Category Conclusion
The creation and analysis of this visual has indicated that using category as a mode of organization helps tie the social and cultural narratives of 1771 to the associated print environment present in that year, in addition to formulating approximations of the general literary contexts of those cities.
Category Counts relative to total percentage, (Tatiana Haddad)
As a part of our chart-based analytical approach, we compared category counts between cities by absolute numbers to create a visual representation of the unique literary profiles each city presented in 1771. By breaking down the dataset’s 2,000 records into categories organized by city, we began to generate an understanding of each city’s print profile and how they differed from each other. Combining these generated print profiles with the existing historical, economic, and political contexts of each city allows us to understand the general literary infrastructure of each location and how these factors influenced the types of writings and authors that were published at that time. In addition to a general understanding of the print infrastructure, this analysis develops our understanding of how female authors were supported by the existing print environment and their roles in publication at that time.
Comparisons Between Cities
In addition to organizing category counts by absolute numbers, we generated a comparison of categories between cities in the forms of percentages as relative to the total number of records analyzed per city. This mode of analysis yields a profoundly different insight into the theoretical print environments of the three cities, as the differently distributed percentages of each respective category hint at separate sociopolitical, cultural, and economic narratives present in each.
London’s top three print categories by percentage are Literary (19.26%), Legal (18.20%), and Religious (17.83%) writings, while Philadelphia’s are Religious (18.18%), Political Addresses (18.18%), and Instructional/Reference (15.91%) works. Other categories with fewer publications, such as Scientific Scholarly writings, Periodicals, and Commercial works, are relatively evenly distributed in both the London and Philadelphia print environments. While London and Philadelphia’s categorical distribution patterns are similar, Edinburgh’s print production in 1771 is dominated by Legal writings (63.20%) and has a much less even distribution than London or Philadelphia. These differences in the majority categories suggest variations in the print infrastructures between each city analyzed, as well as which categories were the most supported and published at that point in time.
Studying categorical distributions by percentages allows us to make certain assumptions about the implications of particular categories being noticeably dominant in certain cities; for example, the dominance of the Literary, Legal, and Religious categories in London substantiates the longstanding record of London’s infrastructural importance in legal, religious, and literary publishing throughout Britain itself and British America. The predominance of certain categories and their relationships with female authors also provides context for women’s participation in certain print spheres within each city; for instance, women authors were much more strongly represented within London’s literary print category than they were in the religious or legal categories, which were the only categories women were published in in Edinburgh and Philadelphia in 1771.
Beyond Interpretations
Our organization of print records by percentage can also help indicate what data might be missing or necessitating further research. For example, Edinburgh’s unusually high percentage of Legal publications (63.20% of its total print output in 1771) compared to London and Philadelphia (18.20% and 7.95%, respectively) suggests several possibilities; first, for example, that there may be some unknown factor of the ESTC’s database history resulting in a possible overrepresentation of legal publications from Edinburgh. Additionally, there could be some underlying element of Edinburgh’s print environment at that time that would explain either an uneven print production of legal publications and/or an uneven record-keeping and material accumulation of legal publications. While this particular point of data necessitates further research to develop a better understanding of this uneven distribution, at this point in the project we can still say that there appear to be significant differences between the categorical distributions of print between cities, and therefore significant differences between their respective print environments. The causal factors behind these differences, however, call for further research.