J233-FINAL-PROJECT-WITCH-TRIALS

Analyzing witch trials data in Europe using Pandas

Introduction

For the final project of my class J233 Advanced Coding for Journalists, I analyzed the data of witch trials across Europe.

I got the dataset from Kaggle). It was compiled by economists Peter T. Leeson and Jake Russ for their paper 'Witch Trials' published in the Economic Journal in March 2017.

This project contains 4 jupyter notebooks, 1 raw dataframe, 7 exported dataframe, and some data visualization images. Notebook 01 is for data cleaning, which, fortunately, didn't require much to do. Notebook 02 tried to look at the data across time, and notebook 03 to see some specific countries. Notebook 04 is a collection of choropleth maps from the 13th century to the 18th century.

Note: since GitHub isn't displaying my data viz results properly, I downloaded all the png files and insert them in markdown.

Pros and cons of using this dataset:

Pros:

• Relatively small and clean.
• Witch trials is such a significant historical part of early modern history that there is no lack of research around it. Many of the observations and analysis based on the data can either be confirmed or explained by relevant historical events.

Cons:

• The problem is that, because the data is so old, many of the entries are null or incomplete.
• It should be noted that the concept of nation in early modern Europe can be very different from the contemporary understanding of nation-states. For example, Germany did not exist until the 1800s, and for the majority of the timeline were part of the Holy Roman Empire (composed of the areas of present-day Germany, Switzerland and Austria).

What the data can and can't tell us:

By looking at the data alone, it can tell us:

• general trend across years and countries.
• the peak of the witch trials. However, it can't tell us:
• the first and the last witch trial case.
• the explanation for such a mass hysteria.
• the demography of those who were prosecuted, which, according to wikipedia, are mostly women.

Questions to explore:

• Q1: What time period (century/decade/year) witnessed the peak of witch trials?
• Q2: Which country has the most witch trial cases in total?
• Q3: Which country has the least witch trial cases in total?
• Q4: How did the trend spread across Europe?