Diarists as Readers:

Thick Journals and Literary Networks

in the Prozhito Data

Andrew Janco (Haverford College)

and Philip Gleissner (Ohio State)

Goals for This Unit

• Use Prozhito data to explore a concrete research problem in the field of literary history, namely the reception of thick journals.

• Illuminate the process of capturing and operationalizing data.

• Walk through the steps of an exploratory analysis of the data as networks and make first observations about the way Soviet readers perceived literary magazines.

• Learn the basics of social network analysis, using the online tool Palladio.

The Thick Journal

• monthly publications
• 150-250 pages
• circulation between 70,000 and 2,000,000
• literary texts (first publication), literary criticism, journalism
• sizable editorial teams

After 1956

• expansion of journals
  • numerous new publications
  • growth in press runs
• Question: What impact does this have on Soviet literature?

Research Problem

Journals and the Literary Field under Late Socialism

• Centrifugal forces and fragmentation of the field of literary journals
  • Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, it becomes less likely for authors to publish in several journals.
  • Some journals share more authors than others, i.e. some are more similar than others.
  • Journals create competitive market for literature under the conditions of state socialism.

Soviet Journals Reconnected

• bibliographical data for six Moscow-based periodicals between 1956 and 1972 from Soviet Chronicle of Periodical Publications
• data parsing, normalization, and creation of database
• ca. 10,000 contributions and 3,000 authors

www.soviet-journals.org

From Bibliographical Data to the Literary Field

• idea: use bibliographical data to visualize and analyze the late socialist literary landscape
• key question: contribution of authors to literary magazines

• network: stuff (nodes) and connections between stuff (edges)
• a bimodal network graph
• Need more terminology? Check out Miriam Posner's network analysis glossary

The Landscape of Late Socialist Journals

• represent information as unimodal graph:
  • edge = shared author
  • edge weight = relative number of shared authors

Six Moscow-Based Journals between 1960 and 1964

• some journals share a larger pool of authors
  • openness to each other's authors and aesthetic
  • similarity in form and content
• ties decrease diachronically

From Cultural Production to Cultural Consumption

• Journals shared varying numbers of authors: social landscape of the field of literary production and similarities and differences between journals

• Over time, ties between journals in terms of shared authors grow weaker.

• Question: Does this matter to readers? Are we indeed watching a competitive market of cultural production AND consumption?

• Proposal: Trace literary reception in the diaries in the Prozhito archive. Which journals do diarists read and mention at the same time?

Step One: The Data

go.osu.edu/slavic_dh

Step One: The Data

go.osu.edu/slavic_dh

Step Two: Create a Network in Palladio

https://hdlab.stanford.edu/palladio/

Step Three: Evaluate Data as Unimodal Graph

Learn to use Cytoscape with Miriam Posner's tutorial...

To Conclude

• Some of our preliminary observations are consistent with the fragmentation of literary production discussed in the beginning.

  • Versatility of the journal Znamia.

  • Mutual exclusivity of...

  • Outsider position of...

Next Steps:

1. Return to qualitative analysis: journals referenced in a negative or positive way, in-depth or peripherally?

2. Make sure the data is complete and weed out data that doesn’t fit, e.g. diaries of literary authors.