 Hi! This summer, I've been wanting to find a general data visualisation intern at the University of Edinburgh. This is a job title I never thought I'd have and one that is maybe quite confusing, so in this video I'll explain what this is involved. My name is Ruby and I'm a student at the University of Edinburgh, currently going into my fourth year of computer science. Before this project, I had interest in the witch trials that had taken place in Scotland, but I had no extensive knowledge as I'd only listened to a few podcasts and read some articles, but it was something I was really excited to learn more about. In the early 2000s, a group of historians at the University of Edinburgh, led by Professor Julian Goodair, worked on creating a survey Scottish witchcraft. They found all the information they could from lots of different resources on the witch trials that took place between the years 1536 and 1736 and collated it into one huge database, which you can search through on this website. This is such a valuable resource and is used by many people when they are researching into the Scottish witch trials, but as you can see, it is a huge database with around 33 tables and loads of relationships, so it can be quite hard to navigate. So a few years ago, the Uni started hiring interns to try and present the information in a more accessible and engaging way. They worked on this website, as you can see here, and created a map that shows the residency of these accused witches. This version has been released and was very well received, and we've got loads of positive feedback on it. In more recent years, lots of other interns have worked on adding more information to this website and creating new visualisations. My goal is to get this version of the website ready for release. This project is led by the university's working media in residence here in McAndree. Gradually, all the information from the survey has been getting uploaded to Wikidata. Since Wikidata is open source, it can be edited by all the users. This has downfalls and positives. Positive being that information can be updated in light of new information, which is good because the survey hasn't been changed since the early 2000s. However, sometimes incorrect information can be added. I've been writing programmes that read in information from Wikidata and the survey and compare them, and then looking at the anomalies to see where the differences are and which is the most accurate piece of information by checking both the references and making sure every single Wikidata is referenced to reliable resources. This is important to prevent the mis-spread of information, but also respect the work done of the original survey and the historical events that happened and the women that went through these inhumane treatments. I've also been working on making some improvements to the new version of the website. So much was added to the website over the past few years, lots of new data and visualisations, but this has led the website with some bugs that I've been working on fixing. This involved me learning a new JavaScript framework called Vue that I hadn't used before. The overall aim is to make the website as usable and accessible as possible so that users can gain as much from it as they can. I also completed several sessions of user testing. For this I was guided by the user experience team at the UNI who gave me tips on how to run these sessions. I did seven different sessions with a mixture of different users, some of these being historians, people that have podcasts on these witches of Scotland, and some being interns that had no knowledge about the witches. This was really beneficial as it got a wide range of feedback from two groups of people that we hoped to be our users, people with no previous knowledge or people that are already very interested in witches and use this as a resource for research. From this I discovered lots of ways that we could make the website more usable. As you can see we're bits people struggle with, which bits they really enjoy using and gave us ideas for new features. I'm now going to be continuing this project while I'm at UNI for one day a week as we've discovered there's a lot more that can be done to this website. Our next aims are to reduce the load time of the website as currently it can take a while to load due to the high amounts of data that it is loading. I also need to make sure it's mobile responsive so that people can look at it on every device. We have new information that has been added to WikiData that needs to also be added to the website. React to the user feedback and fix any more bugs that we noticed from that. And we're adding new features. For example, we have the idea of adding a map of memorials. I really enjoyed this internship because not only have I learned loads of new technical skills and professional skills, I've also gained lots of historical knowledge about the Scottish Witch Trials and learned about what these women were accused of, what they went through, how they were tortured and executed because of what other people believed they had done. I've also been able to participate in lots of interesting activities. For example, last week I went to an event at Edinburgh Book Festival written by two authors who have written books about the accused witches. I also participated in Wikipedia writing events and wrote a Wikipedia article about the accused witch Isabel Ferguson. I also went on some trips with the other interns to Sincerely. For example, Sincerely is Music Hall, which has loads of really interesting old historical musical instruments. It's been a great experience and everyone has been super friendly to work with and I've really enjoyed working in this programme and helping to educate people on this really important historical period of Scotland.