Revisiting the Network Author: The Dynamics of Nineteenth-Century Newspaper Reprinting
This chapter investigates nineteenth-century newspaper networks in two complementary ways. First, the chapter proposes “the network author” to theorize the collective, techno-social processes of writing, editing, circulation, selection, aggregation, and reprinting that defined the medium of the nineteenth-century newspaper for writers, editors, and readers. While the reprinted texts in nineteenth-century newspapers can seem haphazard, driven primarily by the need to fill columns, we demonstrate that within those material constraints editors conceived of selection as a valuable skill that connected local readers to larger conversations and accrued authority through circulation, and that readers valued the selections they read, saved, clipped, and pasted into scrapbooks. Second, the chapter demonstrates how reprinting data at scale, when combined with geographic and network analyses, can illuminate larger geographic dynamics of nineteenth-century US print culture. Scholars understand that many of the texts—including news, fiction, poetry, information, and more—which circulated through the newspaper exchange system originated in urban publication centers on the east coast, such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, and that circulation often followed postal routes, train lines, or (eventually) telegraph wires. But the more granular dynamics of circulation have proven much harder to trace, particularly the movement of texts among smaller urban and rural areas. This chapter shows how dynamic social network analysis can model the "information cascades" of the nineteenth-century newspaper exchange system, focusing not on the commerce between individual papers but instead on the larger geographic trends of circulation.