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.