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Articles by Simon Burrows
This article discusses the potential of ‘historical bibliometric’ methodologies for understanding... more This article discusses the potential of ‘historical bibliometric’ methodologies for understanding past cultures and offers a vision for how historical bibliometric research might be conducted on a comparative and global scale. Drawing on conceptual work being undertaken at the Western Sydney University in order to further develop and extend the widely respected ‘French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe’ (FBTEE) database project, it explores how historians might proceed to correlate, map, and analyse multiple spatially referenced data sets pertaining to the creation, publication, dissemination, ownership, consumption, reception, policing, and geographic setting of texts. While the authors recognise the many dangers and limitations inherent in reducing the cultural history of text to a set of statistical data, they observe that historians frequently use the production and circulation of texts as a useful proxy for understanding the circulation of ideas. Hence historical bibliometrics can provide measurable indicators of cultural resonance. The challenge, then, is to meaningfully integrate algorithmic abstractions with qualitative-based humanities research. This paper and the suite of projects it discusses seek to provide a way forward.
Papers by Simon Burrows
War, culture and society, 1750-1850, 2019
The postface by Simon Burrows describes his serendipitous journey in the field of emigration as a... more The postface by Simon Burrows describes his serendipitous journey in the field of emigration as a veteran in the study of French exiled journalism in the British Isles and a pioneer in Digital Humanities. Paying tribute to the men and women who influenced his thoughts on the matter, this chapter is a summary of the historiographical changes and challenges that he and other historians have faced in the last twenty years. Writing from the viewpoint of a frequent migrant, he discusses the need to show compassion to the subject of this study and recognise their humanity despite ideological differences.
Choice Reviews Online, Sep 1, 2001
BRILL eBooks, Apr 7, 2021
What can be learned about the paper trade from digital and archival sources on the business of a ... more What can be learned about the paper trade from digital and archival sources on the business of a single publishing house? Would the lessons it teaches be of merely local interest, or can such a case study reveal wider information about the, rhythms, networks and scale of the trade? These are questions we seek to address in this study. In the process we hope to shed fresh light on the practices, materials, and networks of the early modern paper trade in Europe, particularly the mechanisms by which printers and publishers attempted to ensure a regular supply of paper to their workshops. By analyzing the supply and demand for paper from a single company’s business records across a time span of almost two decades, our study illuminates the business practices of paper traders, and the interplay of supply networks and purchasing strategies of major paper buyers in early modern Europe.This chapter grew from of a desire to explore the rich data on professional groups in the award-winning French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe (FBTEE) database, which documents the trade of a large Swiss publisher-wholesaler, the Société typographique de Neuchâtel (STN). We first describes the database from which the analysis was derived (§1), then describes the methods used to estimate the STN's usage of printing paper (§2.1) and business paper (§2.2) from the available sales and publication records. We use this data to consider demand for paper in Francophone Europe during the Enlightenment. We consider first what the STN's paper usage tells us about the volatility of the paper market in the period (§3.1), and then build on what we know about the STN's installed capacity to re-estimate the total paper usage of the book trade in Enlightenment Europe (§3.2). Finally we turn to the records of STN's business correspondence to determine how they sourced their paper (§4). We conclude with our reflections on how economic, political and cultural forces shaped the publication of Enlightenment texts, and on how digital methods can help us study these forces (§5). Reason, it seems, was not the only driver of the Age of Reason
Should the famous Société typographique de Neuchâtel (1769-1794) (STN) be viewed as a typical and... more Should the famous Société typographique de Neuchâtel (1769-1794) (STN) be viewed as a typical and representative ‘European’ publisher-bookseller, a ‘print shop across the border’ that offered the latest product of the mud-raking underground to the French market, or a provincial, peripheral, and Swiss-focused distraction? The question needs revisiting before we both trumpet the value of our recently published French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe (FBTEE) database — which recreates the society’s entire knowable bookselling business — and assess its potential for substantially revising scholarly understanding of the eighteenth-century French book trade and, dare we dream, the enlightenment
French Studies, Jun 24, 2009
I first began to question prevailing orthodoxies of eighteenth-century book history during my soj... more I first began to question prevailing orthodoxies of eighteenth-century book history during my sojorns in Hell. For the uninitiated, Hell (Enfer) was the reading room of the old Bibliotheque nationale de France where scholars consulted banned books. It was there that I first encountered the rare pornographic libelles that luminaries of a previous generation of scholars had suggested ‘desacratized’ or fatally undermined the Ancien Regime monarchy
French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe, 2019
The postface by Simon Burrows describes his serendipitous journey in the field of emigration as a... more The postface by Simon Burrows describes his serendipitous journey in the field of emigration as a veteran in the study of French exiled journalism in the British Isles and a pioneer in Digital Humanities. Paying tribute to the men and women who influenced his thoughts on the matter, this chapter is a summary of the historiographical changes and challenges that he and other historians have faced in the last twenty years. Writing from the viewpoint of a frequent migrant, he discusses the need to show compassion to the subject of this study and recognise their humanity despite ideological differences.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Jul 1, 2020
French History and Civilization, 2021
The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe II : Enlightenment Bestsellers
Soon after the publication of the FBTEE-1. 0 database in June 2012, other scholars began to sugge... more Soon after the publication of the FBTEE-1. 0 database in June 2012, other scholars began to suggest it was a game-changing digital resource. According to Jeremy Caradonna, in a comparison with Stanford University’s much-discussed ‘Mapping the Republic of Letters’ digital project, FBTEE was ‘one of the best and most cutting-edge digital tools that historians of early modernity now possess. … [It brings the] historical profession into the age of interactive digital technologies and GIS. ’ Other accolades were similarly enthusiastic. Robert Darnton called the database and interface ‘a prodigious achievement and a joy to use’. The effusiveness of this praise came as a surprise. The FBTEE project was born of a set of tightly organized research questions: a database approach had been chosen because it appeared the best means to answer them. At the start of the project, we had not considered our approach particularly novel. Databases were by the mid-noughties a mature technology and widely used in commercial and research organisations. The discipline formerly known as ‘humanities computing’ had a long and illustrious pedigree. Even the term ‘Digital Humanities’ had been in use among practitioners since before the turn of the millennium
French Studies, 2011
... In a final section entitled 'Sacred Societies', Natalie Bayer examines the coexiste... more ... In a final section entitled 'Sacred Societies', Natalie Bayer examines the coexistence of Voltairean rationalism and Masonic mysticism in eighteenth-century Russia. Kris Pangburn's presentation of Charles Bonnet's 'organ of the soul' makes the strong argument that this ...
Knygotyra
Since the early twentieth century, when Daniel Mornet conducted his path-breaking survey of priva... more Since the early twentieth century, when Daniel Mornet conducted his path-breaking survey of private library catalogues in an attempt to determine what people read during the enlightenment, historians have debated how to identify the best-selling texts in the distant past. Besides library catalogues, scholars of eighteenth-century France have ransacked will inventories, publishers’ archives, print licence registers, book auction records, the titles available in cabinets de lecture, and even the extraordinarily rich records of books stamped in an amnesty for pirated editions in 1777–1781. This article suggests that none of these sources taken in isolation can give us sufficient insight to provide a reliable overview of the book trade and the market for books. Taken together and analysed digitally, however, they give important representative insights into the best-selling texts, genres and authors of the eighteenth century. The article compares and contrasts the findings of several lar...
This article discusses the potential of ‘historical bibliometric’ methodologies for understanding... more This article discusses the potential of ‘historical bibliometric’ methodologies for understanding past cultures and offers a vision for how historical bibliometric research might be conducted on a comparative and global scale. Drawing on conceptual work being undertaken at the Western Sydney University in order to further develop and extend the widely respected ‘French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe’ (FBTEE) database project, it explores how historians might proceed to correlate, map, and analyse multiple spatially referenced data sets pertaining to the creation, publication, dissemination, ownership, consumption, reception, policing, and geographic setting of texts. While the authors recognise the many dangers and limitations inherent in reducing the cultural history of text to a set of statistical data, they observe that historians frequently use the production and circulation of texts as a useful proxy for understanding the circulation of ideas. Hence historical bibliometrics can provide measurable indicators of cultural resonance. The challenge, then, is to meaningfully integrate algorithmic abstractions with qualitative-based humanities research. This paper and the suite of projects it discusses seek to provide a way forward.
War, culture and society, 1750-1850, 2019
The postface by Simon Burrows describes his serendipitous journey in the field of emigration as a... more The postface by Simon Burrows describes his serendipitous journey in the field of emigration as a veteran in the study of French exiled journalism in the British Isles and a pioneer in Digital Humanities. Paying tribute to the men and women who influenced his thoughts on the matter, this chapter is a summary of the historiographical changes and challenges that he and other historians have faced in the last twenty years. Writing from the viewpoint of a frequent migrant, he discusses the need to show compassion to the subject of this study and recognise their humanity despite ideological differences.
Choice Reviews Online, Sep 1, 2001
BRILL eBooks, Apr 7, 2021
What can be learned about the paper trade from digital and archival sources on the business of a ... more What can be learned about the paper trade from digital and archival sources on the business of a single publishing house? Would the lessons it teaches be of merely local interest, or can such a case study reveal wider information about the, rhythms, networks and scale of the trade? These are questions we seek to address in this study. In the process we hope to shed fresh light on the practices, materials, and networks of the early modern paper trade in Europe, particularly the mechanisms by which printers and publishers attempted to ensure a regular supply of paper to their workshops. By analyzing the supply and demand for paper from a single company’s business records across a time span of almost two decades, our study illuminates the business practices of paper traders, and the interplay of supply networks and purchasing strategies of major paper buyers in early modern Europe.This chapter grew from of a desire to explore the rich data on professional groups in the award-winning French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe (FBTEE) database, which documents the trade of a large Swiss publisher-wholesaler, the Société typographique de Neuchâtel (STN). We first describes the database from which the analysis was derived (§1), then describes the methods used to estimate the STN's usage of printing paper (§2.1) and business paper (§2.2) from the available sales and publication records. We use this data to consider demand for paper in Francophone Europe during the Enlightenment. We consider first what the STN's paper usage tells us about the volatility of the paper market in the period (§3.1), and then build on what we know about the STN's installed capacity to re-estimate the total paper usage of the book trade in Enlightenment Europe (§3.2). Finally we turn to the records of STN's business correspondence to determine how they sourced their paper (§4). We conclude with our reflections on how economic, political and cultural forces shaped the publication of Enlightenment texts, and on how digital methods can help us study these forces (§5). Reason, it seems, was not the only driver of the Age of Reason
Should the famous Société typographique de Neuchâtel (1769-1794) (STN) be viewed as a typical and... more Should the famous Société typographique de Neuchâtel (1769-1794) (STN) be viewed as a typical and representative ‘European’ publisher-bookseller, a ‘print shop across the border’ that offered the latest product of the mud-raking underground to the French market, or a provincial, peripheral, and Swiss-focused distraction? The question needs revisiting before we both trumpet the value of our recently published French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe (FBTEE) database — which recreates the society’s entire knowable bookselling business — and assess its potential for substantially revising scholarly understanding of the eighteenth-century French book trade and, dare we dream, the enlightenment
French Studies, Jun 24, 2009
I first began to question prevailing orthodoxies of eighteenth-century book history during my soj... more I first began to question prevailing orthodoxies of eighteenth-century book history during my sojorns in Hell. For the uninitiated, Hell (Enfer) was the reading room of the old Bibliotheque nationale de France where scholars consulted banned books. It was there that I first encountered the rare pornographic libelles that luminaries of a previous generation of scholars had suggested ‘desacratized’ or fatally undermined the Ancien Regime monarchy
French Emigrants in Revolutionised Europe, 2019
The postface by Simon Burrows describes his serendipitous journey in the field of emigration as a... more The postface by Simon Burrows describes his serendipitous journey in the field of emigration as a veteran in the study of French exiled journalism in the British Isles and a pioneer in Digital Humanities. Paying tribute to the men and women who influenced his thoughts on the matter, this chapter is a summary of the historiographical changes and challenges that he and other historians have faced in the last twenty years. Writing from the viewpoint of a frequent migrant, he discusses the need to show compassion to the subject of this study and recognise their humanity despite ideological differences.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Jul 1, 2020
French History and Civilization, 2021
The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe II : Enlightenment Bestsellers
Soon after the publication of the FBTEE-1. 0 database in June 2012, other scholars began to sugge... more Soon after the publication of the FBTEE-1. 0 database in June 2012, other scholars began to suggest it was a game-changing digital resource. According to Jeremy Caradonna, in a comparison with Stanford University’s much-discussed ‘Mapping the Republic of Letters’ digital project, FBTEE was ‘one of the best and most cutting-edge digital tools that historians of early modernity now possess. … [It brings the] historical profession into the age of interactive digital technologies and GIS. ’ Other accolades were similarly enthusiastic. Robert Darnton called the database and interface ‘a prodigious achievement and a joy to use’. The effusiveness of this praise came as a surprise. The FBTEE project was born of a set of tightly organized research questions: a database approach had been chosen because it appeared the best means to answer them. At the start of the project, we had not considered our approach particularly novel. Databases were by the mid-noughties a mature technology and widely used in commercial and research organisations. The discipline formerly known as ‘humanities computing’ had a long and illustrious pedigree. Even the term ‘Digital Humanities’ had been in use among practitioners since before the turn of the millennium
French Studies, 2011
... In a final section entitled 'Sacred Societies', Natalie Bayer examines the coexiste... more ... In a final section entitled 'Sacred Societies', Natalie Bayer examines the coexistence of Voltairean rationalism and Masonic mysticism in eighteenth-century Russia. Kris Pangburn's presentation of Charles Bonnet's 'organ of the soul' makes the strong argument that this ...
Knygotyra
Since the early twentieth century, when Daniel Mornet conducted his path-breaking survey of priva... more Since the early twentieth century, when Daniel Mornet conducted his path-breaking survey of private library catalogues in an attempt to determine what people read during the enlightenment, historians have debated how to identify the best-selling texts in the distant past. Besides library catalogues, scholars of eighteenth-century France have ransacked will inventories, publishers’ archives, print licence registers, book auction records, the titles available in cabinets de lecture, and even the extraordinarily rich records of books stamped in an amnesty for pirated editions in 1777–1781. This article suggests that none of these sources taken in isolation can give us sufficient insight to provide a reliable overview of the book trade and the market for books. Taken together and analysed digitally, however, they give important representative insights into the best-selling texts, genres and authors of the eighteenth century. The article compares and contrasts the findings of several lar...
French Studies: A Quarterly Review, 2009
images depicting public spaces that tell us much about the exercise of power during the Revolutio... more images depicting public spaces that tell us much about the exercise of power during the Revolution, as do designs for public buildings that were never constructed; allegorical images that shed light on the stages through which the Revolution passed; Revolutionary imagery that reveals efforts to create a New Man, one of the loftiest goals of the Jacobin leadership. Reichardt and Kohle show how images tell us much about the Terror, and the logic that drove it forward. They also show how images reveal the decompression that followed the fall of Robespierre, and the political and cultural cross-currents within France after 9 Thermidor. This and far more Reichardt and Kohle discuss with magisterial authority in their outstanding book. Yet, there are problems. For them, the Revolution is ‘bourgeois’, a point that they make several times, although not always in the same sense of the word. This is one way to interpret the Revolution, although it is not one that is universally agreed upon by...