In class this week, we watched a large part of Miriam Posner’s video How Did They Make That?, in which she discusses the concept of reverse engineering digital humanities projects. According to Posner, any digital humanities production requires understanding three basic elements: the sources used to research and create the project, the processing of this information, and the presentation of the results to the audience. Thinking about the Salem Witch Trials through the lens of such a project gave me a deeper insight into both the historical research and the digital humanities.
For a researcher who wants to study the Salem Witch Trials using a digital humanities project, the most important sources of information would be the transcripts of the court records and the topographical maps of the town. Since the original documents are in handwriting, it will be necessary to digitize them and edit the electronic versions. However, as Posner points out in her lecture, such mechanical processing of information is not enough. To create a digital representation of the Salem Witch Trials, it will be necessary to manually edit the digital versions of the court records, marking the names of accused people and cross referencing them with the locations on the topographical maps. Finally, presenting this information in a digital format will also require specific software to build a visual representation of the material. From this example, I realized that digitizing old manuscripts is only the first step in creating a digital humanities project.
I think that the biggest lesson that I got from Posner’s lecture was that creating any digital resource about history is a laborious process of extracting and compiling the necessary information. The researcher who wants to present their findings in a digital format must first decide which historical sources to use as the basis for the project. Then, they have to edit these sources so that they can be processed by computers, which means converting any non-digitized documents into electronic format and tagging them. Finally, the researcher has to edit the processed data so that they can be presented in a digital format that will be understandable to the audience. Next time I visit a digital history resource, I will think about the laborious process of its creation.
