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Networks of Influence in Scottish Enlightenment Publishing

Yann Ryan
Yann Ryan
 und 
Mikko Tolonen
Mikko Tolonen
   | 18. Mai 2024
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Article Category: Article
Online veröffentlicht: 18. Mai 2024
Seitenbereich: 33 - 46
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21307/connections-2019.034
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© 2024 Yann Ryan et al., published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Figure 1:

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.
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.

Figure 2:

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.
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.

Figure 3:

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.
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.

Figure 4:

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.
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.

Figure 5:

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).
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
Booka 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
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