flower field

flower field is a project about the victims of the Salem witch trials from 1692 - 1693. During the one year long Salem Witch Trials, over one hundred people were accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts. Twenty-five of them were executed by hanging, pressed to death, or died in prison. It was the deadliest witch hunt in North American history. It has been held up as an example of the dangers of isolationism, religious extremism, false accusations, and failures of due process.

01 – Flower Field

Dataset

The project visualizes around 150 victims, their origin, the family connections between each other and how and why they were were accused of witchcraft. The Data used in this projects can be found on kaggle.com (Salem Witchcraft Dataset by Racheal Tatman) and originally published by Professor Richard Latner of Tulane University at www.tulane.edu/~salem. Further information about family connections and large parts of the summaries of individual people are published by Benjamin Ray and The University of Virginia at salem.lib.virginia.edu/home.html.

The following data was used:

Basic Data: 
Name, ID, Sex, Residence
Additional personal information: 
Slave, Underaged, Spared because of pregnancy, Church member
During the Trials: 
Month of accusation, Month of death, Cause of death, Guilty verdict
Family connection: 
Parent, Child, Partner or Grandparent of another accused Person
Text:
 Short biographies

Data that I did not use:

 First accused, arrested, interrogating, court date, date of death, examination, Pro or Con Parris (local minister), tax documents, committee lists

Approach and objectives

At the beginning of the project I was fascinated by two possible approaches for this Data Visualization. First was the dynamic of how the idea spread in the community, that they were under attack by the devil and they had to hunt down his accomplices. However, I would have needed exact dates that the dataset did not support for this visualisation. So I focused on my second approach which was to put the victims in the centre of the data visualisation.

The target audience of this project is in general interest in the lore and the witch-hunts of early modern Europe and Colonial America. In my research into the subject, I realised that many authors focused on the same few victims to tell the Salem witch trials' story. Those were often the first people who got accused, people with especially tragic stories and people with formerly significant influence in the community. I decided to make sure that no person should be portrayed as more important than the other when visualising the victims. Furthermore I wanted to focus on the uniqueness of each victim rather than presenting them as dots in a network. The visualization should invite the user to explore and to learn about a few of the many victim's lives, rather than teaching the facts and numbers of the Salem witch trials.

Related works and Inspiration

Unobscured – Podcast 
Inspiration to choose this theme in the first place. https://historyunobscured.com/season1/ 
Film Flowers by Shirley Wu
 Inspiration to not use dots to represent your nodes. https://shirleywu.studio/filmflowers/ 
Royal Constellations by Nadieh Bremer
 Inspiration for the network and general visualization https://royalconstellations.visualcinnamon.com 
MetTooMomentum by Valentina D’Efilippo and Lucia Kocincova http://www.metoomentum.com/trending.html 
Poppyfield by Valentina D’Efilippo and Nicolas Pigelet http://poppyfield.org

Data Processing

Multiple data sets had to be merged, and many entries were incomplete. Over the centuries, names had been changed in different ways, and some records contradicted each other or were ambiguous. Therefore, many entries had to be reworked by hand, which was only possible because the data set was relatively small, with about 150 people. The Software Numbers offered all the necessary functions for this work. In general, the data was quickly cleaned up. During the project, I added multiple data entries by hand, specifically for the biographies, which in the original dataset were included for only one-third of the persons.

Project process

Each function and element went through the processes, shown in the graphic Project Method.

Overview

The data visualization has two main parts.

The flower field

The whole field of flowers and their connections can be seen. Each flower shows on click the biography of the person (if any) and an individual legend of how the flower is created.

The timeline

By scrolling, one is led from month to month through the one-year trial. On the left is a summary and a list of the deaths of each month, on the right an interactive visualization of the people who have been accused up to that point.

Additional Elements

The Info Button gives the user the possibility to read more about the project and to compare the flower field with the general legend to find specific flowers. The project is accompanied with atmospheric sound, including audio feedback, after clicking on the flowers. With the mute button the sound can be turned off.

Conclusion

My biggest challenge was to learn D3. I knew the fundamentals of javascript, HTML, and CSS, but had not used them in a long time. Therefore it took me a while to understand the logic of D3, and the programming was more time consuming than I assumed. This forced me to constantly evaluate if I would be able to implement my ideas during my creative process. Woking as a web designer for a few years now, I was used to having developers in my team decide on what was possible to implement within the framework of the project. Nevertheless, I enjoyed experiencing the other side and to push myself further to make my ideas come true. I also enjoyed studying the topic I used so profoundly and using the tools I learned during this semester to create my own interpretation of the data.