Measuring innovation in book culture.
We can observe a 'rise' of or 'renewed interest' in the illustrated book in the second half of 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century. New genres and techniques and an increasing competition in the book market lead to new collaborations between authors, printers, and illustrators. It would be interesting to track these producers who collaborated on illustrated book projects and trace whether these commercial collaborations were grounded or resulted in social and/or religious interactions. For this, we are bringing together several datasets in the Golden Agents infrastructure that each contain information on the production of books, or on social relations between actors involved in the production process.
Aim of case study:
- Linking & querying different datasets to find overarching patterns on creative industries in the Dutch Republic
Overarching Research Question:
- How can we map innovation in cultural production?
- What is the relation between different sorts (bonding & bridging) of creative and social interactions?
- Short Title Catalogue of the Netherlands (STCN, http://www.stcn.nl/), that contains bibliographic information on books produced in the Netherlands (until 1800)
- Dutch Thesaurus of Author names (NTA)
- STCN Printer Thesaurus
- Rijksmuseum Library (https://library.rijksmuseum.nl/), that contains more information on the actors involved in the production process of a book than the STCN: illustrators as contributors. We model the part of the RMLibrary that contains links to the STCN in RDF. See: datasets/rmlibrary
- Rijksmuseum Collection (https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/) in Europeana Data Model. Contains pointers to the Rijksstudio and relevant depictions.
- ECARTICO (https://www.vondel.humanities.uva.nl/ecartico/) that holds biographical data concerning painters, engravers, printers, book sellers, gold- and silversmiths and others involved in the ‘cultural industries’ of the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
- Ondertrouwregisters Amsterdam City Archives (OTR SAA, https://archief.amsterdam/uitleg/indexen/45-ondertrouwregisters-1565-1811) provide information on the social interaction between people, their (family) relation, and their connection to confession and profession.
- Ja, ik wil! (http://www.collective-action.info/_PRO_Ja-Ik-Wil_Project)
See: /linksets
We will explore the potential of methods like blockmodelling and community detection. For a recent review of these methods see: Lee, C., Wilkinson, D.J. A review of stochastic block models and extensions for graph clustering, Appl Netw Sci 4, no. 122 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41109-019-0232-2
For the applicability of such methods in historical research see: John F. Padgett and Christopher K. Ansell, Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400-1434, American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 6 (1993), 1259-1319. (JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2781822).
An analysis of the data is available in the analysis folder and can be viewed in a Jupyter notebook. The notebook contains an exploration of the data and the application of community detection methods to the data. The notebook is part of a Master Thesis by Iman Hashemi (Utrecht University):
- Hashemi, I. (2022). Community Detection in Historical Data Using Knowledge Graphs (Master's thesis). https://studenttheses.uu.nl/handle/20.500.12932/41641
The data in this repository is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (unless otherwise specified) and can be used freely, as long as you provide attribution to the Golden Agents Project (e.g. by citation).
- van Wissen, L., Hashemi, I., Nijboer, H., Brouwer, J., Baas, J., Prak, M., & Leemans, I. (2022). Golden Agents - Processes of Creativity (case study) (Version v0.9) [Data set]. https://github.com/knaw-huc/golden-agents-processes-of-creativity/
Golden Agents project