About The Project

During the 2017/2018 and 2018/2019 course programme, the University of Edinburgh’s Wikimedian in Residence, Ewan McAndrew, supported students to surface selected data from the original MS Access database to Wikipedia’s sister project, Wikidata, as structured, machine-readable, linked open data.

Students on the Data Science for Design MSc created engaging visualisations from these real world datasets. One group chose create an interactive physical map of accused witches in Scotland laser cut and engraved from an A1 block of wood and creating bespoke pieces to visualise the gender distribution of accused witches in each region of Scotland and the different torture techniques employed in each region.

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. Emma was asked to do the detective work and data reconciliation required in order to geolocate the places mentioned in the Survey so that each accused witch in Scotland could be plotted on an interactive map as linked open data through Wikipedia's sister project, Wikidata

As a result of Emma’s work, there was a place of residence recorded onto each accused witches’ Wikidata page which could then be queried for. Geographical information such as trial location, place of detainment and place of death locations were also added onto the accused witches’ Wikidata pages using the open source software, OpenRefine. There were also other properties added for the accused witches from their charge to inhumane treatment type to build a strong Wikidata page for each accused witch which is displayed for each accused witch on the website maps.

4th year Computer Science student, Maggie Lin, was employed as our second ‘Witchfinder General’: Data Visualisation intern and worked incredibly hard to help illuminate what happened in the Scottish witchhunts of 1563 to 1736 by focusing on opening up the rich historical data in the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database and turning it into linked open data, creating user-friendly web visualisations with her developer colleague Josep Garcia-Reyero (also an undergrad student).

Maggie’s focus was on the hitherto unexplored temporal data and the all the rich information on the witchcraft investigations, which encompassed the initial or supposed denunciation, the arrest, the investigation, the trial, and its aftermath. She focused especially on all the different accusations: who named/denounced who, what occurred in the supposed witches’ meetings, the ritual objects used, accusations of shapechanging and much more. By working round the clock to turn this data into something parseable she created timelines, network analyses of who named who, helped show how the hysteria spread in space and time during panic and non panic periods and even investigated accusations of demonology and attended a symposium on such. She presented on her work at the Edinburgh Book Festival 2022 before the Jenni Fagan book event, Hex, and has contributed blog articles documenting her work and recorded a podcast interview.

• To update the software packages and re-factor the site code.
• Improve the site functionality, accessibility and user interface.
• Added a group clusters on/off button on the map.
• Allow filtering on multiple filter options at a time and move the filters to the left hand side of the screen to allow more space for the map.
• Add a new customizable and more responsive timeline of witchcraft investigations which can be filtered to search for ‘witchcraft panic’ periods and ‘non-panic’ periods.
• Add Maggie’s new visualisations including: filters for accusations of shape-shifting, demonic pacts, property damage, ritual objects used, witches’ meetings, a network analysis of who named/denounced who and an interactive Histropedia timeline that is searchable by name of accused.

Claire Panella worked as the Scottish Witchhunter intern for 1 day a week from February to May 2023. During this time she created and documented a robust and reusable quality assurance process (using RStudio) for the data behind our website so that we could compare the original 2003 Survey of Scottish Witchcraft data with the data shared to Wikidata since 2017 to check for any data anomalies.

Read all about her work here: Claire's blog on the Data Quality Assurance process

Ruby has been quality checking and consistency checking the data using newly developed quality assurance methods in R Studio created by another student intern, Claire Panella, earlier this year that can be reused for many years to come. Ruby’s other focus has been on taking the extremely rich) data Maggie Lin added on all the 3,816 full witchcraft investigations recorded in Scotland from 1563-1736 and embedding those new interactive visualisations on our Map of Accused Witches in Scotland website using a Javascript and the Vue.js framework. By also identifying and addressing bug fixes, conducting rigorous user testing sessions and using the feedback received to address areas for site improvement and action planning for developing new features she has helped to show how the data, and the individual human stories behind the data, can be better visualised, explored and interrogated as never before.