Thursday, May 15, 2008

"What is Witchcraft?" - some suggestions to Christopher Kimberley

Here on Google/Blogspot, I recently came across a blog called What is witchcraft? by Christopher Kimberley, jam-packed with news stories, from around the world, about everything having to do with witchcraft. The majority of the news stories are about witchhunts. Some are about actual practitioners of various witchcraft traditions, and some are about ritual crimes. The witchhunt stories are primarily from Africa, as one might expect, but there are witchhunt stories from other places too, including Saudi Arabia and India. This blog has the potential to become an excellent research resource.

Some suggestions to Christopher Kimberley on how to make it more useful:

1) Add a label list to your side panel. You're already using labels on most of your posts. A label list on the side panel could serve as a topic index. (For an example, see the label list here on my own blog, on the side panel, just below the blog archive.)

2) On all posts from henceforth, use one of the following general category labels, or something similar, in addition to the kinds of labels you are already using now:

  • witchhunts - for all stories about witchhunts

  • practitioners - for all stories about actual practitioners of some witchcraft or magical tradition

  • ritual crimes - for all stories about ritual murders and other crimes for magical purposes, or alleged magical purposes


With the above improvements, your blog could become an extremely handy and valuable scholarly and journalistic resource.

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