Networks of Influence in Scottish Enlightenment Publishing

Ryan, Yann; Tolonen, Mikko

Networks of Influence in Scottish Enlightenment Publishing

Connections

Volume 44 (2024): Issue 1 (January 2024)

By: Yann Ryan and Mikko Tolonen

Open Access

|May 2024

Figures & Tables

Graph of the number of records per year for each document type in the ESTC, from 1700–1800. The definitions of these document types have fuzzy boundaries. For our purposes, we count any document of between 1 and 32 pages as a pamphlet, between 33 and 128 as an “in-between,” and over 128 as a book. ESTC, English Short Title Catalogue.

An example of a typical 18th century book title page. Most included information about the author, date, place of publication, as well as its publishers, booksellers, and printers, which has been recorded as structured data in the ESTC. Image from https://digital.library.mcgill.ca/hume/search/large.php?id=8832. ESTC, English Short Title Catalogue.

Force-directed network of the entire ESTC dataset (1473–1800) with Louvain community detection labels. Edges have been removed for readability. As the data is longitudinal and passes through multiple generations of individuals, its connections are mostly temporal, resulting in the elongated shape of the main component, consisting of a series of subgroups that are connected in series rather than all to each other. Scottish publishers are mostly distributed along this part of the network: the green, blue, brown, and pink clusters. Also visible is an Irish cluster (in orange), and a more distant American cluster (in green). ESTC, English Short Title Catalogue.

Coefficients (not probabilities) for Scottish and non-Scottish publishers, over time. Non-Scottish is consistently below zero, meaning that if both nodes were not Scottish, the probability of a tie moderately decreased.

Probabilities per decade for a number of key coefficients. These suggest that in general the impact of two nodes being Scottish publishers on the probability of a tie lessened over the century, in favor of genre similarity and network effects (edgewise shared partners).

Log-odds for all covariates used by the model_

Time slice	1700	1720	1740	1760	1780
Edges	6.63^***	6.92^***	7.29^***	7.48^***	8.41^***
	0.08	0.08	0.08	0.11	0.07
nodematch.is_ed.no	0.55^***	0.81^***	0.77^***	0.80 ^***	0.57^***
	0.03	0.04	0.04	0.07	0.06
nodematch.is_ed.yes	1.14^***	1.52^***	1.40^***	1.67^***	1.20^***
	0.06	0.05	0.04	0.06	0.11
nodecov.p_scot	0	0.02^**	0.01^**	0.02^***	0.01
	0.01	0.01	0	0	0.01
gwesp.fixed.0.01	2.17^***	2.24^***	2.38^***	2.61^***	3.11^***
	0.06	0.07	0.07	0.09	0.08
nodematch.actor_gender.female	0.25	0.31	1.02^*	Inf	Inf
	0.42	0.33	0.41
nodematch.actor_gender.male	0.23^***	0.10^***	0.18^***	0.30^***	0.19^***
	0.02	0.03	0.03	0.05	0.04
absdiff.p_scot	0.04^***	0.02^**	0.04^***	0.03^***	0.02^*
	0.01	0.01	0.01	0.01	0.01
absdiff.publication_year	0.05^***	0.09^***	0.08^***	0.08^***	0.07^***
	0	0	0	0.01	0
edgecov.dist	1.72^***	2.70^***	2.63^***	2.44^***	2.49^***
	0.06	0.06	0.06	0.07	0.08

Overview of node and edge attributes derived from ESTC data_

Attribute	Type	Description
Percentage of Scottish work	Node	Proportion of work published by Scottish authors
“Scottish publisher”	Node	Binary attribute, defined as any publisher whose publication list was at least 25% works by the above Scottish authors. The 25% threshold was chosen after some experimentation—because most publishers published mostly English works, a higher threshold meant not including many important Scottish publishers.
Edinburgh publisher	Node	At least 50% Edinburgh publications, regardless of the likely author nationality.
Scottish similarity	Edge	The difference in percentage points of the volume of Scottish works published by each node in a pair.
Genre similarity	Edge	Genre information was turned into an edge attribute: the number of publications for each publisher in each genre was expressed as a vector, and a similarity matrix was made using the cosine distance between each pair.
Publisher gender	Node	Estimated using a rule-based approach on first names
Earliest year published	Node	Year of first record in the ESTC.
Total works	Node	Total count of records in the ESTC

Network statistics for each time slice_

	1700	1720	1740	1760	1780
Total nodes	744	810	808	1,207	1,850
Number of components (size of largest)	16 (708)	12 (785)	12 (784)	26 (1,103)	25 (1,782)
Number of edges	4,906	7,058	6,668	12,053	15,519
Average degree	13.19	17.43	16.5	19.97	16.78
Global clustering coefficient	0.31	0.34	0.36	0.38	0.33
Average local clustering	0.56	0.68	0.69	0.74	0.71
Density	0.0177	0.0215	0.0205	0.0166	0.0091
Modularity (with Louvain)	0.34	0.27	0.31	0.27	0.4
Average distance	3.09	2.88	2.95	2.9	3.15
Book^a	15,810	19,519	17,644	26,250	30,263
In-between	10,730	12,916	12,882	16,787	23,927
Pamphlet	15,822	8,544	10,203	10,611	17,513
NA	1,378	2,323	2,549	4,370	5,345

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21307/connections-2019.034 | Journal eISSN: 2816-4245 | Journal ISSN: 0226-1766

Journal RSS Feed

Language: English

Page range: 33 - 46

Published on: May 18, 2024

Published by: International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA)

In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services

Publication frequency: 1 issue per year

Keywords:

network analysis,

homophily,

historical network research,

publisher networks,

book history

Related subjects:

Social sciences,

Social sciences, other

© 2024 Yann Ryan, Mikko Tolonen, published by International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA)
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Previous article Volume 44 (2024): Issue 1 (January 2024)Next article

Networks of Influence in Scottish Enlightenment Publishing

Figures & Tables

Figure 1:

Figure 2:

Figure 3:

Figure 4:

Figure 5:

Log-odds for all covariates used by the model_

Overview of node and edge attributes derived from ESTC data_

Network statistics for each time slice_

Paradigm

My account