Press about Checkley
-
April 3, 2012, Digital Humanities Seminar: Peter Grund: Writing Practices in Early New England: An Electronic Database Tool for Charting the Recorders of the Salem Witch Trials
June 25, 2011, Topeka Capital-Journal: KU researcher goes on (Salem) witch hunt
May 4, 2011, Kansas University News Release: Hall Center's Collaborative Seed Grant to fund project on Salem witch trials
http://idrh.ku.edu/2012/03/digital-humanities-seminar-peter-grund-april-3rd/
Writing Practices in Early New England: An Electronic Database Tool for Charting the Recorders of the Salem Witch Trials
Peter Grund, English, University of Kansas
Hall Center Conference Hall
Tuesday, April 3rd, 3:30pm – 5:00pm
Abstract.
In my presentation, I will report on my ongoing collaborative project (with Margo Burns and Matti Peikola) on the recorders that took down the some 1,000 documents from the Salem witch trials. Our goal is to produce an online tool that identifies as many of the approximately 250 recorders as possible, and provides bibliographical data as well as data on their scribal practices. At the same time, the plan is to make the tool available to other researchers to use in the charting of handwriting and scribes in other historical contexts. The talk outlines the principles of the work, demonstrates the preliminary setup of the tool, and discusses some of the future avenues for the project. Among other things, I show how collaborative research is crucial in a project of this kind, and how the electronic format of this scribal tool allows us to approach age-old questions not only about the Salem trials but also about writing practices, scribal copying, and literacy.
Presenter Bio:
Peter J. Grund is Assistant Professor of English Language Studies at the University of Kansas. His research interests include English historical linguistics, early American English, corpus linguistics, electronic editing, and the vernacularization of science. He is co-author of the recent Testifying to Language and Life in Early Modern England, including a CD containing An Electronic Text Edition of Depositions 1560–1760 (ETED) (John Benjamins, 2011), and co-editor of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (CUP, 2009).
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2012 at 2:43 am and is filed under News.
http://cjonline.com/life/2011-06-25/ku-researcher-goes-salem-witch-hunt
KU researcher goes on (Salem) witch hunt
Project will explore court document from trials of 1692
By Jan Biles
THE CAPITAL-JOURNAL
 |
LAWRENCE — A University of Kansas faculty member is kick-starting a research project to find out more about the people who recorded testimonies during the Salem witch trials in 1692.
Peter Grund, assistant professor of English, will collaborate with Margo Burns, a database specialist and digital editor from New Hampshire, and Matti Peikola, the Academy of Finland Research Fellow in English at the University of Turku, for the project.
The team's preliminary research will be funded by a Collaborative Research Seed Grant from the Hall Center for the Humanities.
"It will show a number of new things about the trials," Grund said of the project. "There are still new things to be discovered in the original court documents."
Grund said he became involved in the project as the result of his work in reading early script from the 15th century to 17th century and his contributions to "Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt," a massive book that contains about 1,000 court documents from the trials. The new project will produce a free online database and a scholarly volume on the Salem documents and their implications for manuscript culture and writing literacy in colonial New England.
Grund said he and the others will study and produce an inventory of the scribes who documented the trials. Initial research by the team tentatively has identified about 40 percent of the 250 trial scribes by name.
Many people couldn't write during colonial times and had to rely on a neighbor or friend to write their witness deposition before filing it with the court.
Thomas Putnam, who had a vested interest in the trials because he was the father of Ann Putnam Jr., a "fierce accuser," and husband of Ann Putnam Sr., another accuser, wrote about 100 testimonials, he said.
The documents written by Putnam were similar in wording, which causes Grund to ask: Was Putnam copying the testimonials and changing witnesses’ names? Because a witness could not proofread what was written, were the documents an accurate reflection of what a person said? "There might or might not be a sinister motive behind it," he said.
Grund said people assume the documents recorded during the trials were done by court clerks.
"But we found that a number of people were appointed by the court to take down these documents," he said.
The trial of Tituba, a slave who confessed to and accused others of witchcraft, was recorded separately by a wealthy merchant, a tailor and a court justice. Their recordings vary in length, detail and wording. Grund said he wondered how the trial would have turned out if there were only one recorder.
The researchers will analyze letter-forms, marks of punctuation, abbreviations and spelling patterns, which will offer clues about the people behind the recordings, including their sex, age, social status, possible geographic origin and occupation. Handwriting analysis will help them link the anonymous trial documents to public records of named individuals.
"One of the tantalizing questions that we hope this research will elucidate is whether women were involved in recording Salem documents, and if so, what are the implications for our understanding of the trials and women’s literacy more generally," he said. Grund said it will take six to seven years to finish the research project, although the database will be available earlier than that.
Jan Biles can be reached at (785) 295-1292 or jan.biles@cjonline.com
http://www.news.ku.edu/2011/may/4/seedgrant.shtml
Hall Center's Collaborative Seed Grant to fund project on Salem witch trials
LAWRENCE — A faculty member at the University of Kansas is undertaking a research project to find out more about the scribes who recorded testimonies during the Salem witch trials.
The research by Peter Grund, assistant professor of English, and his collaborators will eventually result in a database available to the public for free via the Web and a scholarly volume on the Salem documents and their implications for manuscript culture and writing literacy in colonial New England.
The team's preliminary research will be funded by the Hall Center for the Humanities 2011 Collaborative Research Seed Grant. Grund’s partners are Margo Burns, a database specialist and digital editor based in New Hampshire, and Matti Peikola, the Academy of Finland Research Fellow in English at the University of Turku.
The researchers hope to learn about who these scribes were and to expand understanding of literacy in early New England. The research team's primary goal is to compile an inventory of people involved in recording the documents. Initial research by the group has already tentatively identified about 40 percent of the approximately 250 trial scribes by name.
To achieve this, researchers analyze letter-forms, marks of punctuation, abbreviations and spelling patterns, which all offer clues about the people behind the recordings, including their sex, age, social status, possible geographic origin and occupation. Combined with additional archival research, the handwriting analysis allows them to link the otherwise anonymous trial documents to public records of named individuals.
"One of the tantalizing questions that we hope this research will elucidate is whether women were involved in recording Salem documents, and if so, what are the implications for our understanding of the trials and women’s literacy more generally," said Grund.
Their research will break new ground by offering a unique snapshot of networks of mostly unprofessional writers of legal documents operating in a chronologically and geographically confined community, allowing Grund and his associates to assess how writing skills were transmitted in early New England and how writing operated as a commodity to sell and hire.
"Professor Grund's project is exactly what we hoped would come of this new collaborative seed grant," said Hall Center Director Victor Bailey. "He and his collaborators will employ their different research skills to tackle questions concerning literacy and writing in colonial America that no single researcher could accomplish."
The Collaborative Research Seed Grant supports the early stages of projects that capitalize on multiple forms of expertise to tackle the most methodologically and theoretically challenging questions faced by humanities scholars. KU's Center for Research provides funding for the seed grant program.