In this way, data in different places can be linked together by referencing the elements they have in common
This is game-changing for Salem: using shared identities to link parish records, land deeds, family trees, and trial transcripts. The end outcome would be a Linked Salem Dataset, allowing users to move from a confession to a property border to a minister's sermon. It is an ethical rebuilding of context, reuniting the social fabric that panic once ripped apart.
In teaching, there is a concept called ‘backwards design’, where you design your lesson from the end point you wish your students to achieve. The same is true of data.
This is precisely how we should approach Salem: begin with the ultimate goal, an accurate, ethical, and transparent record, and then construct the digital record accordingly. The way we encode witness depositions, confessions, and execution maps impacts how future audiences "learn" Salem. Designing from the endpoint involves envisioning the reader or researcher we want to empower, rather than merely the dataset we aim to complete.
Choices about which fields of data to collect and how to collect them will influence the “shape” of your database, and have consequences for how much cleaning and restructuring you might need to do later.
This is critical for redigitizing Salem documents. Do we track gender? Occupation? Relation to the accusers? Each field approaches causation differently. If we exclude "social ties," we may overlook the neighbour networks that fueled accusation chains. Data fields equal interpretive power.
Agent based simulation: a series of techniques that create a population of software ‘agents’ who are programmed with contextual rules (e.g., if this happens, do that) governing the behaviour of individual agents. The context can be both in terms of the simulated environment (GIS data, for instance) or the social environment (social relationships as a network). Simulation experiments iterate over multiple combinations of parameters’ values, the ‘behaviour space’. Simulation results are then used by the investigator to explain the ‘real world’ phenomenon as an emergency of a population of agents following a set of rules under certain situations.
The Salem trials can be viewed as an agent-based model of hysteria. Each villager followed minor contextual principles such as fear, piety, conformity, and suspicion, but they all contributed to widespread dread. Agent-based thinking explains how little individual decisions ("I will name one more person") led to systematic violence. The emergent phenomenon was unplanned; it resulted from repeated micro-actions under specific social conditions.
Digital tools exist in a meshwork of legal and cultural obligations, and moreso than any other tool humans have yet come up with, have the capability to exert their own agency upon the user.
This is strikingly similar to the legal and cultural "meshwork" of the Salem Witch Trials, in which the judicial system, Puritan religion, and community norms all converged to shape human behaviour and thought. The legal procedures and moral frameworks of the trials had their own agency, and when invoked, they led human activity almost mechanically. Just as built-in assumptions impact users' judgments, Salem's laws and beliefs limited what participants might perceive as "truth," essentially transforming the system into a cognitive agent.