Search

The development of the “public sphere” and the Enlightenment are closely related to the networks of publishers involved in print culture. In Britain, a key question is whether diversity (in terms of nationality) in publishing increased over time. In this paper, we use large-scale library catalog data and a class of models known as Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) to investigate the extent to which an 18th-century network of publishers in London was homophilous with respect to nationality, and specifically investigate whether those with close publishing connections to Scotland formed a separate group or if they were simply integrated into the London book market. As there is little external information on the majority of publishers, we generate node and edge attributes from the catalog data itself. The results suggest that social processes were deeply involved in the decisions behind copublishing and collaborations and that there is indeed a significant positive effect on tie formation if both nodes are “Scottish” publishers, though this lessens over the century. We find that other important factors in tie formation are edgewise shared partners and similarity in patterns of genres published.

Nation and nationhood are among the most frequently studied concepts in the field of intellectual history. At the same time, the word ‘nation’ and its historical usage are very vague. The aim in this article was to develop a data-driven method using dependency parsing and neural word embeddings to clarify some of the vagueness in the evolution of this concept. To this end, we propose the following two-step method. First, using linguistic processing, we create a large set of words pertaining to the topic of nation. Second, we train diachronic word embeddings and use them to quantify the strength of the semantic similarity between these words and thereby create meaningful clusters, which are then aligned diachronically. To illustrate the robustness of the study across languages, time spans, as well as large datasets, we apply it to the entirety of five historical newspaper archives in Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, and English. To our knowledge, thus far there have been no large-scale comparative studies of this kind that purport to grasp long-term developments in as many as four different languages in a data-driven way. A particular strength of the method we describe in this article is that, by design, it is not limited to the study of nationhood, but rather expands beyond it to other research questions and is reusable in different contexts.

Abstract:This article analyses Hume's notion of politeness as developed in a letter he wrote in Paris in 1734 and the account of the corresponding artificial virtue in the Treatise. The analysis will help us understand Hume's admiration for French manners and why politeness is presented as one of the central artificial virtues in the Treatise. Before the Treatise, Hume had already sided with Bernard Mandeville's theoretical outlook which stood in contrast to the popular eighteenth-century understanding of politeness as a natural quality of human nature. In the Treatise, Hume developed these notions about the artificial nature of politeness into one of the cornerstones of his account of human sociability.