References to my protagonists in the Nova Acta Eruditorum, 1732-1776
Friday n° 46, August 30th, 2019
As an
Apology: Beyond the Ivory Tower…
…there is
an everyday realm which does not always comply with the plans made inside the
ivory tower. In my case, this meant that renovating one room to make it into a
third children’s room went a bit out of control and took far longer than I had
planned – which caused me to skip the post that would have been due last week
already. I’m sorry, but I can promise with a clear conscience that this will
not happen again. I don’t have got any other rooms to renovate. But since I’m
done with that room now, here’s what I’ve found since then.
Into the
forests and up into the Mountains
Well, I went back into the paper forest of learned journals, this time tackling the only one left to do for my comparative study, the Nova Acta Eruditorum, appearing in Leipzig in continuation of the Acta Eruditorum from 1732 until 1776 (technically until 1782, but there were no more issues since 1776). And to my surprise, I discovered a significant peak. I’m not sure yet if it really qualifies as a towering mountain, but at least it appears to be one if put into a diagram properly. What becomes visible here is that the Nova Acta Eruditorum took quite a liking to Adriaan Reland, who is referred to on 57 pages in the 25 years between 1732 and 1756 which you see to the right of this paragraph, dwarfing all my other protagonists. This is more than four times the number of references to the next in line, Eusèbe Renaudot, who is referred to 14 times during this period, and more than double the number of the references to all the other three combined, which total 27 for these years: Renaudot’s 14 plus 9 for Thomas Gale and 4 for Johannes Braun.
The peak in Reland references in the Nova Acta Eruditorum between 1737 and 1754, compared to the references to the other three protagonists.
The high time of references to Reland in the Nova Acta Eruditorum thus are the 1740s, and this is interesting because this is precisely the time when the patterns of references to my protagonists in all the other Journals I have surveyed so far fall into the on-and-off mode of mentioning them now and then every few years which I have labelled ‘intermittent referencing’ and which I take to indicate being structurally forgotten within the frame of the medium in question. And until 1737, when references to Reland begin to multiply again, the same pattern could be observed concerning him in both the Acta Eruditorum up until 1732 and the Nova Acta Eruditorum since then. So this might be the specific difference which I have been searching for, the difference which explains why Reland’s posthumous remembrance career has been so much more successful than those of my other three protagonists.
Why the
peak?
Stating a
difference is one thing; declaring it relevant another; and both are neither
equal nor conductive to explaining, which again is a totally different thing
altogether. So having encountered and labelled the phenomenon, how am I to
explain it? Why were the people writing reviews for this Middle German learned
journal so much more fond of Reland than of my other three protagonists – whom they
knew, but were not really interested in – at this particular time?
The specific context the interest in this particular book stems from was a decidedly Protestant one. The writers of the works in the reviews of which the references to Reland were made in the Nova Acta Eruditorum were either Lutheran ministers or Theologians employed as university or high school professors. The scholars in the reviews of whose works Reland was mentioned in 1740 and 1741, for example, were
the Zürich-born Georg Heinrich Werndly (1694-1744), Calvinist minister in Batavia and afterwards professor of Oriental languages at Lingen;
and, as the only scholar from a non-German speaking and non-Protestant country, Étienne Fourmont (1683-1745), also known as Ismaël Ben-Abraham and 傅爾蒙 (Fu Er Meng), a French orientalist studying Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Chinese, and thus working within a shared disciplinary context.
They were interested in Oriental studies because such studies seemed useful to better understand the linguistic, cultural, and geographical setting of the Old Testament, ancient Israel or Palestine, the Holy Land. The Northern and Middle German Protestant universities of the time thus fostered the respective studies – of Hebrew, of Arabic, Persian, and other languages ‘Oriental’, of Biblical geography and history – and to do so, they built upon the results achieved by the scholars of the Dutch universities, among them Reland, with whom they shared much of the preconceptions of what godly scholarship and learning should be like. It surely was no coincidence that the Nuremberg publishing house of Monath in 1740 chose to reprint its 1716 pirated copy of Reland’s Palaestina Illustrata,[2] thus providing fresh copies for the German market.
In the middle of the 1750s this fascination for Reland’s Palaestina Illustrata waned in the Nova Acta Eruditorum, which might be connected with the shift from a theologically based Orientalism to a more secularized discipline within the German universities; but this is something to be explored further. But as it seems, this decade of interest may have been crucial to fix Adriaan Reland within the emerging discipline of German Orientalism, and thus to pull him from structural forgottenness for a while.
[2] Peter
Conrad Monath (ed.), Adriaan Reland: Hadriani Relandi Palaestina ex monumentis
veteribus illustrata; in tres libros distributa, tabulis geographicis
necessariis, iisque accuratis exornata, et a multis insuper, quae in primam
editionem irrepserant mendis purgata, Nuremberg: Monath 1740.
Snippet of the network visualization for the 502 publication sample described in this post; mind the prominent position of Reland’s “Palaestina Illustrata” (big green dot left on top) and the unconnected component in the lower right corner.
… Adrien Reland’s 1714 Palaestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrata!
And so the winner is me, too, for I guessed it correctly.
A two weeks’ post
But one
thing after the other. First, the date: this is my blog post for
Saturday, March 9th, 2019, for Friday
no. 22;
I seem to
acquire a bad habit of posting on Saturdays rather than Fridays. For today, my
excuses are, in chronological order, a) I had to help out at my son’s school,
fixing some shelves; b) I had to figure out how to clear some financial matters
regarding how to pay my salary from this project in a way that some of it
actually ends up with me in the end; c) my youngest daughter stubbornly refused
to go to sleep this evening. Obviously I am not very good at scheduling my home
office work hours, for although I started out at 8:00 in the morning, by 21:30
I had got down to a meagre seven hours of working time. And d) I made a tiny
configuring mistake, messed up my calculations, and had to start all over
again, ruining some two hours of work. I suspect I better had not started
calculating only at 21:30, but a), b), and c) forced me to.
Going for
some metrics, step 1: Gathering data
But the calculations are crucial, because that’s what I originally intended to show you. As I announced in my last post, I now have finished three-quarters of my projected sample of scholarly journals, which has taken me two weeks to complete, clean, and analyse now.
That is to say, I have gone through the digitized versions of the Journal des Savants, the Philosophical Transactions, and the Maandelyke uittreksels, of Boekzaal der geleerde waerelt (more info here), between 1700 and 1799. I have added all issues of these journals referencing one of my four protagonists in any way to my database. In numbers, this means 117 issues of the Journal des Savants, 9 of the Philosophical Transactions (yes, only nine, but I have already argued they are somewhat special here), and 89 of the Maandelyke uittreksels – or 205 journal issues in total. In going through these issues I have examined each page on which at least one of my protagonists was referenced, identified all other scholars and all publications on that page, and stored these data, too, as a basis for co-citation analysis to identify perceived epistemic communities and their changes over time. This netted me another 287 quoted publications, and another 739 scholars referred to and/or connected to quoted publications (as authors, editors, translators etc.). I must confess that I am a bit proud of having managed to completely identify close to 690 of these, or more than 90%. But today everything will be about publications, so the really interesting figure is that of 502 publications in this sample.
Going for
some metrics, step 2: Setting a framework for analysis
The problem
that I now got was how to deal with these data. Plain visualizing did not work
out anymore to really map out the intriguing details. So it needed to be done
the rough way, by calculating metrics for the sample, hoping for something
interesting to turn up. The visualizations did help me, in the way of pointing
out which ways to structure the relations to be investigated would likely not
yield good results. I first thought I might try something like mapping ‘shared
contributors’, that is, connecting publications by way of the same scholars
contributing to them (as authors, editors, or translators). This turned out to
be pretty useless because it only favoured large edited collections who
assembled texts from many different authors. And that’s the reason why this
post is not about persons but publications only; the real co-citation analysis
still has to wait for a bit. So it seemed better to bypass persons for the time
being and only to link publications to publications, and I did so by way of
quotations, that is, two publications are seen as connected if at least one of
them quotes the other. That brought some interesting results about.
Going for
some metrics, step 3: Finally going for metrics!
With the framework set up to network this publication sample, it was high time (half past nine already!) to start calculating metrics. To facilitate calculation, I started with assuming the network edges to be undirected, that is, a link from publication A via a quote in A to publication B works both ways, from A to B and from B to A. I know that this might be a questionable simplification; but as this may be tested by comparison, I will set this matter aside for a rainy day when I don’t have any idea what to write in this blog for the week to have the opportunity to at least redo these calculations for directed edges. (And as I once started tracking time in this post, it is now 4:00 in the morning and high time that I get to bed to have at least some sleep. I’ll continue around noon.) Moreover, as the structure of connections within what one takes to be a network depends on what the question is, and I am interesting in tracing perceived epistemic communities here – that is, publications seen as belonging to shared domains of knowledge – edge directionality is less important than it might be for other questions to ask. (This is a piece of midnight reasoning, but it still looks sound now at 10:30 on the day after.) I could as well also have collapsed the journals into edges connecting the rest of the publications to more explicitly claim this, but I wanted to also get an impression of the position of the individual journal issues, and so I kept them as nodes. Admittedly, this model does have the drawback that relying on quotations only provides only a quite simplified picture of the interconnections structuring domains of knowledge, but it should serve to give a good first impression of the sample’s general structure. Having sample and model settled, I used the opportunity to test Nodegoat’s analysis functions and calculated some metrics.
A lot of
numbers
To keep the
scores comparable across different metrics, I chose to normalize them where
possible. A short look at the visualization (see header for larger picture)
made clear what was to be expected: the network is disconnected. Not all publications
are referred to as situated in overlapping domains of knowledge; some are
distinctly separate from the rest. This is important here because it directly
impacts the calculations of the closeness metric. Closeness serves to indicate
how close any given node is to all other nodes in the network. In mapping out
shared domains of knowledge this might be quite interesting, as nodes with low
closeness scores might be supposed to partake of many fields at once being
referenced in differing contexts, and thus be important to look at. But
closeness measures path lengths to calculate the average distance from node X
to all other nodes, and this does not work in disconnected networks (because
two nodes between which there is no path would be at undefined = infinite
distance from each other). Nodegoat provides a workaround to that by
substituting a maximum distance for path length between unconnected nodes, this maximum
being equal to the total number of nodes in the network.[1]
First:
Betweenness
The first
measure I calculated was betweenness[2]
(because of the problems with closeness). Betweenness works on disconnected
networks and thus was the obvious first choice. Roughly put, betweenness serves
to indicate whether a certain node may be considered a gatekeeper, that is, if
it is situated at a vital connection point in the network. In assuming an
undirected graph, for mapping shared domains of knowledge this resembles
closeness: it should point to publications situated at the intersection of
several domains, and thus of potential importance for each of these. I must
qualify this as ‘potential importance’ because only being situated between
different fields of knowledge does not equal making important contributions to
any of these fields; this will have to be cross-checked with other metrics,
then.
Top 10
Betweenness
These are
the top ten results in terms of betweenness for the whole of the network:
And those are the respective results for the top-scoring publications of/connected to:
Adrien Reland, by Betweenness
Eusèbe Renaudot, by Betweenness
Johannes Braun, by Betweenness
Thomas Gale, by Betweenness
What
becomes directly apparent is that there are a lot Reland’s publications in the
network, not only on vital connection points but also in total. In fact, 37 out
of 287 non-journal publications have Reland as their main author/editor, or
12,9 %; the number does matter because I only added publications to this sample
when coming across a quotation within the sample. Compared to 2.8 % for Eusebè
Renaudot (8 publications), 1.7 % for Johannes Braun (5 publications), and 1.4 %
for Thomas Gale (4 publications) this looks even more impressive. But a large
output as such does not tell anything about the quality or the reception of
that output. There also is one publication by Eusebè Renaudot among the top ten
in betweenness, too.
Second:
Closeness
As already said, the closeness scores for this sample are to be taken with a grain of salt because of the disconnectedness workaround implemented in Nodegoat. But the prediction I theoretically made when thinking about betweenness in this network – that it would line up quite closely with closeness because pointing to structurally similar positions within the network – did come true in looking at the results for closeness, so I am tempted to regard these results as usefull still. Important: The first score in the “A” for Analysis column is always the one discussed!
Top 10 by Closeness
The top ten
publications of the network in terms of closeness scores are:
This again
underscores the relevance of Reland’s publications within the network as a
whole, and especially of his Palaestina
Illustrata.
And those are the respective results for the top-scoring publications of/connected to:
Adrien Reland, by Closeness
Eusèbe Renaudot, by Closeness
Johannes Braun, by Closeness
Thomas Gale, by Closeness
Third:
Degree
In
undirected graphs such as this, Degree just counts the number of connections
any given node in the network has. To be precise, Nodegoat counts the number of
all edges starting from and ending at any given node, allowing for duplicates
edges, thus producing high scores on average.[3]
For an analysis of shared domains of knowledge as proposed here Degree should
be relevant as a corrective. Whereas Betweenness and Closeness both point to
structural positions of publications in regard to their location between
domains of knowledge, Degree points to the importance of a given publication at
this structural position. Or, to put it more precisely, to the attention
generated by the publication in question, as I am focusing on quotations made
by scholarly journals to this publication; and many such quotations do not
necessarily point to the scholarly but in any case to the public impact a work
made.
Top 10 by
Degree
Looking at the Degree scores from this perspective makes clear that while Reland’s publications might share in more domains of knowledge, within their respective domains Renaudot’s publications obviously attracted comparable attention. And looking at the respective results for the top-scoring publications of/connected to Johannes Braun and Thomas Gale in comparison makes clear that they were not only tied more closely to special domains of knowledge but also attracted less attention by the journals in question, perhaps because of this more stringent specialisation. So here are the Degree scores for publications divided by individuals:
Adrien Reland, by Degree
Eusèbe Renaudot, by Degree
Johannes Braun, by Degree
Thomas Gale, by Degree
A cautionary note: It does not pay to put too much trust in Degree scores, because they tend to push publications situated within certain reference patterns. Consider the example of Mathurin Veyssière de la Croze’s Lexicon aegyptiaco-latinum, the Coptic dictionary edited and published by Karl Gottfried Woide in 1775 which has already featured in one of my posts.
With a Degree of 33 it scores shortly below a top 10 place in Degree which, following the reasoning laid out above, should indicate its importance for its particular domain(s) of knowledge – it attracted a lot of attention, because it has a lot of quotes. But all of these quotes are in fact derived from one singe journal issue, the June 1774 issue, part one, of the Journal des Savants, as becomes visible from the cross-references section of its database entry.
And there
it assembles all of these quotes because it features in many different respects
in the announcement written by Woide himself to highlight his upcoming
publication, which makes the reference section of this piece look a bit monothematic:
Snippet from the references contained in Woide’s publication announcement
So while
Degree may be taken as an indicator of importance within a given field by
capturing public attention, this is easily manipulated, and has to be
cross-checked against another metric for validation.
Fourth:
Pagerank
Nodegoat
allows for calculating Pagerank scores, following the original Google
algorithm. As Pagerank was originally invented to determine the relative
importance of information sources (in this case, websites) in a network through
which a user might randomly move, this model might also be applied to domains
of knowledge in a web of publications, treating quotations as paper-borne
hyperlinks. Random movement through the graph is facilitated by its
undirectedness, so please keep in mind that modelling it as undirected may be a
questionable decision, and don’t trust these metric too much. The good thing
about Pagerank is that allows for determining both the relative importance of quoted
publications and of quoting journals in this particular configuration, so I
would like to use it to counterbalance the shortcomings of Degree pointed out
above. In running Pagerank, Woide/la Croze’s dictionary disappears from the
leading places all of a sudden, so this seems to work. The top publications
according to Pagerank thus are:
Top 10 by
Pagerank
Surprise, surprise:
The main hubs for distributing quotes – and thus sorting domains of knowledge –
are journals! Makes me almost wonder why I chose to go by them in the first
place… But more interesting in here is that there one publication from the 287
quoted works in the sample which managed to get a place in the top 10, and that
is – surprise again! – Reland’s Palaestina
Illustrata. This in turn is due by it being quoted by a number of journal
issues (from all three journal series) which are themselves important quotation
hubs, as becomes evident when looking at the cross-references to Palaestina Illustrata, that is, the
publications in the sample linking to it.
This looks
as if Pagerank indeed might be a good tool to determine the importance of a
publication at its respective structural position, at best in combination with
Degree (and Palaestina Illustrata
scores high on both). So what about the top scores for the rest of the field?
Adrien Reland, by Pagerank
Eusèbe Renaudot, by Pagerank
Johannes Braun, by Pagerank
Thomas Gale, by Pagerank
Combining
metrics
Well, that was a lot of tables, numbers, and scores. Well done! Only a few more to go. Now the last thing to do is to find a way to purposefully combine the different metrics results assembled so far to draw something relating to my larger research question from it. To do so, I ventured for a first try to identify the top 5 publications of each of my protagonists by comparison of the results I presented above. This yielded the following table[4]:
Top 5 by:
Betweenness
Closeness
Pagerank
Degree
Reland
Palaestina ex
monumentis veteribus illustrata
Palaestina ex
monumentis veteribus illustrata
Palaestina ex
monumentis veteribus illustrata
Palaestina ex
monumentis veteribus illustrata
Reland
De nummis veteris Hebraeorum
De nummis veteris Hebraeorum
Antiquitates
sacrae vet. Hebr. (4th ed.)
De nummis veteris Hebraeorum
Reland
De religione mohammedica
De religione mohammedica
Antiquitates sacrae veterum Hebraeorum
De religione mohammedica
Reland
Antiquitates sacrae veterum Hebraeorum
Antiquitates sacrae veterum Hebraeorum
Verhandeling van de godsdienst
Antiquitates sacrae veterum Hebraeorum
Reland
Encheiridion studiosi
Dissertationum Miscellanearum
Oratio de galli cantu
Hierosolymae
Decas exercitationum […] nomine Jehovae
Braun
Commentarius in
epistolam ad Hebraeos
Commentarius in
epistolam ad Hebraeos
Leere der verbonden (4th ed.)
Doctrina foederum
Braun
Leere der verbonden (4th ed.)
Vestitus sacerdotum Hebraeorum
Avertissement necessaire aux eglises
Leere der verbonden (4th ed.)
Braun
Avertissement necessaire aux eglises
Doctrina foederum
Commentarius in
epistolam ad Hebraeos
Commentarius in
epistolam ad Hebraeos
Braun
Doctrina foederum
Avertissement necessaire aux eglises
Vestitus sacerdotum Hebraeorum
Avertissement necessaire aux eglises
Braun
Vestitus sacerdotum Hebraeorum
Leere der verbonden (4th ed.)
Doctrina foederum
Vestitus sacerdotum Hebraeorum
Renaudot
Historia patriarcharum Alexandrinorum
Historia patriarcharum Alexandrinorum
Liturgiarum Orientalium Collectio
Liturgiarum Orientalium Collectio
Renaudot
La perpetuité de la
foy, 4
Liturgiarum Orientalium Collectio
La perpetuité de la
foy, 4
Defense de
l'”histoire des patriaches”
Renaudot
Liturgiarum Orientalium Collectio
La perpetuité de la
foy, 4
Anciennes relationes des Indes
Anciennes relationes des Indes
Renaudot
La perpetuité de la
foy, 5
La perpetuité de la
foy, 5
La perpetuité de la
foy, 5
La perpetuité de la
foy, 4
Renaudot
Anciennes relationes des Indes
Anciennes relationes des Indes
Historia patriarcharum Alexandrinorum
Genadii patriarchi homiliae
Gale
Antonini iter Britanniarum commentarius
Antonini iter Britanniarum commentarius
Antonini iter Britanniarum commentarius
Antonini iter Britanniarum commentarius
Gale
Jamblichii de mysteriis liber
Jamblichii de mysteriis liber
Historiae poeticae scriptores antiqui
Historiae Anglicanae scriptores V.2
Gale
Historiae Anglicanae scriptores V.2
Historiae poeticae scriptores antiqui
Historiae Anglicanae scriptores V.2
Historiae poeticae scriptores antiqui
Gale
Historiae poeticae scriptores antiqui
Historiae Anglicanae scriptores V.2
Jamblichii de mysteriis liber
Jamblichii de mysteriis liber
Creating a
Shortest Path Matrix
To fuse
this into something more informative I thought I might utilize a special
function of Nodegoat’s, and that is its ability to calculate shortest paths
between given selections of nodes. In this case, this meant that I first
settled on a matrix of four times four publications: The top 4 publications
after comparing the scores of all metrics for each of my four protagonists. I
chose to use the top four because only four of Gale’s publications made it into
the sample, and this provides better comparability then. Now I used the
Shortest Path function to calculate the length of the shortest path through
this network from each of these publications to each other, and set the results
down in form of a matrix.[5]
It looks like this.
Conclusions
What does
this tell me now? Well, first of all it highlights the isolated position of
some of these publications, which obviously do not share domains of knowledge
with others; this is true for the five marked with grey lines which have no
connections to the rest of the matrix. It moreover points to the broader
diversity of Reland’s publications compared to the rest of the network: His
four publications all have connections within the matrix, while for Renaudot
one publication does not and for Braun and Gale two publications each. Reland’s
and Renaudot’s oeuvres and positions are similar in that both are internally
coherent – the smallest paths to those of their own publications connected to
the rest of the matrix are two each – and well-connected: their publications
are not only connected to more of the rest of the matrix, they are also
connected by shorter paths, making their works appear to be more central. Braun
and Gale on the other hand are similar in having less many publications connected
to the rest of the matrix, and in those publications being situated in strongly
differing fields, as indicated by their larger internal distance from each
other compared to Reland and Renaudot. And both of them are on the outskirts of
the network rather than in the centre as indicated by the long shortest paths
to other publications in the matrix.
This buttresses the claims I have brought forward based on other impressions already: That Reland and Renaudot form a comparable pair of actors, as Gale and Braun do; and that Reland seems to be the most versatile of all four, which might be the reason why he was the last of the four to get forgotten. And, as I already suspected last week, that his Palaestina Illustrata might be more relevant for this process than his other works, even if they are better known today (as his 1705 De religione mohammedica for instance).
But this
has been a fairly static picture of a phenomenon spanning one century, so the
next task will be to dynamize it. Work to do!
[1] So in looking at the closeness
scores in the following, always keep in mind that the maximum path length taken
into consideration is 502.
[2] With duplicated edges taken
into account and weighted according to distance, that is, duplicates add edge
length.
[3] And Nodegoat does not automatically
normalize Degree centrality. But this is an easy operation: If you want to do
so, just divide any absolute Degree score by the total number of edges in the
network, in this case, 2577.
[4] Publications marked in red only
appear once in the table and are therefore discounted from further comparison.
[5] Please keep in mind that shortest paths are elongated in my setting because two quoted publications A and B are (almost) always connected via a journal in between, so the usual shortest path possible between A and B is two links (A –link one– Journal –link two– B).
I am very sorry, but I will have to postpone what I originally intended to post here yesterday for one week. The idea I had in mind does work, but it takes a lot more time to set up the calculations in detail than I had thought, and it will keep me busy for a few days still. In one of my former posts I preliminarily explored a data set still uncompleted at that time, consisting of all references to my four protagonists in the Journal des Savants, the Philosophical Transactions, and the Maandelyke Uittreksels, of Boekzaal der geleerde Waerelt during the 18th century. As this set is completed now*, it will be interesting to see what might be learned from it.
One preliminary finding – which at the same time is a hypothesis to be tested during the next days – is that in terms of being posthumously referenced it seems to pay for a scholar to diversify his research interests, or at least to offer works which may feed into many different research interests over time. For it seems that the most prominent work written by my four protagonists over the course of the 18th century turned out to be Adrien Relands 1714 two-volume “Palaestina ex monumentis veteris illustrata”. And from the contexts of the references targeting it this seems most likely to be due to its ability to be utilized for the purposes of History, Theology, Geography, and Philology alike. The downside of this is that it seems very difficult, if not outright impossible, to determine which kind of work might be suited to such purposes when writing it.
But more about this next Friday!
*At least for the moment. Next addition will be Acta Eruditorum/Nova Acta Eruditorum. To be continued!