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Abstract
Recent Early Modern news histories have tended to emphasise the international scope of the networks on which news travelled. New techniques, falling under the umbrella term ‘digital humanities’, allow for the examination of news as a complete network, and this article will explore the ways in which, using these techniques, the connections between Ireland and Britain can be thought of as not only local, peripheral and bilateral but also within a larger, European news system. Using network science, originally developed for the analysis of the World Wide Web, this article shows that the European system has universal network properties: it is scale-free, divided into clusters and exhibits the ‘small world’ phenomenon, explaining its resilience to interruption and the relative efficiency of early modern information transfer.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Professor Joad Raymond (QMUL) for general PhD supervision and guidance, and Dr. Mark O’Brien (DCU) for organising the 2016 conference where I presented the first draft of this paper. I would also like to extend my gratitude to both reviewers for their extremely helpful and extensive suggestions. My understanding of network analysis, on which much of the article is based, is mostly thanks to participation in EMDA2017 institute at the Folger Library in Washington D.C., and I would lastly like to thank the organisers and visiting faculty for the programme, including Drs Jonathan Hope and Ruth Ahnert.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The Moderate Intelligencer 231, 16–23 August 1649, 2220.
2 See below.
3 Brayshay, Land Travel and Communications, 300.
4 The Moderate Intelligencer 231, 16–23 August 1649, 2215.
5 Arblaster et al., “European Postal Networks,” 51.
6 Brayshay, Land Travel and Communications, 1.
7 Ibid., 287.
8 Behringer, “Communications Revolution,” 339.
9 The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer 315, 19–26 June 1649, 1401.
10 O’ Hara, English Newsbooks and Irish Rebellion, 17.
11 The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer 313, 29 May–5 June 1649, 1384.
12 Braudel, The Mediterranean, 12.
13 Blevin, “Space, Nation and the Triumph of Region,” 124.
14 Ceserani, “Interactive Visualizations for British Architects on the Grand Tour.”
15 Raymond, “News Networks in Early Modern Europe,” 5.
16 Raymond, “News Networks: Putting the ‘News’ and ‘Networks’ Back in,” 115.
17 Pieper, “News from the New World,” 498.
18 Barabasí, “Scale-free Networks,” 52.
19 Barabasí, Linked, 67; for ‘small world’ discussion see 49.
20 Watts, “The ‘New’ Science of Networks,” 244.
21 Watts and Strogatz, “Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-world’ Networks,” 442.
22 Raymond, “Putting the ‘News’ and ‘Networks’ back in,” 115.
23 Raymond, Invention of the Newspaper, 266.
24 Brownlees, “Narrating Contemporaneity: Text and Structure in English News,” 233.
25 Slauter, “The Paragraph as Information Technology,” 253.
26 Dooley, “International News Flows in the Seventeenth Century,” 175.
27 Jacomy et al., “ForceAtlas2, a Continuous Graph Layout.”
28 Barabasí, “Scale-free Networks,” 53.
29 Van Dongen, “Graph Clustering by Flow Simulation,” 1.
30 Freeman, “Measures of Centrality,” 35; Brandes, “A Faster Algorithm for Betweenness Centrality,” 2.
31 Ibid.
32 Ahnert, “Maps versus Networks,” 144.
33 Gao, Barzel, and Barabasi, “Universal Resilience Patterns in Complex Networks,” 307.
34 Johnson et al., “Google’s Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System,” 1.
35 Mühlberger, Colutto, and Kahle, (forthcoming) ‘Hand- written Text Recognition (HTR) of Historical Documents as a Shared Task for Archivists, Computer Scientists and Humanities Scholars. The Model of a Transcription & Recognition Platform (TRP)’ (pre-print)
36 The Moderate Intelligencer 91, 26 November–3 December 1646, 773.
37 The Moderate Intelligencer 209, 15–22 March 1649, 1654.
38 The Moderate Intelligencer 1, 29–5 May 1649, 8 (one week using new numeration).
39 A Moderate Intelligence 2, 24–31 May 1649, 16.
40 For example, see discussion of the diaries of Nehemiah Wallington in Raymond, “International News,” 239.
41 Ahnert, “Maps versus Networks,” 131.