Mapping Print, Connecting Cultures (original) (raw)
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Cultural Circulation and the Book: Literature, Knowledge, Space, and Economy (An Introduction)
Primerjalna književnost 35.1 (2012), 2012
The book as a cultural object of special value co-determines literariness through the linguistic structure of the texts it transmits and the bibliographic codes specific to it as a medium. The book influences the social circulation of discourse and its genre differentiation and systematization. The conceptual and spatial structure of knowledge is materialized in the library (book repository or book series). Libraries are meeting places and crossroads of “bibliomigrancy” (Mani) of works having various geographical and historical origins as well as the places that allow us to establish cognitive and creative interferences between cultural spaces inscribed in the library holdings. Books evoke a variety of imaginary spatial models, including the global, while their own spaces are also physical and meaningful. From its beginnings up to the present expansion of digital textuality, the medium of the book appears in the context of economies, which set the direction and breadth of the spatial reach of the messages it transmits and encodes. Book history is therefore a field that lies within the interest of comparative literature.
Journal of Informetrics, 2014
This paper introduces a novel application in bibliometrics of the barycenter method. Using places of publication barycenters, we measure internationalization of book publishing in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Based on 2002-2011 data for Flanders, Belgium, we demonstrate how the geographic center of weight of book publishing is different for the Social Sciences than for the Humanities. Whereas the latter still rely predominantly on domestic Flemish and continental European publishers, the former are firmly Anglo-Saxon oriented. The Humanities, however, show a more pronounced evolution towards further internationalization. For the already largely internationally oriented Social Sciences, in most recent years, the share of British publishers has grown. The barycenter method proves to be a valuable tool in the representation of research internationalization of book publications. This is especially the case when applied non-Anglophone countries.
Can We Rank Scholarly Book Publishers? A Bibliometric Experiment with the Field of History
This paper presents a publisher ranking study based on data granted to us by Elsevier, specifically, citations to book titles from 604 Scopus History journals (2007-2011), and matching metadata from WorldCat® (i.e., titles with OCLC numbers, ISBN codes, publisher records, and library holding counts). With both resources we created a unique relational database, which enabled us to examine citation counts to books and compare these to international library holdings or 'libcitations' for scholarly book publishers. First, we developed a ranking of the top 500 publishers and explored descriptive statistics at the level of publisher type (university; commercial; other) and country of origin. In our second analysis, we identified the top 50 university presses and commercial houses based on total citations and mean citations per book (CPB). For the third analysis we employed a mapping approach using directed citation links between journals and publishers. American and British presses/publishing houses receive the most attention from library collection managers and citing scholars; however, a number of specialist publishers from European countries are keeping pace. Distinct clusters from our directed citation map indicate regionalism and subject specialization, where international journals (i.e., some produced in languages other than English) are citing books published by the same parent publisher. Bibliometric rankings convey half the truth of how the actual structure of the publishing field has evolved. Many challenges lie ahead for developers of new citation indices for books, scholars aiming to publish with high-ranking presses, and bibliometricians interested in measuring book and publisher impacts.
Publishing and Culture: The Alchemy of Ideas
The Oxford Handbook of Publishing, 2019
How has book publishing shaped and reshaped the modern world? Since the advent of moveable type, books have moved into position as the signal element that defines culture. While this chapter places an emphasis on English-language publishing, it also draws on original discussions with international publishers and editors, providing a brief overview of the history of book publishing in a variety of countries. Starting with the Venetian printers, the chapter moves through the Inquisition to the pre-modern age, briefly discussing the consistent entanglement of book publishing and authority, which perceives books and their publishers as potentially devastating threats or powerful allies.
Following the Footnotes: A Bibliometric Analysis of Citation Patterns in Literary Studies
"This thesis provides an in-depth study of the possibilities of applying bibliometric methods to the research field of literary studies. The four articles that constitute the backbone of this thesis focus on different aspects of references and citations in literary studies: from the use of references in the text to citation patterns among 34 literature journals. The analysis covers both an Anglo-Saxon context as well as research in Swedish literary studies, and the materials used include Web of Science data, references in the Swedish literature journal TFL (Tidskrift för Litteraturvetenskap) and applications to the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet). A study is also made of the influence of one single publication—Walter Benjamin’s Illumina- tions—and its impact in literary studies and in wider academia. The results from the four articles are elaborated upon using a theoretical framework that focuses on differences in the social and intellectual organization of research fields. According to these theories literary studies can be described as a fragmented, heterogenic, interdiscipli- nary and ‘rural’ field with a diverse audience. The fragmented and rural organization of the field is reflected in low citation frequencies as well as in the difficulties in discerning research specialities in co-citation mappings, while the analysis of the intellectual base (highly cited authors) is an example of the heterogenic and interdisciplinary character of the field, as it includes authors from many fields across the humanities and the social sciences. The thesis emphasizes that bibliometric studies of research fields in the humanities need to incorporate non-English and non-journal publications in order to produce valid and fair re- sults. Moreover, bibliometric methods must be modified in accordance with the organization of research in a particular field, and differences in referencing practices and citation patterns ought to be considered. Consequently, it is advised that bibliometric measures for evaluating research in these fields should, if used at all, be applied with great caution. Keywords: Bibliometrics, citation analysis, scholarly communication, research practices, literary studies, the humanities, visualization"
Toward a New Approach to the Study of Literary and Cultural Circulation
This book is about literary and cultural circulation, and includes essays that explore this topic both in the form of case studies, analysing works and authors from diverse literatures and cultures, and by discussing the theoretical issues surrounding the subject of circulation and all that it entails in terms of temporality, place, method, material objects and concepts. Even when circulation occurs in places where there is an analogous context of works that circulate, together with parameters for value judgments and models for producing other works, there may be differences deriving in some way from temporal and spatial factors. But this is not always perceived, since nowadays an understanding of the phenomenon that has come to be known as globalization circulates powerfully, presupposing an unlimited present time and boundless spatial reach, founded on the metaphor of the World Wide Web. This is a consubstantial element of the transnational capitalist order that is said to shape our day-today actions, homogenize attributions of value and, in some way, also condemn the past and all communitarian particularisms to a kind of limbo. This present time is saturated with meanings that also exclude new meanings, which are unable or refuse to adhere to the hegemonic order, the counterpart of which is the dissemination of an awareness that what is presented as a description is, in fact, an interpretation, since what is described is time interpreted in a present in which the anteriority of other times gains meaning, albeit that of the disappearance of that anteriority. Within the construction of historical knowledge, what has taken place is often represented as being part of a chain of continuity leading up to the present moment, or reasons are put forward to explain why the legacy of the past has been abandoned or has vanished, but on the understanding that what has emerged, after the disappearance of what once was, can only be adequately comprehended based on a present absence. Helena Buescu, on the subject of temporality, reminds us that historical evolution and literary circulation also occur at different temporal speeds. Drawing on Claudio Guillén's argument, Buescu draws our attention to the differences in terms of speed and dynamism between: a) long-term phenomena, such as literary genres (whose