Book production network analysis

[Jeffrey Smith]

Dear Digital Humanities Japan members,

 

The National Museum of Asian Art (formerly Freer|Sackler) has a wonderful collection of (mostly) Edo period Japanese books, formerly in the collection of Gerhard Pulverer. This collection can be explored at our online catalogue The World of the Japanese Illustrated Book (https://pulverer.si.edu/).

 

My role in the production of this resource was in developing the underlying data, and for the past few months I’ve been investigating how best to structure a network analysis of the publishers and artisans who produced the 880 titles in the online catalogue. To understand how to accurately associate those who worked on the same titles, I’ve been doing preliminary modeling in Gephi (see the attached graph snapshots), and have practical research and data questions. Centering clusters around publishers seems to make the most sense, but brings up a number of methodological issues, and is as yet not guided by a set of research questions.

 

I’m curious if anyone else has experience modeling print production networks like this, and would be interested in discussing various approaches. I would be pleased to learn any insights or work practices you might have to share.

 

This project is very much in its infancy, but has great potential to become an interface to investigate the communities of book production within NMAA’s Pulverer collection.

 

Thanks very much,

 

Jeffrey Smith

Assistant Registrar for Collections Information

Collections Department

National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution

[Paula R. Curtis]

Hello Jeffrey,

A great question, and what a rich source of data to work with! I feel like there's always a tension between going into network analysis modeling just for exploration vs. going in with a clear research question. Most often it's the noodling around just to see what you have that ends up guiding new insights into a research question the networks might help you answer. I don't specifically know of any print culture/production network analyses, but if you're interested in checking out some other network analysis-based work on Edo materials Bettina Gramlich-Oka's Japan Biographical Database is a great place to start: https://jbdb.jp/

For advanced network analysis work outside of Japan, Jason Protass (Brown) and Jonathan Petit have looked extensively at Chinese religious figures/poets and writing production. At a glance it seems that they've published a bit on this: 
https://doi.org/10.1163/22143955-00302001
https://doi.org/10.1163/22143955-00302003

On the Korea side Javier Cha has done a ton with large corpora. 

Hope these are some helpful starting points!

Best,

Paula

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Digital Humanities Japan" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to dhjapan+u...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dhjapan/CAJqEOqcJLt2_n8Js2HweczwJ7bAfEHXHdjRnZOuhUTADrm7zdQ%40mail.gmail.com.

--

Paula R. Curtis

Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in History

Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies

University of California, Los Angeles

http://prcurtis.com/