Philadelphia Conclusion
Compared to London and Edinburgh, Philadelphia is the smallest of our dataset, but the visualizations uncover the diversity within it. Philadelphia and its port cities act as a communication hub of networking between a multitude of cultures. The acts of producing and distributing texts of knowledge and news are what makes Philadelphia a worthy addition.
(Fig. 9a): City/Category/Genre Graph: Philadelphia and (9b) Women’s
Contributions, (Lauryn White)
Considering the American Revolutionary War would follow a few years after this snapshot of Philadelphia’s literary scene, it is reasonable that a notable portion of Philadelphia’s print output would be in the Political Addresses category, due to a heightened awareness of and interest in political issues. In addition to this, Philadelphia’s historically influential Puritan and Quaker roots also logically coincide with the wide circulation of Religious publications at that time.
Category/Genre
The sunburst chart (Fig. 9a) is used to condense Philadelphia’s male-authored records into hierarchical data that covers ten categories. Most of the texts fall into the non-literary category. The largest percentage of texts fall in the address, religious, and instruction/reference categories. Nineteen percent of texts fall into the address category. The category includes three genres: accounts, letters/addresses, etc. Seventeen percent of texts fall into the religious category. This category has six genres: controversies, conversion narrative, doctrinal, hymns/psalms, meeting mins/eps, and sermons. Sixteen percent of texts fall into the institutional/reference category. It includes three genres: almanac/pocketbook/calendar, manual, and textbook/primer. The commercial/organizational and periodicals categories have the same percentage of texts; both are ten percent. The commercial/organizational category has three genres: advertisements, blanks, and catalogues. The periodicals category also has three genres: newspapers, magazines, and carrier’s addresses. Eight percent of texts fall into the legal category. The category includes three genres: act, laws, and legal scholarship. Seven percent of texts fall into the historical category. The category includes four genres: travel, proposals, foreign history, and Engl/brit history. The smaller percentage of texts are in the scientific/scholarly, literary, and puzzles/music/jets categories. Six percent of texts are in the scientific/scholarly category. This category has two genres: medical and transactions. Five percent of texts are in the literary category. This category has three genres: poems, letters, and conduct books. The smallest percentage of texts is two, and it falls in the puzzles/music/jets category. This category has two genres: songs and ballads.
Women's Contributions
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.