downloaded in different formats to then be visualised.
You can view the full map by clicking https://witches.is.ed.ac.uk/
