Infectious Information: News, Networks, and a Tipping Point in Early English Print

My talk will showcase the "Shakesophere" project, which mines the 500,000 records in the English Short Title Catalogue to map and analyze the network of printers, publishers, booksellers, and authors active in anglophone printing before 1800. I will talk briefly about the construction of the project, but focus on how we can go beyond visualisation, and especially beyond the force graph, to use network analysis as a tool of discovery. I will focus on figures who have been left out of standard histories, but who play a surprisingly prominent role in early English print networks.