Hello Reddit, if you have any questions about Salem or social network analysis, I'm happy to answer them. My thesis website covering the entirety of this project will go up the first week of May if you are interested in learning more.

For further reading I recommend the following: In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 by Mary Beth Norton The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege by Marilynne K. Roach Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum

Also salem.lib.virginia.edu is a great site which includes many transcripts of the original court documents sorted by case file if you are interested in reading the primary sources.

I'll also plug my site salemwitchtrialsresearch.wordpress.com here although I haven't been active on it while I've been preparing my social network site.

Special thanks to Eric Hacke, Will Raybould, Bill Rubin, Elm, Jonathan Wallace, Charles-Eric Lemelin, Mark Katerberg, William Ryan, Stuart Gorman, Daniel Schmidt, Rodney Norris, Alex Gidumal, Michael Moore, Collum Milne, Miles Stapleton, Grant Taylor, Vlad, and Max M. for their generous support of the podcast through the AskHistorians Patreon. And thanks to all our new supporters as well!

And a big big thanks to /u/dhowlett1692 for bucking family tradition and not accusing me of witchcraft!

Great podcast - and a remarkable body of research here. Congrats Dan.

I am concerned about what I thought I heard you say about the computer making decisions about the relative importance of relationships - or something along that line. And that you weren't exactly sure what was happening inside the black box. It's important that you understand the various levels of what is happening here - electronically. Perhaps I heard wrong and this isn't a problem.

In 1974, I worked on a project - using Fortran and a five-foot stack of computer cards for the program and the data - to analyze Upper Paleolithic art in France. The program provided me with a matrix of relationships of various motifs to one another, and it computed those relationships in terms of significant deviations from the norm. So I knew exactly what the math was - how it was affected by data size and how the computer was calculating unusual relationships between a wide variety of motifs. It sounds like this is similar to what your computer is doing with your data.

Ultimately, I found less value in the approach than I had hoped. It turned out that when it came down to it, it was still up to the imagination of someone to say something about what the deviations from the norm meant. More importantly, there was a danger that I could present my own subjective interpretations and declare that "they came from the computer," which in the mid 1970s was enough to intimidate many in the humanities. But that would not be not good social science. It would have only been a slight of hand trick on my part.

It seems to me that you're in a better position here, since many have already declared what the Salem event "represents" and what caused it, so you can use your data to test those ideas to see if relationships bear out the proposed interpretations. I'm not sure about that, but that is what it seems to me. It does also seem, however, that you need to proceed carefully so that you don't use the weight of the word "computer" in a way that is disproportionate to your argument and the data.

All this is not a criticism. It may be a direction peers will approach you with gentle academic criticism (said tongue-in-cheek since academics in general and witch trial enthusiasts specifically will hardly be gentle). Be ready and put your best foot forward. This is great work on your part and I look forward to seeing more on how it unfolds. Congrats on an excellent study (and podcast and website!).

This month's winner of the book giveaway is... Michael Moore!

The selection of books we have available this month are:

Emerson W. Baker's A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience, recommended by our guest /u/dhowlett1692.

Robert K. Massie's Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea, recommended by /u/thefourthmaninaboat.

Sowande Mustakeem's Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage. See also her recent AMA.

Susan Kellogg's Weaving the Past: A History of Latin America’s Indigenous Women from the Prehispanic Period to the Present, my recommendation.

Want a chance to get a free book? Help support the podcast via Patreon!

😱 🔥 Great job Dan! Those graphs make a little more sense now.

is there any similarity between the model you use for social network analysis to the models that epidemiologists use for following disease outbreaks (and similarly for tracking violence patterns). In particular, if there are differences, might those be exploited for evidence either for or against psychological causes of witchery, or strictly political/economic character assassination?

Hello again Reddit- my thesis website is online at www.salemnetworks.org if you are interested in learning more about this project.

Im not sure how easy this will be to answer, but I was gonna post it on this sub and I saw yours right away. But I am specifically interested in newspaper coverage of the Salem trials. Was there any newspaper coverage and if so.....which publications were prevalent in Massachusetts then?