Social capital, material cultures, reading:
German and European cultural histories between network and narrative around 1800
Crystal Hall and Birgit Tautz, Bowdoin College
What is in a name? On what this book is and why it matters
Between February and April of 2017, nearly 3500 Twitter accounts posted content that included #Goethe. This sample of data represents a relatively small subset of social media, but one that is instantly complicated by the content and agency of the participants in this online gesture to the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). With retweets (posting the content of another user) and mentions (posting the name of a Twitter account), there were only 3900 connections between them. So, while these users were connected by a common medium and content, they connected to an average of less than one other account in conversation. Even that connection might have been driven by automated content creation: #Goethe was used most often in conjunction with #Nietzsche and #Schiller, posted primarily by the account @NietzscheSource. This handle, the term for a Twitter identity, appears to be associated with what is referred to as a bot, an account that posts based on programmed instructions rather than ad hoc or creative human intervention. @NietzscheSource automatically tweets quotations culled from Project Gutenberg texts by Friedrich Nietzsche. The agency of association between Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schiller could exist then in three formulations that feed the automated content generation for the bot: Nietzsche explicitly mentioned the other authors, editors established connections across their works, or automated text analysis identified a stylistic or thematic relationship among the texts of these three authors (in translation). The first two situations are recognizable acts of contextualized, historicized, critical interpretation, but the third (which may or may not be part of the bot’s programming) implies the detection of relationships based on counting words and the identification of patterns often invisible to the scholar.
All these observations point to a network of agency and resonance, which is the conceptual architecture that seeks to capture the richness of imagining the workings of social capital, material cultures, and reading around 1800. Adding further complexity to networks’ reverberations today, nearly 90 percent of the tweets were retweeted, meaning that the tweet did not generate new content, but reproduced a limited amount of material already in circulation. While @NietzscheSource earned hundreds of these, almost forty were a retweet from @crassusmedia, the handle for an independent publishing house that specializes in journals for writers. The @crassusmedia posts adopted Goethe’s legacy quite differently: “‘A man sees in the world what he carries in his #heart.’ #Goethe#inspiration#quotes#writing.” Goethe takes on a new local valence for the publishing house, but one that is shared around the world in other local contexts. The famed author, who like no other came to define both German literature and Weltliteratur (world literature), appears to have reached the pinnacle of his existence almost 200 years after his death: Goethe’s becoming commodity, his persistence as both (inter)national icon and misunderstood cipher, designates an anonymous social media network that is at once popular and still relevant to scholars of German and European cultures. Perhaps since 2004 (the founding of Facebook) but certainly since 2006 (Twitter), social media has become the means through which we often see networks, with their elusive and illusive representations of community, sharing, cultures, and activism. The #Goethe example reveals that a network after 2000 might be one that exists only in a certain medium, reflects multiple local variations of a larger phenomenon, and shifts critical attention across the digitally present individuals and the multiple natures of their connections. It most certainly does not stand for intention or collaboration among the networks’ actors.
What, then, is (a) network in or around 1800? First, it is a historical fact: a plurality of constellations thriving on relation and marking literary production, dissemination, and reception that existed as the eighteenth century turned. Some narrative patterns evolved, and their subsequent stories proliferated well beyond their origination, often forming legacies and historiographies that gave the impression of linear processes; other stories receded, were eclipsed, or simply vanished from view and the interest of historiographers. People and places, objects and media aligned and intersected in exchange and collaboration, marking connections or simply reverberations and allowing the circulation of things as well as of people and ideas. Second, the term “network” points to a method or approach that became possible at the turn of the twenty-first century and that catapulted established literary and cultural geography into new contexts (such as the one circumscribed by #Goethe).
German and European cultural histories brings the perspective and architecture of established, geographically situated humanities and digital humanities methods to a well-researched yet foundational period in German and European cultural studies and historiography (c.1760–1830). While Goethe’s status was a little more circumspect at the time, he quickly emerged as a key figure around whom German cultural history around 1800 revolved—indeed the Goethezeit (age of Goethe) remains a lingering term to describe the period within German literary and cultural studies—and reclaimed a lasting modernity that continues to impact the stories, debates, and interactions in which we are absorbed today, not least the aforementioned status of and debates around world literature. But these historiographies revolving around individual protagonists or concepts (such as Goethe or the national author) are now being articulated in a more complex manner, namely as ego networks in which the adaptation of Goethe to the Twittersphere forms but one of the components. Many others, unified by the centrality of one element—no matter whether it is a person, object, or concept—can be retrieved and constructed through digital humanities (DH) methods. Goethe thus recalls the not always bygone legacy of ego historiography, while exemplifying the workings of an ego network beyond the actual Goethe, his works, and his times.
The volume represents interventions that engage with the concept of networks, both analog and digital, with their establishment, their successes, and their borders; these interventions offer an opportunity to explore the relationship of DH to traditional areas of scholarship. About half of the contributions rely on close reading practice and explore actually existing networks around 1800—documented personal, material, or social intersections—for their cultural effects (Dupree, Homann, Franzel, Schellenberg, Ghanbari). The digital humanities interventions in other essays serve as a backdrop and inspiration to test and reaffirm these tools and methods (Conroy, Hall, Baumgartner, Höyng, Erlin and Walsh, Tautz). Without entering the ceaseless debate on the definition of digital humanities, the editors and contributors consider three aspects of the field: humanistic inquiry about digital objects (text, image, space, networks), digital or computational methods employed in the service of humanistic inquiry, and humanistic intervention in the development of digital objects or computational analytical methods. Simply put, we collectively pursue this project knowing about the meaningful ways in which digital humanities may alter—even transform—our thinking about the eighteenth century and its impact on human existence and history, without necessarily having to employ DH methods.
In any case, going beyond the protagonists, objects, and relationships of the actual period in cultural history, as well as the hidden histories revealed through DH methods, the year 1800 serves as a metaphor for the massive cultural transitions affecting Europe in the last decades of the eighteenth and first decades of the nineteenth centuries; the turn of the century marks a nodal point in the stories we tell about the objects that signal the advent of modernity. While each essay in this volume adds but one story to the small archive of cultural production assembled here, they can be arranged in sections reflecting the exchanges around 1800: social capital, material cultures, and reading. An additional, final set of contributions addresses the infinite nature of networks as well as the unpredictability of outcomes when applying digital methods. These sections are framed by contributions addressing process-oriented approaches to networks and exploring cultural effects and contexts of reaching beyond “nation” and “1800,” two keywords that consistently surface in this volume.
In some ways, this volume complements Digitizing Enlightenment: digital humanities and the transformation of eighteenth-century studies (2020), which brought similar intentions to the study of French Enlightenment culture in a European context. Like the editors and contributors of Digitizing Enlightenment, we asked ourselves how DH methods revise or at least impact the field of eighteenth-century German and European studies. While Digitizing Enlightenment sets out to capture a titular state-of-the-art approach through several DH methods, offering a wide array of case studies in the second part of the book, we situate our project at the intersection of distant and close, conventional readings. We hope to illustrate the productive symbiosis, despite all tension, that novel and conventional approaches bring to exploring the vexing questions of relating the telos of history to the momentary in time, the neat story to more disruptive tales. We readily acknowledge that this volume can only winnow the view and that it must remain, sadly but inevitably, a snapshot in time. Such awareness informs this book, paired with the knowledge that German-language cultural production was far more decentralized and existed outside the nation. Scholarly (and popular) views of the late eighteenth century have been informed by the legacies that this bygone period has had, and, by turning to networked relations, we attempt to refocus some of the more mundane, abridged, eclipsed, or forgotten moments of innovation and creativity—or knowledge production, for short—that humans engaged in, especially in communal settings. Finally, the materials and methods presented here rely on the ability to comprehend the breadth and variety of the network components, which is significantly assisted through visual representations that can be found embedded in the print volume and expanded upon in the online component of this book.
This book and its interactive representation as a graph of connections deliberately play on the double meaning of network: They refer to configurations of people, social constellations, and objects around 1800 as well as to network analysis, the one digital humanities method prevailing in the book.[1] The contributions in this volume provide a glimpse into the expanded modes of scholarly collaboration and dissemination, which, unlike older models, emphasize process over results and invite ongoing dialogue and contestation. This focus on process extends to reconsiderations of seemingly established scholarship on historical networks, redirecting attention to their making on either side of 1800. Examples capture multiple stages in this process: They range from the visualization of documented attendees at Parisian salons (Conroy) or the creators and imitators of travel networks (Baumgartner) to the reconstruction of networks of artistic exchange (Homann and Schellenberg) to the documentation of relationships that were in formation between literary authors (Ghanbari) and between expressive modes and values (Franzel, Hall, Dupree) or that attached concept to author (Tautz). The connections between the essays can also be understood through the sites of the networks: a focus on objects as the connective tissue between historical figures (Franzel, Ghanbari, Homann, Höyng), capturing the fleeting elements of local instantiations of larger systems of exchange (Franzel, Hall, Schellenberg), the inverse relationship when the local resists the national (Dupree), and interdisciplines in the eighteenth-century sense of the word (Erlin and Walsh, Hall, and Homann). Likewise, the dialogue between the object of study and the methods available for analysis is reflected in the kinds of arguments posited in the volume: linear (Franzel), conceptual (Höyng, Tautz), and reflective (Erlin and Walsh). Previewing these lines of possible renetworking speaks to our intention with this volume, which is to invite open dialogue and exchange, beyond the necessarily confining time and space of a book with a publication date. The open invitation of German and European cultural histories thus captures examples of the permutations of the network as historical fact and methodological approach. It signals that the stories we tell in this book, as well as the archives and remediations these stories draw upon, must remain unfinished, incomplete, and, yes, inconsistent at times, in order to be productive and insightful.
In the process, both the book and its digital apparatus encourage, in reciprocal ways, reading one with and without the other; experiencing the materiality of reading, as well as its virtual impulse, sequel, and accompaniment that suggest alternate modes of perception and gateways into the text; and reflecting on alternate forms of storytelling that emerge as competitors to neatly organized textual convention. Entering the book through an image file or topical tag contained in the digital apparatus, assisted by the network graph of co-occurrences of people, places, and things in the book, organizes a different reading experience from working through an entire section of essays and treating the digital apparatus as an illustration of sorts. This side-by-side arrangement of narratives intersects two trends emerging in this volume, both of which reflect the stage of digital humanities approaches vis-à-vis more conventionally defined work in and across the disciplines devoted to cultural history. While some of the contributors embrace DH in very broad terms, others work primarily with conventional and digital methods of network analysis and, on occasion, reference the tensions between digital and conventional methods of reading. The book form of our work reflects a thematic narrative of eighteenth-century European cultural studies that considers broadly what a network can represent: social capital, artistic influence, material exchange, textual proximities, and national identities. The network representation of the volume through the graph and tags for images in the online digital collaboration hub space allows for the experience of the underlying connections and similarities in methodologies: historiography, network analysis, literary criticism, spatial analysis, and text mining. Moreover, the linked format of digital representations of the books, artworks, people, places, and data visualizations creates an opportunity to see how these objects of study cut across the themes and modes of inquiry. Through this digital, hyperlinked network, the objects can be seen in their multiple contexts, highlighting an affordance of networks as representations and objects of study. Networks intersect, stretch, and encapsulate more conventional modes of narrative storytelling and more linear models of historiography, and thus simultaneously upend and produce tools of cultural analysis. Together, these layers create alternative networks to document processes and outcomes as a way to draw attention to the questions answered and raised by the contributions.
These contributions neither endorse a full-fledged, data-driven, or “enumerated” reading practice, nor dismiss the meaningful intervention enabled by digital humanities. Instead, they seek to recapture a few generative moments of what scholars have described as “reading nations,” that is, communities formed through shared interests or engagement in reading materials, along with nascent processes of culture formation abandoned and/or fueled later on. But, rather than confining themselves to the results of imagining community, the contributions direct our attention to the ancillary elements of the process. Embracing one set of methods does not signal a rejection of the validity or value of others: The complementarity of the results of all of the contributions allows us to learn about the connections between approaches as much as we learn about the cultural phenomena under analysis. In the end, we made the decision to represent and disseminate scholarship by anchoring it in a conventional book—in part, because we wanted to show how digital humanities has altered the lines of inquiries pursued by German and European studies and therefore altered the tradition of scholarship.
Evidently, the essays collected here begin with and return to literary texts, visual culture objects, and historical documents. While a focus on the German lands emerges, the essays’ authors mostly represent the fields of European literary and cultural studies and thus bring a distinct cross- or transnational focus to the German-language resources. Collectively, our contributors tackle a series of questions intended to illuminate the turn of the nineteenth century. 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? How can we describe the complex and dynamic (hence always emergent) system-nature of networks? Or can we? 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 they outline, proscribe, or subvert the more amorphous relationships we circumscribe in the preceding questions?
To be sure, for long periods of literary historiography, texts and books have been treated, almost exclusively, as inventions and reflections of their individual authors, rather than indicators (and parts) of something at once larger and more circumspect, vague, and all-encompassing—origin and effect. This volume problematizes the privileged status of the book in order to examine its contingency upon and complicity within chains of communication, attempts at collaboration, and the construction of identities and relationships beyond the author. Thus, as several contributions show, the text can be the node, the connective edge between nodes, or the site of the network through its representations. The content, conditions of production, and ownership of the object are connected to other writers, producers, and owners. Yet the text also represents and gives structure to the connected people, places, concepts, and objects within it. In short, it seeks to arrest moments of the eighteenth-century present that today seem lost amidst subsequent historization. But can text as object reveal new questions about the period?
Perhaps evading or eliding these far-reaching philosophical questions, the volume’s contributors are interested in unearthing the small, sometimes isolated instances of linguistic and rhetorical constellations that they believe point to or upset larger, often homogenizing, patterns of narrative organization. Other than microhistories that identify those large stories in an individual episode, these subsets of the overall network simultaneously help to build the narrative while necessarily departing from it. Local contributions cannot all exist at the center of the network. Essay authors suggest a surplus or nuance to the material worlds whose stories are told through evidence, empirically gained data, and technologies that have challenged established studies of literary and cultural traditions, canons, and legacies. Several contributions ask to what extent collections assembled around 1800 challenge or define canons in ways that run counter to nineteenth-century (and later) interpretations of the period (Franzel, Schellenberg, Hall). They aim at a larger context of cultural media and mediation, engaging with, yet surpassing, the minutiae of texts. Ghanbari, for instance, uses first letters to expose the power structures of patronage and social hierarchies that are otherwise obscured when mediated via friendships. Dupree shows how popular oral art forms (declamation), though modeled on texts, bridge the social disparity that is thought to have defined engagement with print media and access to salons. By bringing these new materials and perspectives to bear on well-established traditions, the essays propose alternate, forgotten, or eclipsed histories and open paths into new modes of reading, while retaining a critical perspective toward the potentials and shortcomings of data-driven approaches that are increasingly shaping our understanding of digital humanities. Collectively, they show that we should think of innovation and creativity as much more broadly based; thriving no less in relative anonymity and even obscurity, they nevertheless bore dynamic ideas projecting beyond their present moment.
The online material underscores this goal in several ways: The collections section with data visualizations, prints and paintings, texts, and maps puts different media on display, and showcases data-driven methods of exploring networks, including their dynamics of mediation. The design of the online component also adds an important layer. Rather than following a linear way of “illustrating” the essays (cued through abstracts), it invites alternative modes and perspectives of reading and exploration. The index graph represents an example of “expansive networks” that, like the contributions in the fourth section of the book, supplement rather than illustrate the thought processes. Engaging with the index graph and reentering the book invites yet another way of exploring its contents and argument. Above all, we guide the reader to an item that impacts every part of this project, straddling both book and online components: a set of fourteen theses intended to guide and disrupt, reorganize and broaden any conventional reading expectations from the outset (see Figure 1, page 26). The theses conclude this introduction while pivoting to the online component.
Networked people, objects, routes + network analysis = noncausal effects and transformation
In developing the volume’s argumentation and architecture, we proceed from the following: The broad cultural transitions around 1800 were visible not only in life and politics (e.g., revolutions) but also in the organization, production, and dissemination of knowledge represented by the aforementioned categories of exchange that organize the contributions to the volume: social capital, material culture, reading, and challenges to well-worn conceptual anchors of literary historiography such as national imagination (and its often-posited conceptual opposite, cosmopolitan claim). The last section also forms an epilogue, projecting toward new, hitherto underpursued methods of researching and writing. By examining the margins of networks, the extreme edges where people, objects, or routes begin to lose their connectivity to the whole, the section begins to suggest alternatives to narrative, seemingly linear presentations of cultural histories, while underscoring the lingering effects that Germany and Europe and their correlate networks around 1800 continue to have today.
We refrain here from an extensive research overview, focusing instead on broad contours that admittedly simplify and thus distort the research landscape by distilling trends. Influential studies on late-eighteenth-century European cultural networks seem unified by one impulse and goal, namely, to account for the cultural impact of loosely defined, often geographically far-reaching arrangements of interaction and exchange that seemed eclipsed but never eradicated by domineering narratives of cultural history. The latter seek to privilege a teleologically oriented process over constellation at any given moment. Often, as scholars tried to resurrect the networks’ relevance and restore them to their rightful place in history, images of networks emerged that came to resemble a historical looking glass: magnifying a mediated social constellation, often by discerning one formative vector—gender and/or religion, orality and/or performance, the bourgeois household and/or the urban environment come to mind. Almost always, these histories focus on patterns of power marked by dispersion and imbalance by domesticating them in literary genres, the idea of the nation, or literally in the bourgeois home. Public lives are remediated in and through personal, individual expression, simultaneously co-producing and challenging nascent notions of privacy. In the end, networks often appear as an illustration of a temporary event, though occasionally also as an aberration, in a more or less linear story of culture, one that proceeds from a point of origin, often arranges itself in a binary structure, and always toward a telos or conclusion. In short, networks relate to but are not necessarily an integral, easily subsumed part of a narrative organization of literature, culture, history, and, ultimately, life.
Scholars have observed networks’ disruptive patterns in studies on salon culture, travel literature, and trade practices and book exchanges. These studies turn our attention to local events. So-called inter-arts studies, research on “marginal genres” such as letters and autobiographies, and, last but not least, budding interdisciplinary work on epistemological technologies—from performing to publishing to experimenting and exhibiting—have greatly enriched our views of the century that all too long has been defined by concepts of bold narrative histories on either side of the French Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic Wars.[2] While the latter seek to give a sense of completeness and intention, the focus on networked relations emphasizes incomplete, infinite readings that perpetually open new models for thinking about history while avoiding randomness or particularities. While such studies seeking to capture networked European cultures around 1800 remain sparse, an abundance of scholarship testifies to the nation as an emergent and domineering concept shaping textual exchange. However, national thinking is but one network of ideas that emerged in texts and through the exchange of texts.[3]
In this volume, we also think of the involved shifts in intellectual cultures vis-à-vis their products; perplexingly, along with dominant legacies, we have to confront the errant and diffuse when delineating the outcome of these shifts: The emergence of modern academic disciplines stands next to knowledge and information overload; complaints about too many writers, translators, and pseudo-experts; and nascent descriptions of what we today call a media explosion. While all of these descriptors are apt in accounting for the complexity of the Enlightenment and the onset of modernity that progressed, albeit dialectically, all the way into the twentieth century, they also draw attention to another aspect, namely the local (i.e., nonnational) and collaborative atmosphere of cultural life that often reverberated globally. Underlying this sense of overload is a vast corpus that is seldom read with close analysis yet through a broader analytical lens reveals the penetrations and permutations of themes, anxieties, and representations. Pockets of similarity appear across delineations that were once treated as fixed boundaries of medium, genre, nation, and identity. They become visible through a mode of scalable reading that zeroes in on the quantity (of data), patterns, and distance, and that, through the combination of established philology with digital approaches, delineates interpretive case studies as a result.[4] They gesture to an expansive landscape of knowledge production and reception around 1800, while seemingly glossing over the resistance harbored in the physicality of archival materials, including the dimensions of a book, library, or other artifact.[5] Here, traditional and novel approaches intersect, and, consequently, the volume brings this aspect to the fore in both its physical and online components and the actual and virtual intersection of the storylines they harbor.
Between network and narrative: forms
Because network analysis and related digital humanities methods allow scholars to identify communities that are densely interconnected, highly connected central figures, or eccentric and marginalized members, network is the method and the metaphor underlying the collection and through which we imagine the working of social capital, material cultures, and reading. Although we see this book as a culture-historical project, we are less concerned with causally produced effects and their narration than with the conditions of meaning that resonate through and are sometimes eclipsed by time. We trace conditions of meaning, “accounting,” in the words of Matthew Kirschenbaum, “for all people and things that make meaning possible, each in their own irreducible individuality.”[6] We add genres, concepts, and technologies to this list. And, rather than surveying a number of pathbreaking studies on network analysis and digital humanities,[7] we probe contributions to our discussion that introduce unanticipated angles. One example is Caroline Levine’s Forms: wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, networks (2015). What seems, at first glance, another attempt at litigating the relative merits of formal versus contextual literary analysis—or a focus on text and social worlds, respectively—yields unexpected insights for our understanding of the intersection between network-driven, DH-mediated approaches and “traditional” close readings. Levine’s point of departure, namely that form is the basic constituent of aesthetic and sociopolitical patterns, resonates with our understanding of transformation in German and European cultural history around 1800. Indeed, as we shall see throughout the volume and in the accompanying online materials, the various components and effects of networked constellations constrain, differentiate, overlap, and intersect—even “stretch” and travel amongst each other. Collision replaces causation; affordance or potential replaces intent.
Forms, including the quest for wholesome imageries and repetitions, structure the networks and cultural practices under investigation—or at least our discussion of them, no matter how erratic they appear to be or how much we labor to identify their uniqueness and departure from well-known “linear” histories. Rather than contributing to a narrative told through time, possibly moving from one perspective to the next and thus envisioning change as an orderly or even causal process, these networked practices generate a simultaneity of narratives that at times cross and disrupt each other, often collapsing time and exposing cracks and fizzles in a neatly ordered understanding of history and culture.[8] Such linear and nonlinear histories intersect to explore the tension and constant replication between totality and gaps. In this way, for example, the contents of a letter can be problematized against other correspondence, yes, but also among other correspondents with similar network features. Or, for instance, the local, seemingly isolated salon can be contextualized within a larger structure of social exchange to evaluate its commonalities or differences from those other structures. Attaining hierarchies reveals a surprisingly disorderly impact of hierarchical thinking.
Not surprisingly, though, Levine’s work with “network” proves most challenging and affirming in our context. Like us, she begins by acknowledging that networks seem to resist form and certainly confound any idea of form as containing. And, while they are defined by connectivity, they nevertheless espouse knowable rules and patterns.[9] The network offers a way to compare the role of qualitative features of these interactions, that is, to explore at a larger scale the (in)consistencies of relationships once the people, texts, and places have been described. Rather than precisely linear, this process can be centripetal or centrifugal. For example, the network might reflect authors’ attempts to connect with a powerful central subject, editor, patron, or printer. Conversely, it could provoke the scholar to explore an avant-garde movement away from those centers. The centers close to which or away from which the pieces of the network appear are identified not necessarily by nations, but by themes, images, and experiences. As shown by the directors of the project Nineteenth-Century Publishers’ Series in the British Library, Katie McGettigan and Paul Raphael Rooney, network representation can challenge post hoc categorization by nationality and even chronologies limited by the life dates of an author by addressing the pull of readership, editors, and seriality. The individuals, texts, and objects often occupy the same spaces and milieus, but can also cut across social hierarchies. Labor, materials, and physical realities play important roles in the eventual labels of connectivity and eccentricity. In other words, networks endorse distinct forms and reveal hitherto unknowns.
At the same time, networks put intense pressure on well-worn, traditional forms. They work against the whole as a unifying, binding expression—or telos—of cultural experience. Among our contributions, Baumgartner’s study on travel networks reveals the tension between movement and nation, the ideas of domestic ideals and the foreign, as well as the at once unifying and transcending impulse that comes from repeating, imitating, and translating existing narratives of the Grand Tour. By drawing attention to translations, Baumgartner probes an important force that may destroy and substitute forms; this suggestion is also at play in Hall’s discussion of library collections and Tautz’s engagement with the conceptual rise of cosmopolitanism. Through a completely different gesture, Höyng’s focus on Beethoven’s Konversationshefte (Conversation notebooks)—a chronicle and pattern of the composer’s deafness—challenges well-known assumptions and tales of the composer’s biography. Conversely, the intersection with established, bounded wholes (e.g., nation, biography) stretches the network, which provokes a useful distortion for understanding our objects of study. As Dupree documents, while national narratives take hold and from the outset reach beyond the nation, they find resistance in local instantiations of an event, text, or grouping; they not only give concomitant rise to ideas of the popular, but also trace a festering oral culture. Conroy, in contrast, highlights how challenging national myths with local network identification allows the historian to gain new perspectives on the temporal unfolding of metaphors or narratives previously thought as closed. Similarly, her insights force a rethinking of transposing scholarship on salon cultures into other national contexts, encouraging us instead to proceed from local conditions and repercussions, including nonurban settings.
Nodes, edges, narratives
The combination of approaches involves several shifts and fractures that expose our epistemic threshold moment: Not only have we begun to think of networks in a succinct conceptual manner along the lines of cultural, institutional, and structural parameters—and always against the background of data models and infrastructures—but we have also embraced the toolkit of digital humanities as one that allows us to view and consider tradition in new ways. While contributors engage with this mode of analysis at different depths, certain terms and principles remain consistent across essays. Chief among these is establishing the connections (called edges) between people, objects, cities, texts (called nodes). The nodes exist in all of their complexity: They are a name in a ledger, a woman, a foreigner, a Catholic, and an actress all at once, thus collapsing the single formative vectors of gender, religion, language, and nation into a single abstraction. Edges represent attributes of historical, material, literary, or social conditions of the nodes: that two people attended a salon (Conroy), two words appeared in a title (Erlin and Walsh), two cities formed the leg of a tour (Baumgartner), or two subject headings are used to describe a book (Hall). The strength of the network as an analytical tool derives from being able to compare the connectivity of a pair of nodes (a local or micro instance) with patterns of connectivity in the network overall (Ghanbari, Homann, Tautz). Critical attention is given to the groups of nodes that are highly interconnected with one another and the nodes that bridge those groups or are eccentric to them, such as attendees at one salon and notable figures who were invited to the events of several salonnières (Conroy). The scholar must therefore toggle between the local and the general features of the edges, and between the specific and abstract features of the nodes—for example, the exchange of a drawing and the symbolic capacity of its content. Moreover, in this volume, the section on textual spaces emphasizes the edges (the different types of connections that bind ideas and objects), while the social capital essays focus on the nodes (the identities and characteristics of people, places, and things). This allows us to compare how catalogs and inventories can document relationships (edges) and the agency of individuals (nodes) to create those constellations. These contributions take configurations as their object of study.
Established cultural histories are arranged typically as grand narratives engaging with origin, telos, or the binary (or a dialectic) of inclusion and exclusion. Networks, conceived within this model of thinking, illustrate but one possible configuration of participation in that narrative, contingent upon the attributes of participants. For example, as Conroy argues in her contribution to the volume, salon attendees were often literary, political, and artistic, moving through multiple networks and multiple identities in their social lives, even though conventional approaches depict one attribution as more defining than others. Importing the network idea as conceived by digital humanities, even if its methods are not employed, upsets the established logic; it recognizes constitutive force, creates the ability to challenge narrative, exposes gaps, and destabilizes the origin story or purposes that have been inherited from epistemologies with their own histories and priorities.
Though well versed in this language of digital network analysis, several essays marshal alternative methods against this backdrop, using modes of thinking along edges and nodes to challenge more conventional presentations of influence, development, and cultural shifts (Franzel, Dupree, Ghanbari, Tautz). They participate in a trend that emphasizes the archive as a primary cognitive figure, not an actual place, to structure scholarly work. The last decades have seen new archives emerge and generated new practices of engaging with these archives and moving toward generative scholarship. Projects such as the Early Caribbean Digital Archive have demonstrated compellingly that the latter, in turn, not only produced new research questions but challenged us toward new observations about the old and recovered a richly textured, even more ethical knowledge of the past. In the process of constructing this volume, synchronically and diachronically arranged insights emerge regarding cultural moments shaping the decades at either side of 1800 as an epistemic threshold as well as insights into the subsequent 250 years, with select moments/periods coming into sharp relief, all of which have shaped the ways in which we view the late eighteenth century and write tradition. Any book on multifaceted networks is therefore also one of revision, reexamination, and retellings of tradition, leading up to the formulation of nonlinear histories. Somewhat antithetical to what scholarly books are, namely a capsule of knowledge at any given point or period in time, this one attempts to shift focus toward multifaceted processes that capture a plurality of voices, sets of knowledges, and forms that open lines of inquiry. Often these openings occur simply by trying to read through the lens of new interpretive orders.
The power of data, the power of convention, the power of networks
Another observation shapes our engagement with the facets of network analysis. In creating the historical and theoretical framework of exploring and reconstituting networks, the volume provides an exhibition of different ways of engaging with network and network theories that today appear tied to European (especially German) and North American scholarly contexts. But these geographical attributions are deceptive at best and have become ever more porous, even during the development of the present project. Whereas the European tradition has pursued a pragmatic, somewhat intuitive use of sociological approaches to group dynamics, to multidirectional and interpersonal exchanges, and, eventually, to network formation, US-based scholars enlist models appealing to Bruno Latour’s writing on networks (at least when it comes to moving beyond the application of computer science methods and technical capabilities). Where European, in particular German, scholars remain indebted to philological traditions—leading to the coinage of the term Medienphilologie (digital philology) and associated theory and practice—and have long shied away from crossing into the messier territory of data as the purview of digital humanities,[10] scholars based in North America are deploying new modes of reading, revolving around data generated by network analysis and laying the foundation for—and indeed representing—new, exploratory material. This material includes the metadata about our objects of study, that is, the data about the data: the contours of its creation, use, preservation, and place in the archive. Metadata and new interpretations of text corpora, text context, and text archiving support what scholars suggest may arise from reading the exploratory material; at this juncture in the scholarly dialogue, both “schools” remain cautious to surrender sole authority to the explanatory power of data. While recent studies have moved toward data-driven methods, culminating in the data modeling of and for processes of reading literature—intending to advance, deepen, and revise central tenets of literary study—we prefer to focus on illuminating the tensions at the core of a practice that straddles exploration and explanation.[11] We aim to focus on divergences, approaching what some might consider the earliest debates lingering in the decades before any sustained, academy-driven practice of literary and cultural interpretation. By demonstrating how divergences work together in an observation of nonlinear, noncausal effects of collaboration, exchange, and articulation, we provide a fuller picture of the potential and risks of distant readings.
Despite their differences, both approaches are complementary and united as they seek responses to one predominant, vexing question: 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? Does it matter whether networks, which always involve relations and, inevitably, degrees of cooperation, posit themselves intentionally and institutionally or simply aggregate? European approaches seem to emphasize the social aspect of historical networks, charting their paths away from a premodern culture of patronage, dependency, and dominance and convergence with modern societies’ functional transformation and moves away from social hierarchies, etiquette, and form.[12] Emphasizing immanent dynamics, these approaches nevertheless unfold (or correlate with) linear historiographies that they interpret through synchronic moments. In fact, by cycling through elements of accumulation and disruption, and diving deep into the archive of the communication network and its bibliographic traces, contributors redirect our collective gaze to the conditions of historiographical narrations and their implied continuity, progress, and linearity that have erased nuance, individuality, and singularity. Anglo-American approaches underscore, at least at first glance, the techné dimension of the network; they thus define network primarily in technical terms, namely as an expression of the technologies—and the modes of expression and reception (e.g., seeing and hearing, writing, and reading)—involved in constituting modernity. In their complementarity, these approaches straddle the manifold lines between the lives of individuals and their relationships with people and to things (objects and archives). To return to Levine’s approach, they expose the forms of literary and artistic life and of sociohistorical context in all of their messy intersection rather than correlation. Therefore, these approaches also bring into sharp relief the question of designating power: What matters in constituting networks—the intention of actors or the aggregate effects of their actions? 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? Conceptually, these effects have been linked to archives that, since they have the capacity to store both material and techniques, seem to encompass objects. In relation to the year 1800, to what extent do these objects document the shift between what we now understand broadly as the Enlightenment and modernity?
The individual actor and the network turn out to be the crucial elements in mapping the constellations of modernity by conglomerating the media of communication, action, and the relations they signify and, ultimately, archive. Whoever chooses to save an object, chooses to give agency to the networked nodes it represents; exclusion is continued rejection (obliteration) of agency. Traditionally, that translated into a repository along the lines of actual collections, archives, and libraries, whereas today these relations may create virtual depositories simulating ideas of order, storage, and documentation that we all know to be part of the physical library,[13] or elusive social media networks such as the one described in our opening section. While efforts to gain advantage through networks predate our period of study, this research on 1800 outlines a shift in power structures for mobility, visibility, and accessibility. Particularly with networks that arise from texts (Baumgartner, Ghanbari, Höyng), our attention is drawn to the connective edges, to their existence rather than to the agency of the nodes involved in their creation or perpetuation. Conversely, networks derived from personal interactions privilege the nodes, the individuals, and their subjectivity within those structures. Importantly, this reempowers the audience and parodist, not just the author, in the creation and preservation of culture (Dupree). The scales and contexts for communicating, acting, and interacting expand networks beyond traditional loci of power and invite a reconsideration of the archives that they, in many senses, have determined.
Digital humanities enable and expose this multilayered archiving. They redirect, if not preserve, our access to different, stubborn materials that each on their own encapsulate a moment. Though doomed and “a medium to be out-engineered […] they become our hedge against oblivion.”[14] They provide a way to recreate and evaluate multiple perspectives and multiple possible orderings of the repository. Network graphs built from different assumptions about the relationships between people, materials, and themes can juxtapose a retrospective scholarly order against a conceptual schema that arises from lesser-studied or less visible attributes of those same objects of study. In this way, standard biographical and bibliographical metadata do more than demarcate the representational value of that content; the metadata are in conversation with the content of primary sources. The network becomes a site for an implosion of both: established modes of writing cultural histories—hermeneutic interpretations of texts and contexts undertaken by individual authors—and the traditional delineation of discreet, academic disciplines. But, rather than supplanting the single author with a collective and allowing concepts, terms, and microhistories to emerge in professed synergy, as has most recently been proposed by The Multigraph Collective’s Interacting with print (2018), we suggest alternative modes. The network allows for a reassembly of attributes that is generative, as a representation of relationships to analyze, evaluate, and problematize. It also allows for a better understanding of how scholarly work in literary studies may be organized, distributed, and hierarchized, or simply unfold, now and in the future.[15]
Thus, whereas The Multigraph Collective draws our attention to the media ecology of materials of study (and relegates hitherto important constitutive elements of the archive, such as the Werkedition—edition of author’s works—to the margins), German and European cultural histories capitalizes on the media ecology of literary, historical, and cultural scholarship; it uncovers the fault lines, priorities and omissions, values and distortions of linear, mostly national historiographies. As Matt Erlin and Melanie Walsh identify in their reflective contribution, the creation of the network representation of the objects leads to a broader understanding of the features of those objects. Similarly, our book emphasizes the process at the heart of generating concepts, terms, and microhistories in the historical network, while the contributors step back and record this process. In other words, where The Multigraph Collective emphasizes the joint writing among scholars, we document the networks that arise in the essays and between the essays in German and European cultural histories, signaling that scholarship is always in the making.[16]
At the same time, the evidence and arguments presented by some of the contributions push back against the impression that digital humanities struggles to produce results. Erlin and Walsh expand upon this idea in their reflections on their large-scale project, and the essays by Baumgartner, Conroy, Hall, and Höyng offer examples of how the representation interacts with our understanding of the objects, the individuals, or the contexts in which they existed. By offering the ability to see connections between materials, approaches, and digital representations of scholarly engagement with 1800, the index graph to this volume engages the reader in this generative, nonlinear problematization of connectivity in the organization, production, and dissemination of knowledge today. It showcases new views of the historical networks around 1800. Like Interacting with print, the essays collected here also resist the alignment of social and material culture with national cultures.[17] Nevertheless, alignments with different modern languages do emerge. The communities analyzed here are not imagined, but documented, primarily through textual sources; they attest to local thematic affinities that are similar across national borders. But, unlike existing studies of such local networks, German and European cultural histories does not fold back onto the local textual source to tell the story and historical legacy of the locale, but uses it to highlight and interrogate the eccentricities of cultural history.
Thus, something else we hope to accomplish comes to the fore: Here, as elsewhere, the outcomes of digital humanities research are often iterative results. They are iterative in the sense that the addition or removal of an element has the potential to significantly alter a digital, quantitative representation of the relationships between materials. Likewise, a newly considered qualitative aspect of the object of study will provoke a different network representation. By extension, our aspiration is that reading or seeing the chapters in their different networked configurations will prompt the same iterative process. Although this shift in interpretation has always occurred, as scholars problematize the roles of different works within a given context, the impact on the overall understanding of a period, national literature, or genre has felt more incremental, slowed by publishing schedules and access. With a network graph, the microstructures of smaller communities can immediately be compared to similar structures (see Conroy, Hall, Höyng). Canonical pieces are in constant conversation with secondary and minor texts, but the result is dependent on analytical choices and the priorities of the graph’s designer.
Questions of scale and granularity dominate—in particular, intratextual network analysis, which documents the connections across texts via the shared appearance of names, terms, or concepts. The consequences of choices about the number of documents or data points to consider and the size of the text to analyze limit the representational capacity of the resulting graph. Does the network capture all titles, all letters, or all destinations? Are the relationships driven by co-presence, exchange of dialogue, or diegetic attributes? How are items defined as being present together—by being mentioned together in a chapter or by sharing the same diegetic time and space? The representation can only answer the questions encoded into the data collection and organization. If the feature extraction is automated, based on patterns assumed to exist with a certain regularity in the text, then certain nuances of expression are inevitably invisible to the graph. At the same time, redefining centrality mathematically can reveal other kinds of marginalization and eccentricity. In all likelihood, the online representations of data, while fueling the scholarly readings put forth in the contributions, also challenge any dominant narratives emerging in the sections and across the printed book.
Nevertheless, we are wary of taking definitive stock as Andrew Piper does, perhaps unintentionally, in Enumerations: data and literary study (2018). In reflecting on and erstwhile concluding his personal process of engaging with digital humanities, he offers an important account of the possibilities and pitfalls, pros and cons of reading digitally and quantitatively. While one could challenge the binary structure embedded in the title—one that is subverted across the book—our intention is, again, different. We agree with Piper’s observations, the first of which he makes in an uncanny allusion to Levine—namely, the repetitions that data-driven approaches reveal and that are at work in producing and reproducing literary and cultural life. In a second observation, he compellingly argues that literary studies have been defined by generalizations. In the purview of this collection, it seems that we ought to challenge these general observations, in order to advance both DH methods and literary studies, which, behind the curtain of seemingly impartial data, always draw attention to figuration, singularity, and the nongeneral. Only by unleashing the humanistic, nonautomatic potential of DH in literary studies will either have a future.
Effects: the architecture of this book
We named the four sections of this book for the discursive trends we saw emerging in the knowledge networks, which defined our exchanges.
While, at first glance, a focus on people—the social actors—and the capital they possess seems to unify the three contributions in the “Social capital” section, a more complex understanding of capital comes to the fore, one that entwines actors and their movements, the products they forge and the stories they tell. But we also see the tokens of exchange that these actors leverage for more idealist and immaterial outcomes, such as friendship (Homann), recognition, and elusive power (Conroy)—or, more circumspect already then, caricature (Dupree); in the process, the fragility of those terms becomes visible, in addition to their accumulative effects. By pinpointing and circumscribing these concepts, social capital marks a tension: between continuity and linearity, or even between teleology and progress, which have traditionally been associated with the respective events and the disruptions or movements that become visible through the network. Conroy’s debunking of the narrative that the French Revolution was the disrupting event par excellence serves as perhaps the most impressive example.
If social actors form nodes in thus imagined networks, their products resemble nodes in the “Material cultures” section. But paper and books, collections, and libraries also engender the edges, the entailed impact, and the connections that these materials may have had. These edges cannot just be described as transactions, but also make up chains of transmission that become entangled, interlaced, and knot-like. Attempts to organize the proliferation of print material both constrain the possibility of transnational knowledge networks (Hall) and speak to the Weimar appropriation of European cultural trends (Franzel). In contrast to that outward-facing construction of national identity, Schellenberg documents local resistance to that overarching characterization and homogenization. Agency here is diffused beyond centralized figures since the objects (the inventories and itineraries) create both things to mediate and ways to mediate them. Although the contributions to the “Material cultures” section draw heavily on textual sources, we distinguish here between the text as a vehicle of transmission to establish connections between people and places and the text as the (only) site in which a network can be said to exist.
The section entitled “Reading” approaches the latter, drawing attention to edges that are defined by nodes collocated in a document and perhaps nowhere else found together. For example, Höyng outlines individuals who may have never met but appear on the same page of Beethoven’s conversation notebooks in networks that reveal a previously lost glimpse of daily life. The section asks what networks of such textual neighbors can reveal about the larger cultural environment in which they were created. Ghanbari and Baumgartner both reveal nascent networks of patronage and tourism. Whereas Ghanbari chronicles how writers, via their “first letters,” attempted to forge as well as stifle networks of communication, at times disrupting or leaning on existing correspondents’ networks, Baumgartner redirects our attention to the networked, loose intertextuality that travel guides formed with prior, model guidebooks and through translation. Cities may have been connected only by circuitous routes or through local knowledge rather than by direct road access. Networks arise from the contents of the text rather than from the configuration of authors or agents in their production. And by tuning in to texts only, rather than paying attention to the reputation and legendary standing of the person behind the page, we allow different, nonlinear histories of culture to emerge. They are nearly always more complex than established scholarship would have it, and often implode long-held beliefs.
Operating behind all of these sections is the question of nation (and national identity) in a moment of knowledge expansion, bringing with it translation and transmedia expression—even if the national is not articulated as a center around which networks revolve. The concluding pieces, in the “Expansive networks” section, encourage the reader to consider what (if any) boundaries can be attached to the network. Erlin and Walsh consider methodological questions and challenges to networks (and digital humanities, more broadly), while Tautz chronicles the rise of cosmopolitanism as a concept that juxtaposed nation, creating and simultaneously undoing networks in favor of teleological history. The authors of the epilogue problematize the finality of any hermeneutic structure—no matter how much we desire it as scholars and authors—and they challenge the interpretative traditions that rest upon hermeneutics. Their approach invites a reconsideration and reconfiguration of the network metaphor, which the reader should take as a prompt to explore the alternative configurations suggested/invited/enabled by the index graph for the book. Finally, the short theses in Figure 1—with an obvious nod to Emily Apter who introduced the format in similar fashion in The Translation zone (2006)—seek to capture and provoke yet another mode of thinking about the underlying architecture of social capital, material cultures, reading, and take the titular cue provided by the “Expansive networks” section quite literally.[18]
See the online figure currently available in the digital collaboration hub for this volume at https://liverpooluniversitypress.manifoldapp.org/projects/german-and-european-cultural-histories/resource/VolumeIndex and https://learn.bowdoin.edu/network-1800/social-capital-material-cultures/ (last accessed June 21, 2023). ↑
See, for example, recent research on epistolary discourse: Was ist ein Brief? Aufsätze zu epistolarer Theorie und Kultur / What is a letter? Essays on epistolary theory and culture, ed. Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig and Caroline Socha (Würzburg, 2018). On knowledge and performance, see Performing knowledge, 1750–1850, ed. Mary Helen Dupree and Sean Franzel (Berlin, 2015); on cultural objects, see Anke Te Heesen, The World in a box: the story of the eighteenth-century picture encyclopedia (Chicago, IL, 2002), and the work by The Multigraph Collective, discussed in greater detail below. ↑
A case in point is the vigorous discussion of trade networks and their nonalignment with nation—for example, in several presentations and sessions at the 2022 convention of the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS). ↑
Jan Horstmann and Rabea Kleymann, “Alte Fragen, neue Methoden: philologische und digitale Verfahren im Dialog—ein Beitrag zum Forschungsdiskurs um Entsagung und Ironie bei Goethe,” Zeitschrift für digitale Geisteswissenschaften (2019), DOI: 10.17175/2019_007. ↑
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Bitstreams: the future of digital literary heritage (Philadelphia, PA, 2021), p.13. See also Horstmann and Kleymann, “Alte Fragen, neue Methoden.” ↑
Kirschenbaum, Bitstreams, p.14. ↑
We are indebted to the work of Scott Weingart for introductory and conceptual research on network analysis across the disciplines in The Network turn: changing perspectives in the humanities (Cambridge, 2020) and Exploring big historical data: the historian’s macroscope (London, 2015). In general, conventional studies embracing network terminology grapple with cultural history and its inherent ordering impulse. See for example Ann Blair, Too much to know: managing scholarly information before the modern age (New Haven, CT, 2011), and Chad Wellmon, Organizing enlightenment: information overload and the invention of the modern research university (Baltimore, MD, 2015). ↑
For an example drawn from Scottish literature, see Andrea Stewart, “‘The limits of the imaginable’: women writers’ networks during the long nineteenth century,” Victorian review 45:1 (2019), p.39–57. ↑
Caroline Levine, Forms: wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, networks (Princeton, NJ, 2015), p.112–13. ↑
A robust example countering this preference is the Zeitschrift für digitale Geistes-wissenschaften, published online at https://zfdg.de/ (and in printed issues that are also available as open access). ↑
The example that comes to mind is Andrew Piper, Enumerations: data and literary studies (Chicago, IL, 2018). While he does not use terms like “explanatory” and “exploratory data,” advancing instead “distributive semantics” in order to emphasize alliances with information science, computer science, and linguistics, we prefer our terms to address more realistically the (opportunities for) work with data across the humanities and in academic institutions of different sizes and options for networking. See also our discussion below. ↑
On sociological network theory, see Nacim Ghanbari, “Netzwerktheorie und Aufklärungsforschung,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 38:2 (2013), p.315–35. Furthermore, for a succinct research overview, see Hannes Fischer and Erika Thomalla, “Forschungsbericht: Literaturwissenschaftliche Netzwerkforschung zum 18. Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift für Germanistik, Neue Folge 26:1 (2016), p.110–17. ↑
See, most recently, Venkat Mani, Recording world literature (New York, 2017). ↑
Kirschenbaum, Bitstreams, p.8. ↑
In this sense, we agree with Jo Guldi, “The common landscape of digital history: universal methods, global borderlands, longue-durée history, and critical thinking about approaches and institutions,” in Digital histories, ed. Mats Fridlund and Mila Oiva (Helsinki, 2020), p.327–49 (337): “Just as critical theory pushed out the set of uncritical liberal targets of research that came before it, so, it might be expected, will the new goals of digital history displace some of the focus of the scholarly record before them.” ↑
The “Epilogue” of The Multigraph Collective, Interacting with print: elements of reading in the era of print saturation (Chicago, IL, 2018), p.305–10, closely resembles our approach. ↑
See The Multigraph Collective, Interacting with print, p.5 and 13. ↑
Emily Apter, The Translation zone: a new comparative literature (Princeton, NJ, 2006). ↑