Introducing the Online Companion to German and European cultural histories, 1760-1830: between network and narrative

Crystal Hall and Birgit Tautz

The online collection of digital objects discussed in the essays of German and European cultural histories, 1760-1830: between network and narrative creates an experiential opportunity to engage with the themes of the subtitle. By providing digital versions of some of the materials in the print volume, we reproduce the narrative of German and European cultural histories, 1760-1830 as expressed by the essay authors and our critical framing in the introduction and epilogue. By visualizing the connections of people, places, and things mentioned together in essays, we offer alternative orderings and arrangements of those arguments and their evidence. Each contribution, but most intentionally the introduction to the volume (presented as part of this digital companion) sits between the ideas of network and narrative, connecting or dividing them as the authors’ methods and evidence allow. The online companion also provides an expanded explanation of the technical principles that underlie the Digital Humanities methods applied by some of the authors.

Importantly, the site offers an alternative point of entry to the volume, but relies on the agency of the site visitor to participate in the theoretical arguments posited by the network of scholarly contributions contained therein. The online companion in many ways shifts onto twenty-first century scholarship the questions of organization, production, dissemination, and reception at the turn of the eighteenth century that motivate the central arguments of the essays.

Visual and textual evidence from the volume is available for consultation in a linear form that follows the narrative of the essays: the ordered set of abstracts, the list of figures and tables, and tags. Tags reproduce the sections of the volume in which the object is presented and analyzed: social capital, material culture, reading, and expansive networks. Using the tag feature retains the compartmentalization of the print volume while deprioritizing the prose interpretation offered by the essays' authors.

At the same time, visitors to this online collaboration hub are invited to participate in a nonlinear reading of the book, using the networks of digital objects afforded by the Manifold platform: collections and embedded graphs of relationships. Collections highlight the similarities of objects and evidence from the essays: data visualizations (charts, graphs, and tables), maps, prints and paintings, and texts. In this way the commercial prints of stationers' shops in England, France, and Germany studied by Franzel enter into conversation with Schiller's social brokerage through Italian and German-situated artworks presented by Homann, the result of which was also meant for sale. These two essays participate in different sections of the volume, but their objects of study are placed in direct conversation via this organization, in a way that might not be apparent in spite of their contiguity in print. Perhaps more provocatively, the collection of texts offers a way to explore what printed text looked like across Europe, forms of text, and intended audiences. Importantly, we need to acknowledge what has not been collected here: evidence that is not represented visually. This method of representing the book has thus excluded arguments raised and defended about art collecting across national boundaries, the transmission of cultural narratives from urban centers, and the establishment of influential relationships through first letters.

The critical introduction to the volume sits both between and above these representations of the concepts of network and narrative addressed by the authors. The status of the introduction's framing and evaluation of the contents of the book are both reinforced and subverted by the graph of connections between people, places, and things that are mentioned in the chapters. As such, this online companion continues the work of the volume by challenging the privileged status of the book and the author in understandings of culture, history, and concepts such as nation.

On the one hand, the individual essays provide answers to the questions that we raise in the introduction:

• How did people communicate and collaborate around 1800?
• Which networks were actually formed?
• How were these networks enhanced and/or eclipsed by subsequent cultural historiographies that mostly favored national or author-driven narratives over local, group, or otherwise fractured collaborations?
• How did these networks mitigate and negotiate the internal, always perpetuating forces that interacted in order to sustain the network in a self-organizing manner, no matter how hidden it seemed?
• Does it matter whether networks, which always involve relations and, inevitably, degrees of cooperation, posit themselves intentionally and institutionally or simply aggregate?
• What matters in constituting networks, —the intention of actors or the aggregate effects of their actions?

On the other hand, the graph of people, places, and things mentioned by the authors of the essays raises more provocative questions about the nature of scholarly work in cultural studies and historiography:

• How can we describe the complex and dynamic (hence always emergent) system-nature of networks? Or can we?
• In an age like the eighteenth century, where we witness an explosion of exchanges—of people and goods, ideas and information, to name a few—how can we articulate the ensuing networks if the individuals involved and co-creating them cannot?
• That is, to what extent does the scholar reveal a structure that determined those relationships or a structure upon which the individual capitalized on personal achievement?
• And, perhaps towering above them all, there is the question about the seemingly privileged status of the book—or rather the texts that books contain: How do networks outline, proscribe, or subvert the more amorphous relationships we circumscribe in the preceding questions?

In particular, our supplemental document describes network analysis terminology and topic modeling while offering examples of methodologies employed in the chapters and addressing the limitations of those methodologies. By relying on the index of terms and concepts within each chapter, this digital collaboration hub also offers pathways through the content of the volume that diverge from the linear organization of its print counterpart. In addition to a traditional page index, we have developed a network representation of the people, places, and things that are mentioned together in an essay in the volume. We ran a community detection algorithm in the software Gephi to identify clusters of nodes that are highly interconnected. While we might expect that cluster detection would simply reproduce the contents of each essay (resulting in 13 communities), the clusters are topical. The nine groups are color-coded in the graph, with the nodes that appear in multiple communities shown larger. Starting from the top center in black, poets and musicians, cosmopolitanism and translation in teal, international travel in cerulean, libraries in purple, salons in beige, journals in orange, local travel in green, and letter writers in pink.

After clicking on the graph, site visitors will be taken to an interactive version of this data.

In the interactive version, clicking on a node in the graph will show a scrollable list of the other people, places, and things to which it is related. For example, readers will notice the ways in which the city of Berlin is connected to multiple topics represented by the essays. In this way, the graph tries to capture what the authors argue throughout: that nodes can represent more than one thing simultaneously.

This index for the volume is both comprehensive and incomplete, seeming fixed and yet extensible. More could be added (concepts, primary sources, secondary scholarship cited). The intersections of the constellations should be explored for concepts that defy boundaries. The extreme edges should invite us to explore where connectivity is lost in this volume. They might also suggest where connectivity will begin in a new scholarly conversation about German and European cultural histories, 1760-1830, or beyond.