Conference Agenda

Introduction

National bibliographies are collections of data that gather information on printed publications, broadly connected to a particular country or a cultural community (e.g. published within a country's modern borders or by its diaspora abroad). Composed mostly for cataloguing, these collections have come recently to be used as datasets for cultural historical studies, as an aspect of bibliographic data science (e.g. Lahti et al. 2019). While the coverage of national bibliographies can vary, the register of known books published and the associated metainformation can prove a valuable source of data for studies in cultural history.

In this talk, we explore the cultural processes surrounding the national awakening and independence for the Estonian language community during the 19th century with the help of Estonian National Bibliographies. We expand the study by exploring the same type of dynamics in the Latvian National Bibliography, to broaden the coverage for the Estonian language community and to look for similarities for the Latvian language community. 19th century European book publishing was transnational at the time and the cultural communities do not always follow the modern national boundaries. A good use of the national bibliographies for cultural historical research may have to rely on data from different countries.

Historical context

In the 19th century, Estonians and Latvians were mostly placed rural communities with low cultural prestige, situated in the three Baltic Gouvernates of the Russian Empire - Estonia, Livonia and Curonia. These areas were politically and culturally dominated by a minority population of Baltic Germans, who had a special status within the Russian Empire as the local administration. In the context of the Russian Empire, the Baltics had an exceptionally high level of literacy, due to German and Scandinavian influences in education (Raun 2017). In the early 1800s already more than 70% of the rural population could likely read, however mostly in the context of learning religious texts. The majority of books written in Estonian or Latvian were written by the local Baltic German elite either for religious or administrative purposes or as part of a national romantic project aimed at the locals.

During the 19th century, this situation changed. Gradually, Estonians and Latvians came to enter the sphere of written communication by publishing books, newspapers and other works. The teaching of reading and writing skills became more practical, aimed at everyday communication. It became common for Estonians and Latvians to read and write in their native language, becoming the language of choice instead of German, Latin or Russian. As part of local national romantic movements, strong language-based communities were established, eventually leading up to the declaration of independence from the Russian Empire for Estonia and Latvia in 1918.

Notably, these events took place in a multilingual cultural space, where individuals had some agency in which language and cultural communities they participated in and oriented towards. For example an Estonian with intellectual aspirations in the 1860s was likely to aim to participate in the German or Russian cultural context as these major cultures showed a potential to include a wider audience and a richer cultural heritage. Thus, the transition towards a preference towards Estonian or Latvian as the language of choice for the native elite provides an interesting case of some agency of the community to choose its path.

The study

Here we study the processes behind this transition with a few substantive questions.

- How were the transitions in language choice influenced by major political decisions made at the time?

• For example, in the 1880s the Russian Empire started a process of Russification, making Russian the primary language in schools and administration in many places, specifically targeting the cultural dominance of Baltic Germans in the Baltic Gouvernates, among others. Did this influence the language of choice for the books published in Estonia?

- How did the movements of national romanticism influence the demographics of the intellectual community?

• For example, in Estonia and Latvia, a strong movement of local national romanticism emerged in the 1870s. This was partly due to increased economic and social freedoms, partly due to improved education, and partly due to the spread of influential ideas. Can we see, as part of this emergence, the book publishing community becoming younger as the new young people join, or is it more of a choice for each author in regular generational transitions?

- Did the local intellectual communities grow organically out of the cultural interests of Baltic German elites, or were the communities formed fairly independently from them?

• For example, the major works written about Estonian culture and language in the 1820s were all written by Baltic German ‘Estophiles’ for whom Estonian language was learned as a second language and more as an intellectual pastime. In the 1860s, many writings were already written by native Estonians. Did this transition happen gradually, as the new writers joined the existing networks of authors and publishers or did the new writers form their own communities, independent of the Baltic German predecessors?

We make use of the data within the national bibliographies to tackle these questions.

Data

We rely on the records of the Estonian National Bibliography from 1800-1940 (n = 39,442) and exploratorily on the records of the Latvian National Bibliography from 1800-1940 (n = 40,123). The data are estimated to have very good coverage of all the known books published then. We transform the library records to allow for cultural data analysis and enrich the datasets in a few ways.

Based on the titles of the books, we add information on the language, where it is not given in the dataset. We harmonize place names and publishers associated with the books using rules and fuzzy matching. We rely on links made to VIAF in these collections to combine different pseudonyms so that each person is represented with an individual id. Where possible, we augment the author names with information on the birth places, to build a separate subset of locally born authors. Due to conventions of the time, the publishers are sometimes listed as people, sometimes as organizations associated with the works; we harmonize these fields for major publishers for network analysis.

Working with two bibliographies brings with it an extra challenge and opportunity: some authors and books are present in both. Thus, sometimes we can use one to get a more complete picture of the works by an author present in another. At the same time in combining the data, some entries may be given in duplicate. To work with both datasets we rely on VIAF links to combine instances of authors across the bibliographies, and on partial matching of book metadata to find instances of duplicate books across the bibliographies.

Analysis

To understand the role historical events played in language choice, we calculate the share of books in each language for each year. Here, we rely on the language data augmented by information in book titles. We see a gradual growth in publications in Estonian across the time period, establishing relative dominance over other languages. Notably, we can see how the Russification policies did substantially increase the share of books in Russian, but only at the expense of German. The share of books in Estonian kept a stable growth throughout this period. This suggests that the mechanisms responsible for growing the community had become somewhat independent from the administrative circumstances. For example the switch in the primary language of teaching in schools from Estonian to Russian did not stop this growth. A major transition occurred with the independence from the Russian Empire that led the Estonian language to dominate the books published, while other languages kept a stable minority position. Here, the importance of political events can be seen as Estonian took on more functions in the community.

To understand the role of generational shifts in the growing status of local publications, we look at the age and the origin of the contributors named for each book. This includes authors, but also illustrators, publishers, and translators. As part of an international community, there are a number of authors that originate from past eras (Aristotle, Martin Luther), we exclude them, by including only authors born in 1750-1920. And in order to focus on the local community we run a separate analysis where we exclude the original authors of translated works and as an additional constraint consider only the contributors born locally in the Baltic area. Here, we see how the age of an average contributor to a book decreases as new contributors join the community, specifically during the period of national romanticism. This suggests that the national romantic movement not just in leaders but among many contributors was led by the younger members of the community rather than simply new ideas becoming popular in a regular transition between generations.

To understand more precisely how the new community came to be formed, we look at the choices of language use for individual authors and their roles in local social networks. We look at the share of books in each language for individuals and track who were the people forming the emerging linguistic communities - were they authors publishing mostly in other languages and only sometimes in the local language or were they authors publishing mostly in local language, but publishing also in other languages. Our analysis shows the community becoming increasingly dependent on authors writing mostly in the local language. To track this in detail, we perform a network analysis, based on the coauthorship patterns in the dataset. We track the central actors over time as measured by betweenness centrality and closeness centrality. We also look at the personal networks of major actors across the time period. With this information we can see how the central figures become increasingly Estonian-dominated, but also how the Estonian community relies on a few actors very active in Estonian and other languages.

We perform the main analysis on Estonian, and report on preliminary analysis of the same questions for Latvian National Bibliography. We are able to complement the study of the Estonian community with the information on Baltic Germans available in the Latvian dataset, and at the same time are able to compare the development of the Estonian community with the Latvian community as shown in the bibliographies. We report on the differences between the datasets and the process of joining the two datasets.

Conclusions

We used the book records given in Estonian and Latvian National Bibliographies to study cultural history of Estonian and Latvian communities. Specifically, we looked at the share of languages in the context of major political events, the demographics of contributors involved and the role of individuals and social networks in these changes. We found that the bibliographic data allows a way to systematically address cultural historical questions (e.g. the choice of a language in book publication), and offer new ways to measure historical trends previously described in general terms (e.g. the demographics of individuals participating in the emerging literary community).

We argue that bibliographic data can become a very valuable source to approach cultural historical questions. These datasets may provide fairly comprehensive overviews of cultural activities of particular communities and thus also allow an easy way to compare these communities. As stated by the proponents of bibliographic data science (e.g. Lahti et al. 2019), this can be accomplished with the combination of methods from data science, digital humanities and cultural historians. The research interest may in turn facilitate the development and enrichment of these datasets, mostly held by the national libraries to find further value in their collections.

This paper presents the first results of a larger project that draws on large-scale data analysis to investigate the publication patterns and networks of the 890 members of the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (1617–1680), or Fruitbearing Society, the first and largest cultural society in early modern Central Europe. First, we elucidate the major steps, including data wrangling, evaluation, clean-up, and algorithmic enrichment, necessary to transform the already high-quality VD17 bibliographic database into research data. Then, we relate the first results of our investigation of the publication patterns of Society members, which brings more nuance to the existing narrative of a society that shifted from focusing on the literary and linguistic aspects of its agenda in the first period (1617–1650) to a more courtly one in the later periods (1651–1662/67) of its existence.

Philological text editions that are 'born digital' can and should be linked to other primary sources and, ideally, this happens within an ecosystem of clear and short IRIs. Yet, linking texts with each other is and has been a common practice in any form of critical editing: the source apparatus under the text draws parallels between the text being edited and other primary texts.
This paper explores the possibility to mine the source apparatuses of existing editions, to enhance them with further scholarship, and thereby democratize the knowledge about intertextual connections. Based on the analysis of existing proposals and on the experiences of the OTRA project (Ontology for Re-Use and Argumentative Patterns), I propose five requirements that allow to document the knowledge that is already contained in the source apparatus. Setting up this infrastructure based on Linked Open Data would allow distributing its creation and federating its hosting among different actors such as libraries, archives, and museums.