A little while ago I wrote a post about the future of the edited collection of essays. In that post, I suggested that there was still a future for the edited collection of essays in the humanities, but that in order to survive, those collections would need to become more coherent.

But how might we understand and recognise coherence in a volume of this type ? That post was inspired by one particular volume in which I had a clear (if subjective) sense that the various contributors were in a continued dialogue with each other, of which the volume was a progress report.

The traditional way in which scholars acknowledge intellectual contact with another is of course the footnote. And so I thought it would be interesting to take this same particular volume, and see whether my subjective sense of this internal dialogue was borne out. It took just a few minutes to go through the volume and record as a dataset each instance where an article cited another piece of work by one of the other contributors to the volume. After some tentative first steps with Gephi I had some rough-and-ready network diagrams to illustrate the relationships.

A pointed arrow indicates a citation from one author to another; a thicker line represents more works being cited; and an arrow at both ends indicates that the two authors cite each other.

This first diagram shows the whole network, and immediately it is clear that all the authors here cite at least one work by one of the others, and in some cases several different works by several authors. In a later post, I shall be showing some diagrams of other collections which I think do not have the same internal dialogue.

We can also begin to see some variations between the authors in terms of the attention they are being paid by the others; and this is shown clearly if we isolate the citations of works by A (top right) and B (bottom left).

Authors A and B are clearly the most cited nodes in this particular network. This is explicable if we know that A is one of the two editors responsible for assembling the team of authors; and that A has also published a large number of individual articles in the field, which explains the thickness of some of the arrows, as authors cite more than one of A’s works.

In contrast, B is cited by a similar number of the other authors, but not so many of B’s works each time. This chimes with the fact that B is the eminence grise of the field, but it is their definitive monograph on the topic that is being cited.

A rather different dynamic is at work when we isolate the parts of the network that involve G. While G is a very well-established scholar, the piece in this volume is their first contribution to this particular literature. So, we can see below that while G cites several of the authors in the volume, this is not reciprocated (because, in terms of this particular field, there is nothing to cite.)