Historical Social Research Research Articles

Scottish and English architecture: a “provincial” relationship?

This article seeks to explore the specificities of Scottish architecture in relation to English architecture. It focusses first on the orthodoxies presented within past literature, and how these have been sometimes unhelpful to scholars wishing to address this question. The article then seeks to identify, and then to analyse, what clearly is a national style of architecture which can be characterised, in summary, as castellated. The discussion that follows on Revivalism(s) is articulated relative to long-standing issues of nationhood; considering Scotland first as an independent European state, over many centuries until union with England in 1707; and secondly, thereafter, Scotland’s attempt to define its status within both the British union and the empire; an arrangement in which the paradigms were those of England; but an England which tolerated a degree of cultural individuality so long as political adherence to the “core” was assured. The article builds upon recent research in social and political history, as well as architecture and visual culture, and demonstrates that Scotland’s interest in its own past heritage, and its clear individuality (or “different-ness”) in architectural style, is closely connected to the nation’s recurring attempts to find a voice in a larger political entity.

INSERÇÃO DAS ENFERMEIRAS NA PRÁTICA DE ACUPUNTURA EM SANTA CATARINA (1997-2015)

Objetivo: identificar a inserção das enfermeiras na prática de acupuntura em Santa Catarina (1997-2015).Método: pesquisa qualitativa histórico-social, utilizando técnica da história oral temática,fundamentada na sociologia das profissões de Eliot Freidson. Participaram 20 enfermeirosacupunturistas. Para seleção realizou-se contato com o Conselho Regional de Enfermagem deSanta Catarina, com Escolas de formação em Acupuntura do Sul do Brasil e a técnica snowball.Resultados: as enfermeiras escolheram a especialização por empatia, vontade de atuação eo querer provocar mudanças na vida de outras pessoas. O aperfeiçoamento permitiu utilizarestrategicamente os conhecimentos e inovando ideais para um atendimento diferenciado. Quantoà escolha da escola de formação, estavam atentas ao reconhecimento institucional e às facilidadespessoais.Conclusão: a enfermagem brasileira vem fundamentando um corpo de conhecimento especializado,assegurando sua autonomia, expertise e credencialismo profissional. Este estudo contribuirá aocenário conquistado pela enfermeira e com todos os pesquisadores que se relacionam com estetema.

The Promotion of Early School Nurses in Virginia: Learning From Our History (1900 to Present) to Build a New Future.

Despite tremendous challenges, in the early 20th century school nurses provided the first, and often only, medical care for thousands of schoolchildren and their families. However, multiple barriers impeded the developing role. Influences of historical events, financial support, lack of knowledge regarding benefits of the school nurse role, limited access to training, and issues of poor pay affected the Commonwealth of Virginia's attempts to develop and provide school nursing throughout the diverse rural counties across the state. School nurses continue to face these challenges today. The purpose of this social historical research is to identify, describe, and analyze the origins and evolving role of the school nurse in the rural counties of Virginia, 1900-1925; investigate how this history influences school nursing today; and offer several suggestions rooted in findings for moving the profession forward as outlined by Cowell's response to recommendations made by the Institute of Medicine.

The Gender of Subscribers to Eighteenth-Century Music Publications

One of the most important and valuable resources available to researchers of eighteenth-century social history are the lists of subscribers that were attached to a wide variety of publications. Yet, the study of this type of resource remains one of the areas most neglected by academics. These lists shed considerable light on the nature of those who subscribed to music, including their social status, place of employment, residence, and musical interests. They naturally also provide details as to the gender of individual subscribers.As expected, subscribers to most musical publications were male, but the situation changed considerably as the century progressed, with more females subscribing to the latest works by the early nineteenth century. There was also a marked difference in the proportion of male and female subscribers between works issued in the capital cities of London and Edinburgh and those written for different genres. Female subscribers also appear on lists to works that they would not ordinarily be permitted to play. Ultimately, a broad analysis of a large number of subscription lists not only provides a greater insight into the social and economic changes that took place in Britain over the course of the eighteenth century, but also reveals the types of music that were favoured by the members of each gender.

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction

Desperation, Hopelessness, and Suicide: An Initial Consideration of Self-Murder by Slaves in Seventeenth-Century Crimean Society

Suicide, a new issue in Crimean social history research, has not been dealt with in terms of the status of free persons and slaves. It is difficult to find reliable and detailed primary source about slaves’ private lives and their expectations apart from some cases which focus on slaves as merchandise to be bought and sold, and examples of their release and escape. However, the Crimean Shari’a court records, which recently became available, provide researchers with such information on slaves as well as some incidental information on many topics such as their living conditions, their hopes for release, and reasons for their suicide. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of society on slave suicides by examining the Shari’a court records of the Crimean Khanate from 1650 to 1675.

Pre-Colonial South-East Africa: Sources and Prospects for Research in Economic and Social History

In recent years, historical research on the pre-colonial period in the area between the Zambezi and Limpopo has almost ground to a standstill. A number of seminal works on the economic and social history of the area appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, each of which were underpinned by the documentary legacy of the Portuguese presence in the region from the beginning of the 16th century. Since the 1990s, it has been archaeologists that have taken up the mantle of post-1500 history, but the corpora of documentary material available is now seldom used systematically or to any great length. This article revisits the use and availability of historical documents for the study of African society in this region prior to 1840, specifically by presenting a newly constructed database of c.1,140 published and unpublished documents of relevance to African society, economy and the environment. The need for this database is first set into context by a critical overview of two of the major historiographies in pre-colonial economic and social history in this region – those of the relationships between trade and politics and drought and food production – from which a series of common problems are identified. The database is then introduced, together with an analysis of its chronological and spatial coverage and a discussion of the availability and accessibility of the documents. The article concludes by pointing to some potential future directions for a revival of pre-colonial economic and social history in south-east Africa north of the Limpopo, to which renewed interrogation of the wider range of documentary material collated here can contribute.

Scotland, Scottishness, British Integration and the Royal Navy, 1793–1815

With few exceptions, existing research in British social and maritime history has never focused on the presence and role of Scotsmen in the Royal Navy of the French Wars era (1793–1815), on their identification and self-presentation within this institution, and on attitudes towards naval warfare in Scotland more generally. Situating the problem within current debates on ‘four nations’ history and the development of British identity, this article aims to fill this gap. It will consider, in turn, the Navy's institutional language and practices, individual experiences, and, chiefly employing as a case study the 1797 victory of Camperdown, achieved by the Scottish Admiral Duncan, public representations in the Scottish press. This will help to illustrate the often ambiguous relationship that Scots in the Navy—and particularly on the quarterdeck—could have with their homeland, and the powerful attraction, reinforced by the naval environment and administrative structures, which Englishness exerted on them. More broadly, it will be shown how the late Hanoverian Navy, as a markedly Anglocentric institution, acted as a key instrument of cultural, social and political assimilation of Scots into Britain, thus offering a valuable case study for an investigation of patterns of British integration.

Non-Fiction Transmedia: Seriality and Forensics in Media Sport

The article uses two examples (from 1908 and 1966) to analyse in greater detail why and how sport’s transmedia dynamic is very much fostered by the close interrelations between the seriality of sport events and the forensic attitude of fans. Two arguments are of special importance: (1) While social media add to forensic fandom’s proliferation, it was sport’s strongly serialized evaluation of performances that actually triggered the “spreadability” of sport-related topics across different media, first doing so at the end of the 19th century. What is more, modern sport owes its very existence to the cross-media circulation of its events. (2) So far, transmedia has mainly been researched with respect to fictional content, yet existing research on documentary transmedia forms and social media seriality has shown that the inclusion of non-fiction can broaden our knowledge of how storytelling sprawls across media and takes advantage of their specific affordances. This, I want to argue, ensures that sport is an insightful and important example for the understanding of transmedia world-building.

Avison and his Subscribers: Musical Networking in Eighteenth-Century Britain

One of the most important and valuable resources available to researchers of eighteenth-century social history are the lists of subscribers that were attached to a wide variety of publications. Yet, the study of this type of source material remains one of the areas most neglected by academics. These lists shed considerable light on the connections that an author or composer had with other like-minded individuals and the support that they received from members of the middle and upper classes. In cases where a single composer published a series of works by subscription, there is an opportunity to gain an insight into the growth of the public's appreciation of the composer and the contacts he or she forged over the course of a lifetime. Charles Avison is one of the best known British composers from the eighteenth century. He issued six works by subscription between 1740 and 1767 and they together provide a unique insight into his growth into one of this country's leading native musicians. Although a respectable number of the associations discussed are already known through other sources, this study not only reinforces the importance of these associations, but additionally gives an insight into those links for which there is no other known evidence. This research ultimately reveals that Avison's location in the North-East of England did not significantly impact on his ability to forge connections across Britain and beyond.

Elites and Networks: New Approaches for the Research of Jewish Economic History

Lately, the researchers of Jewish social and cultural history turned their attention to economic issues and produced some news collections of essays and monographs, the remarkable feature of which is a shift to the questions of interaction among religiosity, culture, economics, and politics. In a review article the author analyses three recent books, dedicated to economic Jewish history: David Schick “Vertrauen, Religion, Ethnizität: Die Wirtschaftsnetzwerke jüdischer Unternehmer im späten Zarenreich” (2017); Michael R. Cohen “Cotton Capitalists: American Jewish Entrepreneurship in the Reconstruction Era” (2017) and Cornelia Aust “The Jewish Economic Elite: Making Modern Europe” (2018). All three books focus on the interconnection of two factors: the ethnicity and solidarity of Jewish businessmen in the early modern and modern era. Methodologically, the authors choose a similar approach and look at the activities of entrepreneurs or merchants using a network concept. Each author explores specific cases – in American South, Eastern Europe, and Western Europe, to see how the context shapes the behavior of Jews. The authors show how Jewish ethnicity and Judaism played a role in developing the relationship of trust, limiting and defining new economic spheres and undermine the view of ethnic solidarity as a social norm. Also, the works are an important contribution to the broader context of economic history. With the modernization, and in particular the impact of legal emancipation and industrial revolution of the Jews, they enter into space that gives them completely different opportunities for economic activity and interaction with ethnic groups. The study explains how ethnicity, culture, and economy can interact.

Comparative Process-oriented Research Using Social Media and Historical Text

This article evaluates whether we can use process-oriented theory to conduct comparative, historical social media research. There is a lack of theoretically informed approaches to studying recently digitized historical text with contemporary social media. This article argues that such perspectives are needed and extends Norbert Elias’ notions of ‘sociogenesis’ and ‘psychogenesis’ into data-driven research. Canonical process-oriented researchers such as Elias used mixed-methods approaches, including visual maps and quantitative surveys. By comparing 17th-century digitized diaries and 5 million digitized books from Google Books with contemporary tweet data, this study provides a successful case of comparing tweets with historical printed text at a big data scale. Moreover, quantitative methods are important to process-oriented methodologies and can be extended to big data empirical sources. An important finding is that there are similarities in the curation of everyday life in elite historical diaries and in more democratic forms of contemporary social media. Although accessibility and volume of content have changed over time from historical text to tweets, we found that there is a marked preference for certain words associated with communal sentiment over the centuries.

Handle with Care: ICTY, Juridical By-Products and Criminological Analyses (Summary)

This paper takes its starting point from claims made for the potential historical value of the evidence gathered, presented and scrutinised in international criminal courts. Human Rights Watch claimed of the ICTY that “future generations will use the evidence to understand the region’s history”, while Mullins identified records from the ICTR as a source of ‘thick’ description. Earlier trials have played an important, if not always unproblematic part in Holocaust historiography. Recently, criminologists and others have started to make use of resources generated or collected by the ICTY and ICTR to describe and analyse international crimes. Methodological aspects of these studies are not always fully or explicitly developed and so we must reflect on how we can make scholarly use of ICTY material, on the challenges and limitations of the source material, on the kinds of questions that material is best suited to answering, and on how to build as robust a set of findings as possible. This paper argues that while evidence and transcripts from international criminal courts do have great potential as a source of data for analyses in criminology, and by extension other social sciences and historical research, they need to be handled with care, recognising gaps, regional specificity and the need to assess validity. The paper compares judicial and scholarly approaches, examines access and transparency, issues around the construction of a body of evidence in the trial process and matters relating to witnesses. There are many reasons to take the ICTY as a ‘best case scenario’ of international judicial sources as data, and I examine two different approaches taken to using the court’s output in criminological research. They make a strong case for using the ICTY as part of scholarly efforts to make sense of the violent disintegration of state and society in Yugoslavia.

Categories all the way down

Categories All the Way Down Marion Fourcade & Kieran Healy ∗ Abstract: »Kategorien auf der ganzen Linie«. Scores and classifications are dual to one another. Cardinal and ordinal measures are repeatedly used to produce nominal classifications of essential worth. Conversely, presumptively natural kinds provide the basis for new measurement and scoring systems. Over time, the iterative application of nominal classifications and quantifying measures produce involuted, nested systems whose structure and origins are hard to dis- entangle. While careful studies of earlier systems and methods have often un- covered these arbitrary aspects, newer technical tools for classification are at once substantially more opaque than their predecessors and more likely to be employed on very large scales. The classification situations to which they give rise thus have the potential to produce the sort of naturalized facticity charac- teristic of classical social facts. Keywords: Market classifications, scores, categories, classification situations, market sociology. The articles in this HSR Special Issue “Market Classifications” explore scoring and classification tools across a range of economic settings, and from a variety of perspectives. The settings range from the German wine market (Diaz-Bone 2017) to the American subprime credit sector (Rona-Tas 2017), from the sus- tainability and social investment sector to the British fashion world (Nagel et al. 2017; Schiller-Merkens 2017; all in this issue). The perspectives taken vari- ously see scoring and classification methods as tools for solving coordination or action problems in markets, as means for establishing and maintaining iden- tities (Pridmore and Hamalainen 2017, this issue) and as portable judgment devices with the capacity to be put to use beyond their original context (Chia- pello and Godefroy 2017, this issue). Across the contributions is the sense that, as Citron and Pasquale (2014) have suggested, we now live in “scored socie- ties” where increasingly large tracts of social life are subject to these methods, and in an increasingly automated manner. Discussing the credit crisis of 2007-08, MacKenzie (2011, 1830) asks “Should we understand the conduct of those practices and the use of their results as having been driven by belief in them, or should it be seen as cynical, as driven simply by the pursuit of gain (e.g., by Marion Fourcade, Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720- 1980, USA; fourcade@berkeley.edu. Kieran Healy, Department of Sociology, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA; kjhealy@soc.duke.edu. Historical Social Research 42 (2017) 1, 286-296 Ň© GESIS DOI: 10.12759/hsr.42.2017.1.286-296

Classification Situations: Life-Chances in the Neoliberal Era

Classification Situations: Life-Chances in the Neoliberal Era Marion Fourcade & Kieran Healy ∗ Abstract: »Klassifikations-Lagen. Lebenschancen in der neoliberalen Ara«. This article examines the stratifying effects of economic classifications. We argue that in the neoliberal era market institutions increasingly use actuarial tech- niques to split and sort individuals into classification situations that shape life- chances. While this is a general and increasingly pervasive process, our main empirical illustration comes from the transformation of the credit market in the United States. This market works as both as a leveling force and as a con- denser of new forms of social difference. The U.S. banking and credit system has greatly broadened its scope over the past twenty years to incorporate pre- viously excluded groups. We observe this leveling tendency in the expansion of credit amongst lower-income households, the systematization of overdraft pro- tections, and the unexpected and rapid growth of the fringe banking sector. But while access to credit has democratized, it has also differentiated. Scoring technologies classify and price people according to credit risk. This has allowed multiple new distinctions to be made amongst the creditworthy, as scores get attached to different interest rates and loan structures. Scores have also ex- panded into markets beyond consumer credit, such as insurance, real estate, employment, and elsewhere. The result is a cumulative pattern of advantage and disadvantage with both objectively measured and subjectively experienced aspects. We argue these private classificatory tools are increasingly central to the generation of „market-situations“, and thus an important and overlooked force that structures individual life-chances. In short, classification situations may have become the engine of modern class situations. Keywords: Market classifications, market sociology, market order, categoriza- tion, credit scores. Marion Fourcade, Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720- 1980, USA; fourcade@berkeley.edu. Kieran Healy, Department of Sociology, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA; kjhealy@soc.duke.edu. The article is reprinted with the kind permission from Elsevier B. V. Reprint of: Fourcade, Marion, Kieran Healy. 2013. Classification situations: Life-chances in the neoliberal era. Ac- counting, Organizations, and Society 38 (8): 559-72. doi: 10.1016/j.aos.2013.11.002. Historical Social Research 42 (2017) 1, 23-51 © GESIS DOI: 10.12759/hsr.42.2017.1.23-51

The ransom of mussels in the lagoon of Venice: when the louses become “black gold”

Abstract The article presented here is rooted in our doctoral research in Ethnology and Social History developed in the lagoon of Venice in 2010-2013. It is a research based on the methodology of ethnographic field research, in parallel with the bibliographic and archive research. The fieldwork was conducted between March 2010 and August 2012 with 21 informants, fishermen aged 20 to 90 years. In this article we analyze how the formation of a new food taste is a process that can be defined “cultural”. We can meet an example in the history of mussel-farming on the island of Pellestrina, an island of fishermen in the southern lagoon of Venice, where the exploitation of this mollusk as food and economic resource appears rather late in history. Our research enabled us to find some frequent allusions to the alleged toxicity of this mollusk, called in Venice peòcio, that is to say “louse”, and once considered inedible. What mechanisms have transformed today the mussels into an appreciated and great demanded food, into “traditional food”?

Buchgeschenke, Patronage und protestantische Allianzen: Die Stadtbibliothek Zürich und ihre Donatoren im 17. Jahrhundert

The so-called Bürgerbibliothek, the first public library in Zurich, was founded in 1629, partly to protect the reformed community in dangerous times. It was made possible by private initiatives and occasionally supported by the city’s authorities. Although lacking public funds, the collection expanded considerably thanks to donations, both from private citizens and from foreign visitors. Most donations and gifts, consisting primarily of books and various objects for the cabinet of curiosities, were meticulously registered in an illuminated manuscript. The donation book is an interesting source of information not only for provenance history, but also for researchers of cultural and social history, as the recorded entries for theologians, merchants, politicians, diplomats and refugees reveal numerous social connections. It is argued that the book donations were not merely voluntary, but that they bear witness to a network of legal deposit, patronage systems and a fascinating gift economy.

Cannon Fodder for the Revolution: The Russian Proletariat in 1917

According to Marxist theory, the working class represents the principal dynamic force of the revolution because of its important intrinsic qualities--namely, its discipline and capacity to organize, its sense of solidarity and collective spirit, and its ability to engage in collective action. The workers' most important quality, however, is their supposed understanding and mastery of the socialist creed (simvol sotsialisticheskoi very), which is itself understood to be the direct result of their class consciousness. A true proletarian understands the difference between capitalism and socialism, between bourgeois and socialist revolution, and he knows the path ahead. He also appreciates the leading role he is expected to play in the necessary destruction of capitalism and the building of socialism, fully aware of his calling as the obvious dominant power (gegemon) and vanguard of the revolution. According to the tenets of Soviet historiography, the formation of the proletariat as a class in Marxist terms had been effectively accomplished in late tsarist Russia by the 1880s. By that time, workers were fully conscious of themselves as proletarians, which was regarded as the necessary proof that the class itself had come into being as a social formation. By 1917, this established social class was primed to carry out a socialist revolution and therefore readily assumed its appropriate leading role in the revolutionary movement. Following the end of the USSR in 1991, the problem of how the Russian working class actually became mobilized to do this predictably lost some of its urgency. Certain studies, however, continued to engage the topic and offered at least a partial revision of the standard Soviet position, suggesting that the workers coalesced as a class not in the 1880s but later, during World War I. (1) As for historians writing outside the country, there has never been a Soviet-like consensus on the problem of the Russian working class. However, an influential school of social historical research nonetheless agreed that a bona fide working class had effectively formed by 1917 and that, by then, a significant share of workers had begun to self-identify as proletarians. Scholars from this school of thought acknowledged the legitimacy of the revolution based on the framework of modernization theory. The workers and the soldiers represented the driving force of the revolution, after all, not the Bolsheviks. (2) Soviet historians reached their conclusions by combining deductive reasoning with Marxist definitions of the proletariat and socialist revolution. By contrast, non-Soviet specialists based their views on inductive reasoning drawn largely from empirical analysis. The logic of Soviet historians was straightforward: if the workers were the social group that played the most active role in overthrowing the monarchy and later the Provisional Government and were the most ardent in displaying their revolutionary fervor, then, naturally, they possessed a proletarian consciousness. Using deductive reasoning to resolve historical questions, however, does not work. This is especially true when the original theory at issue is itself subject to serious doubt. The use of inductive reasoning, however, also has its limitations. The empirical material on which historians have drawn to support their conclusions about workers during the revolution, for example, rests solely on assessments of the workers' exterior involvement in revolutionary events. By contrast, their interior motivations, incentives, and self-reflections as to how and why they engaged in revolution have generally been overlooked. Yet it is precisely such interior questions that are critical to understanding the extent to which workers endorsed socialist doctrine. The mere fact that a deviant act occurs is not enough to describe it as a One has to determine criminal intent, the offender's awareness of the criminal nature of his/her intent, and his/her participation in the crime. …

Metaphors of Mind: An Eighteenth-Century Dictionary by Brad Pasanek

Reviewed by: Metaphors of Mind: An Eighteenth-Century Dictionary by Brad Pasanek Donald R. Wehrs Brad Pasanek. Metaphors of Mind: An Eighteenth-Century Dictionary. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2015. Pp. vii + 372. $49.95. Mr. Pasanek's book aspires to update the eighteenth-century genre of "philosophical dictionary," which, exemplified by Bayle and Voltaire, "offer[s] alphabetical order in [End Page 78] lieu of narrative structure, mixing matters of fact and commentary." Interweaving cultural criticism (Raymond Williams's Keywords, Foucault, and so on) with digital humanities in an effort to show what digital humanities can do, the book also demarcates its limits. Mr. Pasanek proposes to treat his "database" as "a commonplace book." By organizing "thousands of metaphors of mind from collections of eighteenth-century literature" into "eleven headwords" and sub-categories, he hopes to "challenge scholarly commonplaces by means of commonplacing, preparing the way for new studies of eighteenth-century writing." Metaphors of Mind is certainly a work representative of our times. Its message is primarily its medium. Mr. Pasanek himself cites Austin Dobson's anecdote about the matron who complained of the dictionary she was reading that "she found the story somewhat disconnected." In the place of connection, Mr. Pasanek offers "desultory reading" (emphasis in original) as "[p]racticed by Grub Street and perfected in the 'rambling' and 'idling' Samuel Johnson." This conflation of "Grub Street" and Johnson might give pause, but the larger point is that in our electronic times, desultory rambling and idling become surfing the web, wandering whither the search engine listeth. Electronic commonplace books, however, appear very much to resemble the print versions that flourished from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. They can usefully aid study, contemplation, and composition, but they also may encourage confusion of appearances of learning with its substance, and invite mistaking industry for achievement. These dangers are prominently satirized by Sterne, Swift, Cervantes, Rabelais, and Erasmus, and associated by those writers with reservations about modernity that one might expect eighteenth-century scholars to be cognizant of when they reflect on digitized modernity. Unquestionably, the digital revolution has had important democratizing effects in making previously obscure material accessible and in facilitating archival research by scholars without travel-to-collections funding. However, availability is no guarantee of significance. The existence of a document does not demonstrate its historical, cultural, or aesthetic value. Much of what is written is conventional, redundant, and rightly forgettable; as Nietzsche points out, forgetting is an evolutionarily valuable skill. Just as automobile driving techniques, once learned, become unconscious so our minds can be otherwise occupied than in thinking about the location of the turn signal, so once an idea comes into a culture, that culture need not remember every conventional reiteration or minor variation of the idea. It would in fact be debilitating to do so. The digitalizing of vast quantities of documents is a wonderful aid in widenet, bottom-up social historical research. It also has what the eighteenth century would call a "leveling" effect. Long unread, out-of-print texts can become the subjects of commentary. Ephemeral publications "rub elbows with" work continually reprinted. Search engine driven democracy ensures that anyone using a keyword, in no matter how mediocre or silly a way, will receive recognition, the scholarly equivalent of a trophy for participation. By undoing the work of time and judgment in regulating forgetting, digitalized archiving may obscure important differences between cybernetic intelligence and human assessments of relevance and value. Concerning Mr. Pasanek's project, if [End Page 79] certain metaphors of mind were prevalent in eighteenth-century English usage, the significance of this cannot be simply "that's how it was in the eighteenth century." The notion that peculiarities of the past are interesting simply because they occurred is the attitude of Old Historicism. Electronic antiquarianism is likely to seem in time as quaint and self-involved as print-based antiquarianism came to be. One would expect as much, given cognitive, neuroscience research suggesting that memory is organized and accessed with a view to guiding future life-enhancing actions. In scholarly terms, this means that something becomes salient for memory only if it bears on an argument of consequence. Humanities writing has...

MapTap and Cornelia Slow Digital Art History and Formal Art Historical Social Network Research

Abstract The essay introduces MapTap, a research project that zooms in on the ever-changing social networks underpinning Flemish tapestry (1620 – 1720). MapTap develops the young and still slightly amorphous field of Formal Art Historical Social Network Research (FAHSNR) and is fueled by Cornelia, a custom-made database. Cornelia’s unique data model allows researchers to organize attribution and relational data from a wide array of sources in such a way that the complex multiplex and multimode networks emerging from the data can be transformed into partial unimode networks that enable proper FAHSNR. A case study revealing the key roles played by women in the tapestry landscape shows how this kind of slow digital art history can further our understanding of early modern creative communities and industries.