Abstracts of Chapters in the Volume
Introduction, Crystal Hall and Birgit Tautz
This chapter provides an introduction to this edited collection for all those interested in the use of Digital Humanities methods for interrogating the eccentricities of cultural history. The chapter explains how the study of networks offers a way to test the boundaries of narratives of transmission, organization, and cohesion that often mark scholarly evaluations of European culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. Hall and Tautz also demonstrate how such a study gives rise to the double meaning of network that prevails in this volume: a method of analysis and an object of study. The chapter provides an overview of how the contributors’ focus on networks elucidates the non-linear aspects of experience and expression that shape the texts and objects of Europe at and around 1800. This introduction concludes with a description of the three organizing sections of the volume and the chapters therein.
Chapter 1: “French Salons as Networks, Before and After 1800,” Melanie Conroy
Salons were core institutions of European sociability before and after 1800. Proceeding from this long-established truism, this essay asks how we can use the concept of networks to see the continuities and discontinuities in elite French salons, between 1750-1789 on one hand, and 1800-1830 on the other. This chapter is oriented toward understanding salon guests around 1800, hosted by six prominent salonnières (Geoffrin, Lespinasse, Necker, Genlis, Stäel, and Récamier), using data and methods provided by the Salons Project. By providing a more nuanced account of the major figures and spatial distribution of salons using network analysis and visualization, Conroy reconceptualizes the salon as a cultural phenomenon in relation to places and people outside geographical and socio-discursive center(s). This chapter concludes with an analysis of how the salon world remained integrated in spite of discontinuity and geographic distance provoked by the conditions of the French Revolution.
Chapter 2: “Plappermann’s Wanderjahre: Traveling Declamators and Knowledge Circulation Around 1800,” Mary Helen Dupree
Anxieties about the domestication of previously public modes of literary appreciation as well as the importation of national or cosmopolitan ideals into local spaces were inherent in the German media landscape around 1800. This essay focuses on the satirization of declamation, taking as its point of departure an 1816 satirical short story by Swiss author David Hess entitled “Der wandernde Declamator” (The traveling declamator). Through historical contextualization, Dupree shows how main character Plappermann’s arrival in a provincial bourgeois town bears little resemblance to documented declamator concerts for a cosmopolitan, aristocratic audience already familiar with the texts. In doing so, Dupree demonstrates how Hess’ satire is a comment on this widely diffused knowledge network connecting the provinces to the cites. Dupree’s analysis signals that the genre of declamation was less a mechanism of unity than it was a mode of negotiation of identities and relationships in the German-speaking world around 1800.
Chapter 3: “‘Luftschiff der Phantasie’: Johann Christian Reinhart, Friedrich Schiller, and Artistic Networks around 1800,” Joachim Homann
The creation and circulation of printed images in the years around 1800 reflected and indeed contributed to changing patterns of communication, artistic exchange, and relationships among visual artists and writers. Discussing various transactions (e.g. exchange of prints as gifts; commercial distribution in the marketplace; delayed illustrations), Homann establishes the print as a currency suitable to reframe conceptual underpinnings of social relationships and social capital. Homann takes German painter and printmaker Johann Christian Reinhart (1761-1847) as a case in point. By exploring Reinhart’s friendship with Friedrich Schiller from the perspective of artistic exchange from Italy to Germany, the essay highlights social relationships that blended many of the socioeconomic, cultural, and geographic distinctions that are often used to demarcate a study of networks. Through visual analysis, Homann unpacks the networked aesthetics present in Reinhart’s work before analyzing efforts by Schiller to promote Reinhart’s work in what would otherwise seem incongruous venues. The essay ultimately suggests that the network of collaboration and influence can only be documented through heterogeneous means.
Chapter 4: “Periodicals, Reading Rooms, Paper Shops: Taking Inventory of the ‘Age of Paper’,” Sean Franzel
This essay examines representations of the business of printing, book selling, and paper in Weimar-based publisher F.J. Bertuch’s periodical London und Paris (founded 1798). By familiarizing Bertuch’s readers with aspects of the larger world of publishing, the commentaries draw attention to the uses of paper above and beyond reading material. Franzel contextualizes the claims in London und Paris against the backdrop of Bertuch’s publishing house Landes-Industrie-Comptoir, represented by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Franzel highlights Bertuch’s claims about serial publications as a way to refresh knowledge, mitigate the flood of books that reach market, and thereby shape trends in London and Paris networks while evaluating foreign content for German audiences. Franzel draws on examples from the French, London, and German contexts. Overall, Franzel documents the role of serialized publication in organizing the shifting archive of print materials between Germany and England while preparing readers to navigate that network themselves.
Chapter 5: “Cultivating Contacts: Collectors, Critics and the Public in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Renata Schellenberg
This essay investigates the communication networks established and cultivated by collectors in eighteenth-century Germany. By examining actual networks as well as ideal networks prescribed in journals, the essay shows how actual and ideal contacts helped propagate collecting as a leisure practice, while promoting the overall epistemological value of material culture to the reading public. Schellenberg discusses Christoph Martin Wieland’s journal Teutsche Merkur (1773-89), emphasizing its role in bringing high culture to a general audience, establishing social norms, and mediating exchange between artists and collectors. Schellenberg also closely examines the Weimarer Kunstfreunde (WKF) against a backdrop of connectivity, popularity, and education in order to eventually articulate the reasons for its failure. This reading ultimately shows that while attempts at intentional canonicity persisted, they stand in sharp contrast to the networked, collective efforts at public awareness and participation seen via the Teutsche Merkur and other publications.
Chapter 6: “An Eighteenth-Century New England Library in its European, Material Context,” Crystal Hall
The private book collection belonging to James Bowdoin III (1752-1811) became the foundation of the Bowdoin College library in Brunswick, Maine. At once a network of ideas mediated by agents interested in promoting sales and circulation, the personal library of James Bowdoin is also a sample of the ways in which medium, genre, and language shape bias, exchange, and appropriation of cultural objects across national discourses and languages. Close readings of passages, quantification of material features of the texts, network visualization and analysis of subject headings, and statistical modeling of title groupings together show media-specific levels of cultural identities in the collection in order to argue that early students at Bowdoin College would have confronted multiple different understandings of European culture in their library. By drawing attention to the composition of an eighteenth-century private book collection, Hall documents varieties of transatlantic European identities mediated through networks of textual production beyond the traditional, authoritative book.
Chapter 7: “First Letters,” Nacim Ghanbari
This essay revisits letters outside the “traditional” correspondents’ networks of epistolary exchanges. It presents new interpretations of the genre of a letter, by aligning it not as an indicator of relationships between two people over a period of time, but by examining its status as a “first letter.” The essay sketches the systematic value of “first letters” for the study of social networks around 1800, and it proposes to read this particular permutation of the epistolary genre in all its social effects. Ghanbari uses a 1761 letter from aspiring woman of letters, Anna Louisa Karsch, to the established poet Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim as a frame through which to explore first letters as network-creating documents that must overcome hierarchical and cultural borders. Through Ghanbari’s analysis, the strategy in Karsch’s letter to Gleim becomes apparent: a two-fold commendation of herself through rhetorical prowess and creating a narrative that transforms her from locally-known to nationally recognized poet. Karsch thus invites Gleim to participate in her growth as well as invites herself into his sphere of influence, successfully establishing a bridge between their networks.
Chapter 8: “Mapping the Nation: Foreign Travel in Germany 1772-1839,” Karin Baumgartner
Through their travel narratives, foreign travellers between 1772 and 1839 inscribed a geographic presence onto the European map for the fragmented, emerging Germany which was at the time neither the Holy Roman Empire nor the German nation. This essay explores the central question: what kind of Germany arose in these travelogues from the layers of postal routes, cartography, aristocratic connections, and the priorities of the local tour guides? Baumgartner documents how the emerging nation was depicted primarily by British and French authors, resulting in two competing representations of the territory, people, and culture of Germany. The essay begins with a close reading of Thomas Nugent’s The Grand Tour, or, a Journey through the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and France (1749), before examining how Nugent’s seemingly accurate cartographic knowledge is strongly critiqued by German publisher Friedrich Nicolai’s need to rely on local knowledge instead of the guide. Ultimately, Baumgartner shows that while contemporary German publications refuted the tone and substance of foreigners’ accounts of their nation, they nonetheless used those routes and itineraries as the basis for their own contributions to the genre.
Chapter 9: “A Call for a Concert of Eavesdroppers: Challenges and Opportunities in Reading Beethoven’s Conversation Notebooks,” Peter Höyng
Beethoven’s Konversationshefte, or conversation notebooks, document snippets of discussion, news, and other exchanges in the years 1818-1827 between visitors and the composer, who suffered agonizing hearing loss. Crucially, the notebooks document transient, quotidian, and otherwise ephemeral aspects of post-Napoleonic life in the Metternich era that have no other record. However, this unique recording of an early nineteenth century private communication has been neglected by scholars due to its many challenges in how to “read” it. By eavesdropping on one notebook from these ten years of encounters, this essay outlines a method for comprehensive and holistic analysis of the Konversationshefte, rather than the isolated, repeated references to the same passages from these notebooks that have defined scholarly work to date. Ultimately, Höyng addresses how Digital Humanities facilitates an interdisciplinary, quantitative analysis of Beethoven’s social networks as they present themselves in the notebooks, and highlights opportunities for future research.
Chapter 10: Interview on Social and Conceptual Networks in German Periodicals and the Challenges to Digital Humanities, Matt Erlin and Melanie Walsh
Structured around questions put forth by the editors, Erlin and Walsh discuss opportunities and challenges to Digital Humanities research. Erlin and Walsh introduce their project, which, by analyzing co-publication networks, explores how periodicals represent a mechanism for considering the common ground of European intellectual cohorts around 1800. The questions posed by the editors ask Erlin and Walsh to reflect on the role of process and results in Digital Humanities projects such as theirs, the ways in which Digital Humanities can further the humanistic goal of uncovering a multiplicity of perspectives on experience and expression, and how building their project problematized features of the materials of study by seeing them in different contexts. Erlin and Walsh also use visual examples from their project to demonstrate how networks provide multiple points of entry to a question, to consider if the period around 1800 is particularly appropriate for this kind of study, and the extent to which an exploratory approach can meet the expectations of our current results-oriented scholarly environment.
Chapter 11: “Cosmopolite in Enlightenment Journals: Of Networks and Translation,” Birgit Tautz
By examining the generic expression k/cosmopolit* in German journals, this essay traces semantic differences from the word’s roots in French and English, vis-à-vis weltbürger (citizen of the world) and delineates how presence and disappearance of the term illustrate the making of a canon revolving around ego-histories, while underscoring the lingering presence of translation, and the untranslatable, in an era obsessed with originals and increasingly, with nation. Tautz draws from examples in the 196 Zeitschriften der Aufklärung (Journals of the Enlightenment), casting a wide net that captures aspects of cosmopolitanism’s genealogy beyond the qualities of openness, othering, and ethical imperative that it carries in much modern cultural criticism. Tautz’s exploratory topic modeling helps to reveal the complementary, yet distinct threads of development of the term k/cosmopolit*: the bourgeois nation and politics, France, global miscellanea, and genealogy. Overall, the idea of multiple concepts of cosmopolitanism on one hand, and multi-directional acts of translation on the other complicate any neat (that is, linear) narratives of Enlightenment.
Epilogue: “New Networks?” Crystal Hall and Birgit Tautz
This epilogue briefly takes up the challenges that digital work faces, revealing the deceptive nature of some earlier claims by practitioners of computational analysis and archiving. Hall and Tautz argue that conventional practice and digital interventions are not oppositional or exclusive, but at their strongest when in conversation and collaborative practice. The collection of essays in this volume presents an argument for openness, fractures and incongruities, and the authors note that eighteenth-century writers described a similar landscape, albeit not as an inspirational goal. Ultimately, while traditional cultural historiography considered effects of disruption and resistance an obstacle to be overcome, Hall and Tautz conceive networked thinking as a seed to generate new and alternate, in any case, non-linear histories that invite to be read, interrogated and re-arranged over and over again. The final statement is an invitation to those who would meet that challenge.