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1. Description of the project and its significance
Enhancing and Extending the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive
The purpose of this project is to integrate, fully document, and expand the web based
Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive. Extensive improvement of this kind will transform the
Archive into an exemplary digital research environment. Heretofore, no scholar has been able to
examine all of the original manuscripts of the Salem court records held in four major archives nor
assemble and systematically search through these records, as well as all the related primary
sources, such as church records, town records, historical maps, supplementary volumes of court
records, contemporary published accounts, sermons, diary accounts in addition to important
eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century historical studiesall of which are critical to the
study of the extraordinarily complex and lengthy Salem episode. Integrating and documenting the
Archive’s current resources and adding hundreds of newly digitized primary sources means that
the Archive will become the primary place for scholars to examine the full corpus of nearly one
thousand digital images of the original manuscripts linked to the transcriptions of a revised
version of the Archive’s the on line edition of The Salem Witchcraft Papers, in addition to dozens
of related primary sources. Several years ago, historian Mary Beth Norton noted in a published
review that the Archive was of “tremendous assistance” to scholarly research. The Archive also
continues to be used in classrooms at both the college and secondary school level.
Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project was initially funded
by a NEH Collaborative Research Grant and by the University of Virginia’s Institute for
Advanced Technology in the Humanities from 2000 to 20003. It provided an online research
environment for an international team of scholars to produce new transcriptions of the original
court records, Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, a work that is soon to be published by
Cambridge University Press. To assist the transcribers, the Archive digitized the microfilms of the
all the original court records. Many microfilm images turned out to be of poor quality, and the
project later obtained new digital images of approximately seventy-five percent of the original
manuscripts after the NEH grant period. The editors have also recently completed a basic
chronology of the court records, the first of its kind, which can now be incorporated into the
Archive. The Archive also digitized the previous transcriptions published as The Salem Witchcraft
Papers (1974). In the process of locating the original court records, the editors discovered over
fifty previously unidentified records and dozens more published transcriptions whose original
manuscripts are now lost,. All of this material has been transcribed and digitized and will be
incorporated into a rebuilt and expanded version of the Archive.
The Archive has also recently created a master database with over 2,000 personal names
which can now be fully populated with manuscript and other primary source information, and
archival documentation that will enable users to search and retrieve the manuscripts of the court
records, transcriptions, and related primary source documents in a variety of productive ways
impossible in any other research environment. The Archive will enable scholars to retrieve its
primary source materials according to: (1) the alphabetical order of the case records of each of the
accused persons; (2) the chronology of the documents across the fifteen months of the legal
proceedings (1692-93) and its long legal aftermath to 1759; (3) the names of each of the 1,284
persons mentioned in the court documents and other primary sources, using a standardized
spelling of these names; (4) a word-search query (both single and compound words), retrieved
according to chronological order and/or numerical frequency; and (5) individual archival
holdings.
Integrating, documenting, and expanding the primary source documents in the Salem
Archive will therefore enable scholars, students, and the general public to advance significantly
their understanding of the historically complex and culturally important Salem witch trials
episodean American story that has continued to interest and fascinate both historians and the
general public for over 300 years.