Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FHNR (Charting the process of getting forgotten within the humanities, 18th – 20th centuries: a historical network research analysis)

Teaser

Why do scholars get forgotten? To fade out of remembrance is the posthumous fate of the overwhelming majority of scholars. But understanding forgetting is as important as understanding why something is appreciated. Both are necessary to understand the formation and...

Summary

Why do scholars get forgotten? To fade out of remembrance is the posthumous fate of the overwhelming majority of scholars. But understanding forgetting is as important as understanding why something is appreciated. Both are necessary to understand the formation and sustainability of the canon within any academic field. The aim of the project was to provide the basis to do so by focusing on four exemplary cases. These four scholars selected as my protagonists were Johannes Braun (1628–1708), Thomas Gale (1636–1702), Adriaan Reland (1676–1718), and Eusèbe Renaudot (1646–1720).
The basic assumptions put to the test were:
1. ‘Structural remembrance’ is the sum of individual, consciously crafted acts of referring to a predecessor. ‘Structural forgetting’ is thus a function of such acts of reference ceasing over time. As both are constituted through delineable individual actions, their patterns may be observed and recovered.
2. ‘Being forgotten’ in a structural way therefore is defined as a pattern of being only intermittently referred to over a longer period of time.

Such patterns were found and could meaningfully be analysed in the project, suggesting the basic assumptions to be sound. Analyses of ‘structural forgetting’ governed by these assumptions are necessary specific to the featured scholars’ respective intellectual contexts and disciplinary frameworks. This lead to three consecutive goals:
1. Charting the process of getting forgotten within science and learning without any qualifications: to understand how becoming forgotten works.
2. Determining the dominant factors for each respective scholar: to understand why forgotten scholars were and are referenced the way they are.
3. Developing a theoretical model of how scholars got forgotten as basis for a general theory of getting forgotten in science and learning.

Work performed

To reach these goals a digital humanities approach focusing on network analytical tools was chosen. A large part of the project was dedicated to collect and analyse the data necessary for this approach.
In a first step I collected data on more than 800 letters either written or received by my protagonists or mentioning them, more than 600 of those inedited. These data served as evidence for my protagonsists’ lifetime connections and epistemic communities but were too fragmentary for proper network analysis.
Based on the evidence revealed by the letters I therefore collected three series of data forming sufficiently complete sets for analysis. The first set traces all references to works by my protagonists in 18th century British book auction and sales catalogues, accessed mainly via Eighteenth Century Collections Online and complemented by other digitized source collections. This series comprises data of 342 such catalogues, all of which feature at least one title by at least one of my protagonists. The series covers the years between 1707 and 1801.
The second set contains a sample of 122 dictionaries and encyclopaedias from the 18th and 19th centuries, comprising 103 specialised bio-bibliographical dictionaries and encyclopaedias and 19 more general in scope. It features titles in Dutch, English, French, German, and Latin, covering the years between 1715 and 1898. All entries dedicated to my protagonists in this sample were recorde, with 98 out of the 122 publications in this series containing at least one such entry protagonists (equaling 80,3%).
The third set covers all issues of four major learned journals of the 18th century between 01/1700 and 12/1799 referencing my protagonists. This sample comprised the Journal des Savants (Paris); the Philosophical Transactions (London); the Maandelyke Uittreksels, of Boekzaal der geleerde waerelt (Amsterdam); and the Acta Eruditorum plus Nova Acta Eruditorum (Leipzig). To allow for co-citation analysis all other persons and publications mentioned together with at least one of my protagonists on the same page were tracked. The completed data set contains data of 395 journal issues, in which 1532 persons and 841 publications are co-cited together with my protagonists.
Apart from these serialized quantitative strands of research I did archival researches for materials relating to the families of my protagonists and to persons referring to my protagonists after their death. I additionally selected and collected matching sample materials from outside the scope of each series for comparison with the results of each individual series.
Goals 1) and 2) were reached within the project time. For reaching goal 3) the analyses performed on the third data set need to be concluded which was not possible during the project time proper due to delays in the data collection process caused by the large number of items involved, which was not foreseen. These analyses will be concluded before the end of 2019.
For the dissemination of results I started a research blog where I posted 40 full entries totalling 72.000 words, or 1.800 words per post on average, detailing my research process and results. Twitter postings linking back to blog posts were used to further spread these results. This blog now serves as the project’s website, being the primary spot to publish my data in open access. The first and second data set are directly available for download, while the database holding the third set and the rest of my data can be accessed following the directions given there. In the coming months the data will be converted into different downloadable formats to facilitate re-use. As some analyses are not yet fully carried out, the final results are not yet formulated, but will be by the end of 2019, and be made available via the blog instantly.
I have given three conference papers on project topics at two important scientific conferences in the field, and have given three project presentations in unive

Final results

The project goes beyond the state of art in the field in its multi-layered diachronic framework for analysing scholarly recognition processes over different media, across national, scientific, and language communities, and over different time periods. In some aspects, as for instance concerning the systematic use of auction and sales catalogues to track down circulation of individual scholar’s works, it is a pioneering study going beyond what is already available. It is to be expected that is sets a starting point and reference model for further studies of this kind. A desired impact would be a refocusing of histories of the humanities, sciences, and learning away from the few who made it towards the many who did not make it to correct an inherent progressivist and teleological bias in many of these studies. It would also be useful if the project’s general conclusions would be integrated into public funding schemes for research.

Website & more info

More info: https://fading18-20.hypotheses.org.